Self-driving cars are just one more way everyone becomes isolated from each other, I guess.
I think we're on the cusp of something that will change the landscape of our cities. It's going to revolutionize getting around and take a chunk out of the land dedicated to parking.
Waymo in Miami won't be locally re-spending nearly as much of Miami's money as Uber/Lyft did. Significantly more of it will be removed from Miami with each ride. This might be even more pronounced for cities like Houston, which don't attract tourism from Waymo staff.
Why SF? Does Google even still have an engineering office in the city? Alphabet is a publicly traded company with employees all over the USA and the world, even if you said the money would be funneled into Mountain View you'd be incorrect. The money will be funneled into 401Ks would be more accurate, and a lot of snowbirds in Florida are living off of their 401Ks and stock investments (which probably have a lot of Alphabet in them), so it is definitely something for Florida.
But I think your point is that gig workers won't be making the money anymore. That's definitely true. That is just like when loom machines took money away from weavers back in the 19th century, or computers took money away from typists/secretaries in the 20th century. We should carefully consider whether or not that is a net good for society.
I don't want to sound like a luddite, but each of those contributed to a consolidation of wealth that was largely offset by new jobs and new markets. How exactly do you think this is paying off here? Tech companies get to benefit, we know that, which sounds like a dead end. So it's ok that everyone else loses?
it's not a dirty word. being a luddite means caring about your professional and personal communities.
So these days, saying you're luddite doesn't mean you care about your professional and personal communities, it says you're anti-technology and anti-progress. If you want to say you care about your professional and personal communities, just say that.
The Luddites (1811–1816) were not merely destroying machines to stop technological progress; they were a broader, community-backed protest movement fighting for economic survival, fair wages, and against the erosion of their traditional, skilled way of life. While they were textile artisans at the core, the movement was fueled by widespread distress during the Napoleonic Wars and received support from local communities and even some sympathetic small-business owners.
what social movement could possibly have been an early progenitor of the modern labor rights movement?
Even just taking it at face value that "the vast majority of the 35% of the fare that would have gone to the drivers will now go to '401k's" is interesting! Currently most drivers for Lyft/Uber are in the bottom 50%ile of wealth in the USA, and they are currently getting that 35% cut. The bottom 50% of the USA hold nearly no stocks at all. 50% of the S&P500 shares are owned by the wealthiest 1% of the USA.
Also, computers and looms were perhaps a bit different - the result of their automation was a product that actually cost less than their equivalent human labor could produce. Waymo currently charges more than Uber and Lyft, but still takes significant market share.
I do expect them to be cheaper eventually, but they'll also have an opportunity to establish market monopolies and then raise prices again. Sure, uber and lyft driver supply is obviously elastic, but possibly not quite as elastic in the very long run - it took a lot of capital to raise the current driver base for Uber+Lyft, and I'm not sure that can be repeated, say, five years after people stopped driving for them.
Of course people have to get new jobs as the world churns. But all of these other effects are interesting too! And, many, many people never really attain those new jobs. I don't think that's Waymo's "fault" as a moral judgment if the reality is that removing money from these jobs will lead to increase in squalor. It's just a pretty stark example of the rich getting richer.
surely it's good to reduce the amount of menial labour being performed in the world
Night soil collectors were replaced by partial sewage systems, which resulted in cholera and typhoid outbreaks.
Local butchers were replaced by meat packing plants. The Jungle tells us why this didn't go so well either.
In all three of those cases, we rushed to an incomplete solution before it was fully ready. In this case though, no one's banning humans from driving cars anytime soon, so that part of it will go okay.
Only the money from Alphabet employees who put money into their 401k will end up there. Other parts go to taxes paid by Alphabet and taxes paid by the employees. The vast majority though will go into Alphabet's coffers and be used to pay back investors and make big bets on the future (ideally). Sundar gets a bunch, as does Sergey and Brin. Waymo's taken more than a decade to get this far (and it's not quite there yet). DARPA jump-started this with their Grand Challenge in 2004, so I think the government does deserve a bunch of tax revenue off of this.
Either way, it's not all that much different. Most of the money spent on getting around a city goes elsewhere through vehicle and gas purchases. Adding the cost of self driving to that probably won't move the needle all that much.
I think part replacement is an excellent use case for robotic delivery and even the Wing service if suitable weight and size.
I strongly believe that if you extrapolate 5-10 years then at that point the really big revenue stream(s) that self-driving cars will be funneling to themselves will revenue poached from the legacy auto manufacturers and adjacent industries.
And I also think this is a good thing.
Insurance, gas stations, transit systems, car mechanics, parking garages/lots, airlines(?!). The possibilities are really staggering.
This could be as big a transition as from horse -> automobile.
The taxi ride I took from the airport yesterday was $60 with tip but Uber would have been $40. Waymo doesn't go to the airport yet tho.
I doubt it, it's a call center in the Philippines, where $1 USD goes quite far.
I have some bad news for you about Amazon, Facebook (+Instagram), TikTok...
There's an argument that more competition could reduce prices and/or wait times for consumers, but there's also the argument it'll take away gig jobs, which are already somewhat of a "backup net" for people who need money but can't find a formal job for some other reason.
I don't live in SF anymore. When I did and now that I occasionally visit, I personally don't see any meaningful difference from when only Lyft and Uber operated there.
I remember once playing ball all day in the front yard, calling all the taxi companies just on a lark. They'd claim they were sending a driver, that the driver pulled up and honked, but we were outside the entire time. No one ever actually drove up over about 20 calls to 6 cab companies.
Uber/Lyft finally served all neighborhoods mostly equally, and that was a huge benefit.
If I spend 100$ on an uber ride, 65$ goes to Uber while only 35$ is local ?
I thought it's was the other way around with a margin of 30% for Uber.
For example, this route shows for me at $57 (-$10 discount = $47) but the driver sees $20: https://www.reddit.com/r/uberdrivers/comments/1q5z1dg/f_you_...
The easiest example is to look at Detroit.
Although, perhaps the username is a signal, and I fell for it.
Basically, instead of someone going from point A (current location with own car nearby) to point B (destination), Point A becomes the destination of the previous passenger, and point B and C were the previous points A and B. So a single trip adds one more leg.
It might reduce the need for parking... potentially. But there will still need to be a certain amount of time dedicated to charging for these cars that requires parking.
If private car ownership continues increasing in cost, and households become increasingly cost burdened (transportation is already the second highest cost for households), then I wonder how this will impact demand for housing in areas dependent on cars.
Curious on the outcomes here. I think the best thing we can do for city transportation is increasing the number of viable transportation options. Waymo is one option amongst the options dependent on roads, but walking, biking, and transit should still be a priority so that we maintain competition amongst transportation modes.
The parking gains are huge though. As adoption increases, parking demand for shopping centers, apartments, workplaces, etc. should all decrease. Say hello to higher density cities. Although I imagine it will take quite a while (decades) for these pressures to have a real effect.
Private cars will end up 2nd class citizens with 'waymo lanes' and sky high insurance costs, pushing everyone to self driving taxi services who have a really high cost per mile compared to your own car, since they have a huge debt to pay back to investors so will never get down to the $0.15 per mile that driving your own old car costs.
Then the one I'm more interested / excited for: optimizing the fleet for the cargo. If most trips involve single passengers, then most cars can be small electric single seaters. This can further reduce insurance costs as well as fuel, maintenance and depreciation.
I'd hope that's enough to offset the price of the sensors, compute hardware, and engineers to maintain the system.
But yes paying back investors; not sure how long that would lead to elevated costs for riders.
Seems implausible but then there are examples like deepseek.
https://insideevs.com/news/710364/byd-detroit-import-seagull...
Few automotive companies have a coherent plan for how they were going to survive that existential risk.
Sure they'll get slightly more miles out of a ride share car, but the number of miles will also go up do to dead heading and because cheaper/better transportation causes prior to use more of it.
Oh and this price was going up, not down.
This justifies wholesale fleet purchases of EVs. A competitor could come in with a cheaper model. There will be a lot of players who want a piece.
Does this include fuel, insurance, repair, parking, registration, maintenance, etc.?
Everyone I know under 40yo already professes to hate driving and hate car ownership.
At present or I suspect future costs, any kind of taxi for an out of town trip (without any rail option) of 50-100 miles is way too expensive to consider, we'd sooner hire a car, if it was slicker and more convenient. But hiring a car anywhere but an airport terminal needs a trip to the hire place, and needs to start and finish when they're open to avoid spending an extra day or two of hire. Plus time taken on paperwork and insurance faff could easily be an hour.
At worst you can just pay extra to have a smaller or more luxurious private self driving taxi vs. something more like a bus, shared with others. The appeal of owning and having to maintain something like this is nil. You're not in control, there's no ownership of the driving experience, and if appropriately compliant with the law, they should all drive the same speed.
It's somewhat equivalent to the advent of trains but on a personal level. In the way that trains made shipping goods across the country more or less free once the rail was built that's what's going to happen to people and packages getting around cities.
Yep. A couple of bad experiences with Uber/Lyft drivers put me off using them. Waymo is honestly more comfortable/less stressful for me. Similarly, I just read an article discussing parents making use of Waymo to schlep their kids to sportball practice/friend's house/wherever kids hang out these days, even though it is against Waymo's terms of service. The article indicated those parents didn't trust their kids to be in a car along with a strange human, but were ok with an automated system (and violating the ToS of that system).
> please explain how exactly our city landscapes, namely parking lots, will be revolutionized in any way, shape, or form other than zombie lots occupied Waymos
Today parking tends to be located near the shop/restaurant/office people want to go to. If people no longer need to park to go to where they want to go, parking (for charging) can relocate and be concentrated, thereby freeing up the parking spaces for other uses.
I have no horse in this race, but for my female family members, the answer is absolutely yes. The odds of getting a weirdo driver are just too high. One of them lives in a Waymo-supported city and uses it all the time.
The last couple of drivers I had were so actively dangerous on the road that I quit using ridesharing completely.
After experiencing Waymo, I'll actually use ridesharing again.
And I think there's some demand shifting that can happen. People get driven to the office in the morning. Deliveries happen during the day and then people are driven home.
It also eliminates the need for parking for a lot of places. A restaurant doesn't need a parking lot if people are primarily arriving in self driving cars.
The only sensible aspect of Elon's boneheaded move to remove non-camera sensors from Tesla models is the drive to reduce costs, because low costs are essential for mass adoption. Yes, sensors are rapidly dropping in cost, making the move even more boneheaded, but the theory is sound.
Some Waymo exec claimed that they are seeing very encouraging unit economics, which gives me hope for mass diffusion, but we'll only know when the rubber actually hits the road (heheheh).
Waymo in heavy rain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG6u6QfTv6s
> only been tested in semiarid locales
Is San Francisco semi-arid?
Everybody can drive a car. They have solved the wrong problem.
The reality is we decided to invest mainly in car infrastructure for the past 100 years and it's going to take a long time to fix that. In the meantime, I'll be happy with an automated car and diminishing car ownership.
If you want (relatively) high speed, you can take the Brightline to Orlando, 236 mi in 3.5h aka 67 mph average. That's on par with Brussels-Amsterdam (68mph), Amsterdam-Paris (80mph), but indeed far below the marquee EU/Chinese/Japanese HSR routes of 150+ mph average speed.
More generally: large parts of the eastern US had a developed railroad system (and often still do, for freight.) You can look up old maps and see how widespread they were. The economics mostly just didn't work out because as car ownership rose, the population density wasn't high enough to justify them over cars.
Human drivers kill >30K/year.
But concretely, regarding the staffing costs, if I roughly read the financial report section correctly, it looks like for the Berlin transport agency, salaries make up half of all expenses[0]!
Given that that's such a big portion, I think autonomous buses could likely unlock a lot of mobility in big cities by having more flexibility in creation of additional bus routes (as you don't have to consolidate multiple routes into one because you have to pay drivers for each).
[0]: https://www.bvg.de/dam/jcr:67ef63fc-3fd1-4e95-aae6-2ab8c8c2b...
Yes. For my suburban bus system, about 30% of the total budget (operating AND capital) goes to drivers (and related support like HR, managers, etc.).
Not everyone can/wants to own a car, though.
I can't.
Prices are rarely based on cost, and more often based on what a customer is willing to pay. Waymo is a better experience than Uber (predictable, safe, clean, quiet, etc.), so it makes sense people would be willing to pay more.
> Is Waymo close to bankruptcy, unable to be profitable, or are they just greedy?
No x 3
Compared to what? Most estimates put costs around $150K/vehicle and dropping.
Source: I worked in AV V&V for a decade.
Tesla is just making noise as usual.
Examining the cumulative hours waiting over time, it is a bit staggering just how much time Waymos are spending without a passenger or even assigned to pick one up. Peaking in March 2025 with over 304,000 hours, the California Waymo vehicle fleet is spending the equivalent of 12,700 days every month operational but without an assigned passenger trip.
If we assume 1,000 Waymos were deployed for public rides during this period (on the conservative side given recent fleet announcements), that ends up being around 12.7 days2 of waiting per vehicle per month. Further, the bias here is to be forgiving, as Waymos are not operational 24 hours a day.
They're, in my customer impression, quite a world different.
Not that I disagree but it's never gonna happen. more money > money
- consistent car quality
- safety of the drive (conservative driving and potential fear of drivers)
- no randomly chatty driver
All of those feel like a breath of fresh air especially when stacked up against the current state of Uber & Lyft rides. People really just want consistency. I don't actually think you needed AI to get there (I've had occasional rides in black cars that provided the same experience). Waymo was just right time, right place, right price.
Just last week a Waymo was driving on train tracks and the rider had to jump out of the car and run because the car stopped while trains came at it. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26KJvL2clTs) I bet that guy'd have something to say about the experience.
That said, I've never felt unsafe or uncomfortable. But I have jumped out halfway through the ride and grabbed an eScooter instead.
https://www.sfmta.com/blog/creating-better-market-street-car... https://www.planetizen.com/news/2025/08/135849-sfs-market-st...
Wonder if that explains your observed preference. I'd bet Waymos will start utilizing the route again if it aligns with Google's mapping algo.
If it gets in an accident, who pays my medical bills?
Waymo cameras permanently record everything that happens in their vehicles, right?
Some people see this as an upside. Not me, not you, but these people exist.
Safe, clean, quiet, private, predictable, no tipping, etc.
I've also been in one with like hair and stuff on the seats and door.
It's not like humans don't still ride in those cars.
I work at Alphabet and I think it’s sad that KitKat died