Waymo revealed they have been given permission to charge money for rides in San Francisco. They have recently been giving them for free to a select group of testers. In Chandler Arizona, they have been charging for rides for several years, so what’s the big deal?
Waymo is widely regarded as the leading self-driving company by a large margin. They have been at it the longest, with one of the best regarded teams and huge resources, and produced the best results. This includes operating in Chandler with no safety driver in the taxi. That experiment in Chandler has helped them understand how riders react to a robotaxi, especially one with no other person in it. As Sun Tzu never said, “no business plan survives first contact with the customer.”
While they charged money in Chandler, at a rate slightly below the cost of an UberUBER, the problem is that the suburban town is not really a reasonable market for robotaxi services. Uber and taxis are rarely used there, transit and walking options are poor, and private car ownership is the norm. Some day robotaxi services will operate in towns created for cars, but not at first.
San Francisco is another story. It is a much older city with lots of transit and walking, and it’s where Sidecar was born, and quickly copied by UberX and LyftLYFT. Short of a seriously car-free city like Manhattan, London or Hong Kong, it’s a great place to experiment with the economics of robotaxi service to find out what works.
Best Covid-19 Travel Insurance PlansByAmy DaniseEditor
Waymo can try a bunch of pricing models:
Price it similar to Uber. This just tests how people compare it to such services, and also how many use it because it’s cool, and that takes a long time to wear off.
Price at a price much better than Uber, but more than private car use, like $1/mile.
Price at a price similar to the all-in cost of private car use, around 50 cents/mile.
Price at a price similar to the incremental cost of private car use, which is also the future all-in cost of a minicar taxi — around 25 cents/mile.
Experiments with different amount of “flag drop” (base) fees and per-mile fees.
Free “stops” (no extra flag drop) as Waymo already does in Chandler.
Price like transit, flat fee inside the city.
Various subscription fees, including flat monthly fee, or flat monthly fee plus much lower per ride or per mile fee.
In order for a robotaxi to succeed is must do much more than just compete with services like Uber or transit. It must work as a car replacement. People need to feel they can give up car ownership, either for real, or temporarily as part of an experiment. That’s actually hard for a pure robotaxi service to do — you need to supplement it with super quick carshare for trips out of town and other special travel, and you need to be able to take the rider most places they need to go, with a very short wait time. You gain a big benefit in large cities from eliminating the costs and delays of parking, but that only goes so far.
Waymo faces a burden because they are only operating outside the downtown. Nobody is going to see it as car replacement until that’s fixed. They could just offer you a human driven taxi when you want to go downtown, as long as they can stop doing that fairly soon. Cruise also has ambitions here, but their service area is even more limited and they only operate at night. (Cruise is running with no safety drivers in that limited area, which Waymo does not yet do in theirs.)
Indeed, one can argue that these economic experiments could be done by just subsidizing the price of an Uber like service. You don’t get the full-product experience which combines being alone in the vehicle and paying for it, but you get a lot. Several companies have operated robotaxi services with safety drivers in certain areas. Motional just announced they will be operating one in Las Vegas, though it will be free and only in the “downtown” area, not the strip or convention center.
Go big
To truly test a commercial service you need a big fleet, and sadly a limited set of customers. One of the main measures of quality of a service is wait time, particularly when you compare it with the near zero wait time of a car in your garage.
The wait time is determined from the number of idle vehicles you have per square mile of service area divided by the number of active customers in that region. The higher density of idle vehicles, the closer one will be to you, and the shorter wait. You can reduce that wait time by having more vehicles or having fewer customers. This is how Lyft, even though smaller than Uber, can compete with it on wait times — they are smaller both in customers and in drivers.
Sadly, the best way to test this is to limit the number of people who can use the service. There’s tons of people who want to try it, so perhaps they could let random people have 2 rides in off-peak times to make sure the vehicles are there for the real test subjects to see what it’s like to have cheap, on-demand robotaxi with fast service.
In a way, it would not be a bad idea for Cruise and Waymo to even combine once Cruise expands to daytime service and more area. I don’t think the learnings will be all that secret or proprietary. This probably won’t happen.
More trips
Waymo did all their early development in Silicon Valley, where their HQ is, and until recently their vehicles were a regular fixture on the streets there. They intended a service there but probably decided they did not need to learn more about suburbs at this point.
There is one service I think would be worth experimenting with, however. It would be to have two services, one in San Francisco, and one in the valley, and regular connector vans and buses (possibly driven by humans) between them. As I have described in my articles on the potential future of transit robotaxis offer the potential for door to door transit where the common part of the ride is shared, giving the best of both worlds. You get the door-to-door on-demand service of cars, with the reduced road use and lowered cost of shared rides for most of the miles.
In such a service you could call a Waymo in Silicon Valley and it would take you to a place where a van or bus is leaving to go north within one minute. (You don’t have to send a van every minute, though they could, you introduce modest delays in the pickup that nobody notices so you only have to send a van or bus every 5 minutes.) The vans go to various switch points in San Francisco where other Waymo robotaxis are already waiting, and you get in yours. (Post covid, two people going to similar destinations would share.) Unlike UberPool services, you do almost no detouring out of your way — none if you don’t share the last mile ride.
The same thing repeats on the way back. Because of the shared van service, the cost of this ride can become less than the cost of driving up yourself and parking. In addition, they would let you do rides among places in San Francisco while up there, to simulate what you could do if you drove your own car up. Today, almost everybody going to SF from the valley drives their own car up — the train exists but has much longer travel times and the stations are not conveniently located. (At certain times semi-express trains run, and the robotaxis could go to the train station and pick up there for those specific times, where the train might beat rush-hour traffic, though barely and only for certain regions of the area.)
This permits a robotaxi service even over a large service area, and would actually compete with car ownership even with existing car owners. Some of the vans could also go to SFO airport to add more utility, but this may not be what Waymo seeks to test now. Of course, there is still the issue of the virus when in the van.
The service would also be very popular with Alphabet employees. Alphabet/Google runs a very large private transit system with buses that run from Google HQ to places all over the area, but in particular to San Francisco.
Artificial prices
It’s not out of the question that other companies, including Uber itself, might object to a Waymo experiment which has enough size to deliver meaningful results but which deliberately undercuts their prices by subsidizing an early service that is not yet that cheap. One would hope this would not create an anti-trust violation if it were just for research.
Right now, robotaxi operation is pretty expensive. Not even counting the immense R&D expenses, the vehicles are being made in small volumes and nothing has yet been made to scale. Cruise has just now applied to NHTSA to get the exceptions and approval they need to manufacture a vehicle without a steering wheel. Real operation will require not just vehicles, but operations centers and cleaning depots and charging infrastructure. There’s a lot that is going to cost a lot in the early days, so this is not a game for the underfunded. Many of the players are the biggest companies in the world, so that won’t be a problem for them.
When it comes time to set real prices, I expect we’ll see something around $1/mile. That’s half of what an Uber cost pre-pandemic (it’s gone up a bunch of late) but more than the typical per-mile cost of car ownership. Car owners don’t tend to think of the cost as per-mile, however, while robotaxi operators must. It’s high enough to make people who already own a car not find it attractive, unfortunately, though low enough to be a bargain if parking is expensive at the destination. The reality is that once players are in it for revenue, they won’t want to charge less than the market will bear. Only once there is competition will prices really drop. Outside of places like San Francisco, competition is less likely. It will be easier to just go target a virgin city with nobody else playing than to go head-to-head in a city where somebody else got in first.
The Waymo vehicle was a completely autonomous vehicle with no driver in the front seat. The five-mile ride lasted 14 minutes over highways and some neighborhood streets. The cost was $10.77, or a little less than $1 a minute. For the most part, the ride was smooth, allowing me to comfortably avoid spilling my coffee.
Waymo One™ is our ride-hailing service that's offering fully autonomous rides in Downtown Phoenix and the East Valley. You can take a trip anytime you're there — just open the Waymo One app and hail a car.
Just download the Waymo One app and ride right away. In San Francisco, riders can also download the Waymo One app and join our waitlist as our service ramps up in the City by the Bay. Riders can use the Waymo One app to hail one of our autonomous vehicles operated by the Waymo Driver, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
BEIJING — Chinese tech giant Baidu announced Thursday it has cut the price of its robotaxi vehicles by nearly half, lowering costs for a nascent business. The new vehicle, the Apollo RT6, is an electric car that costs 250,000 yuan (about $37,313) to produce — without relying on a third-party manufacturer, Baidu said.
Waymo's mission is to make it safe and easy for people and things to get where they're going. The Waymo Driver can improve the world's access to mobility while saving thousands of lives now lost to traffic crashes.
No distinction is made whether the vehicle was in autonomous mode or the human driver was in control at the time of the accident. ... Recorded collisions involving autonomous driving vehicles in California.
Waymo Can Now Offer Driverless Taxi Rides In SF (But Can't Charge for Them) Joining the likes of General Motors-owned Cruise, Waymo — the Alphabet-owned autonomous car company — is now permitted to give fully self-driven rides in San Francisco after months of testing with drivers behind the wheel.
In San Francisco, Cruise and Waymo allow residents to request a ride on their app, summoning a driverless vehicle that brings them to their destination. (Waymo transports passengers using safety drivers who can intervene if something goes wrong; Cruise does not.)
Waymo's sensors allow it to see 360 degrees, both in daytime and at night, and up to nearly three football fields away. This multi-layered sensor suite works together seamlessly to paint a detailed 3D picture of the world, showing moving and still objects.
For the last five years, driverless car companies have been testing their vehicles on public roads. These vehicles constantly roam neighborhoods while laden with a variety of sensors including video cameras capturing everything going on around them in order to operate safely and analyze instances where they don't.
The cost of an autonomous ride-hailing service will drop to $0.25 per mile, compared to $0.70 to keep a personal car. Low Operation Cost: Autonomous vehicles will help to reduce insurance costs, as well as, reduce accidents. This will help to bring down the cost of these services.
After several years of testing, the robotaxi sector has begun to move into commercialization in 2021 with an exponentially growing automotive fleet. This is thanks to rapidly falling hardware costs, better algorithms, better infrastructure, and regulatory relaxation. China and the U.S., in particular, are far ahead.
Amazon acquired the 9-year-old startup in 2020 and, at the time, shared few details about how it planned to use the company's technology. Zoox unveiled its custom-built, electric robotaxi in 2020, with an eye on offering on-demand autonomous transportation in urban settings.
The Waymo vehicles were in line with costs of ride-hailing services. In total, I spent $49.20 on two trips that totaled 26.5 miles and took 1 hour and 17 minutes. The cost per mile averaged to $1.86 a mile.
This deep, long-term partnership will bring together the power of the Waymo Driver with the scale of Uber Freight's marketplace technology, ultimately enabling the safe and scalable implementation of the Waymo Driver on America's roads.
Our vision system includes cameras designed to work in long range, in daylight, and in low-light conditions. We use cameras outside the car to see things like whether a traffic light is red or green. Waymo's cameras also see the world in context, as a human would, but with a 360° field of view.
The Waymo Driver uses all that data to calculate a safe route with the help of AI and machine learning, allowing the car to respond in real time to the evolving traffic environment. In other words, the Waymo Driver is able to capture driving data that is used to continuously improve its performance.
Waymo's approach to self-driving cars is to build a high-capacity, predictive driving model called the Waymo Driver. It can handle both “usual” conditions, such as driving on a highway and navigating around pedestrians on city streets, and rarer situations, called long-tail cases.
Across the trips I cross-referenced with quotes from Uber/Lyft, Waymo fares were on average ~10% more expensive. Wait times were generally comparable, but for a few rides, it looked like Waymo would have beat the nearest Uber or Lyft to the punch.
But despite that admirable performance, the Waymo vehicle did better, avoiding 75 percent of collisions and reducing serious injury risk by a whopping 93 percent. “We consistently outperform this high bar of human performance,” Trent Victor, Waymo's director of safety research, told The Verge.
The company found that the Waymo Driver completely avoided or mitigated 100% of crashes, except for those where the driver was struck from behind. Waymo then tested how NIEON would behave in these crashes, as NIEON would present a higher benchmark than average human drivers.
How much does an Autopilot make? As of Feb 28, 2023, the average annual pay for an Autopilot in the United States is $71,878 a year. Just in case you need a simple salary calculator, that works out to be approximately $34.56 an hour.
So far, roughly 100,000 Tesla owners have paid for FSD, either with a lump sum as part of the purchase price of their vehicles or via a monthly subscription ($99 for those with Enhanced Autopilot, $199 for those without). Anyone who decides to buy the system outright doesn't have to pay for future updates.
ALLYN: These fully electric white Jaguars tricked out with all sorts of high-tech cameras and sensors are everywhere in the city. But only employees and a select group of others get to ride in these here. For me, the Waymo car has a safety driver.
Cruise's majority owner and carmaker partner GM is giving the vehicles which include their all-electric, driverless car The Origin, designed for shared ride-hailing. Not only Cruise, Google's self-driving car company, Waymo, is using all-electric cars for its fleets too.
Perimeter LiDAR is located on the front and rear bumper, as well as on each side just above the front wheels. There's also a front-facing, long-range camera on the roof, as well as a 360 vision system that can see 500 meters away.
Waymo said the map allows its fleet to track the progression of fog as it rolls in from the Pacific and burns off as the sun rises, and can even "detect drizzle and light rains that lead to wet roads in situations that are invisible to the National Weather Service's local Doppler weather radar."
So, using our cutting-edge perception, on top of the data collected by our high definition long-range cameras, we have trained the Driver to perceive and classify objects, such as a vehicle, up to 1,000 meters away.
Los Angeles, U.S. The top four cities all belong to India, which is the world's second largest country by population. Surveillance cameras are playing a major role in the country's efforts to reduce crimes against women.
San Francisco is a beautiful city with a big problem — car theft. In 2021, nearly 2000 cars were stolen, and there were tens of thousands of car crimes in popular areas like North Beach and The Mission District.
The Waymo vehicle was a completely autonomous vehicle with no driver in the front seat. The five-mile ride lasted 14 minutes over highways and some neighborhood streets. The cost was $10.77, or a little less than $1 a minute. For the most part, the ride was smooth, allowing me to comfortably avoid spilling my coffee.
To start with, the rides themselves will be free as the company does not yet have approval to charge fares. The pilot allows Waymo to offer driverless passenger service throughout San Francisco and portions of Daly City, as well as in parts of Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Sunnyvale.
Price at a price similar to the all-in cost of private car use, around 50 cents/mile. Price at a price similar to the incremental cost of private car use, which is also the future all-in cost of a minicar taxi — around 25 cents/mile. Experiments with different amount of “flag drop” (base) fees and per-mile fees.
The Bay WheelsOpens in new window bike share program, operated by Lyft, provides 4,500 bikes and more than 6,000 docks for them across San Francisco. A bike share is great for one-way trips between neighborhoods and is often the quickest, most affordable way to get around.
Many Californians rely on personal cars to get around, but SF has some excellent infrastructure for car-free commutes, including bike paths, well-connected buses, and much more. Read on to discover some solid car-free alternatives for getting from point A to point B in the city.
"The good news is that nearly every neighborhood in San Francisco is walkable and BART and MUNI can basically get you anywhere you need to go." The City's car-free lifestyle comes at a definite price, though. Rents in San Francisco are the highest in the nation and the median home price is over a million dollars. 4.
The Waymo Driver uses all that data to calculate a safe route with the help of AI and machine learning, allowing the car to respond in real time to the evolving traffic environment. In other words, the Waymo Driver is able to capture driving data that is used to continuously improve its performance.
Over the past several years, hundreds of Waymo engineers have rebuilt most of the company's self-driving hardware, chiefly the cameras, lidars, and radars that perceive the world around the car.
No distinction is made whether the vehicle was in autonomous mode or the human driver was in control at the time of the accident. ... Recorded collisions involving autonomous driving vehicles in California.
This deep, long-term partnership will bring together the power of the Waymo Driver with the scale of Uber Freight's marketplace technology, ultimately enabling the safe and scalable implementation of the Waymo Driver on America's roads.
Waymo is now running a robotaxi service in two states, but the vehicles for those services are retrofitted commercial cars. The company rolls around in either the "4th-gen" Waymo vehicles, built on the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid, or the "5th-gen" driver, built on the Jaguar I-Pace.
Introduction: My name is Nathanael Baumbach, I am a fantastic, nice, victorious, brave, healthy, cute, glorious person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
We notice you're using an ad blocker
Without advertising income, we can't keep making this site awesome for you.
