Waymo's driverless cars are taking over San Francisco, and it's getting weird
Learning to live with Waymos
Waymo now runs more than four thousand cars in fifteen U.S. cities and has overtaken Lyft in San Francisco market share, with D.C., New York, London, and Tokyo in its sights. The New Yorker rides along to see how people are adjusting: some find the turning steering wheel reassuring, others sing karaoke in the back seat, and at least one rider watched his car blow through construction cones and speed down the highway with police in pursuit. Cars, unlike LLMs, make technological change feel concrete.
It might be some custom L.L.M. that causes someone to lose their job, but they're never going to see that. They're going to see the car going down the street without anybody in it.
- blululu
I feel like the article is trying really hard to be cynical about one of the few technologies that is just totally an improvement in my life. I don't even really ride cabs very often (basically the airport is the only place and Waymos don't go there). But I do bike and bus into work and frankly the Waymos are just considerate to bicycles and pedestrians. I never have a sense of danger in the crosswalk with them. No risk of getting cut off. None of the borderline psychotic behavior I have personally seen from motorists. The author of the piece even admits that she totaled a car. Which is not exactly uncommon since cars are dangerous. The upsides just so heavily outweigh the bad here.
- binlog
You can tell that this piece is written by someone who visited San Francisco to sit in a Waymo and then extrapolated how weird it must be for people who see them every day. In reality after the initial shock wears off these cars are just a normal, boring part of the road. Seeing them drive around town is the same as seeing any other kind of taxi. I find that the strongest opinions about Waymos come from people who live in cities where they don't operate.
- 7174n6
I used Waymo several times while in Nashville this summer. Fantastic experience. I'll choose Waymo over a human-driven vehicle everytime I have the choice.
- dozerly
Waymo’s feel so so so much safer when walking and biking around. They actually give you priority.
- pama
As a tourist in SF about two weeks ago I experienced a bit of superhuman driving from a Waymo. On one of these 30-degree downhill slopes, a long truck was stopped in the middle of the road and to its right and slightly ahead was a parked car. The space between these two was just about right so that a 45-degree-turned Waymo car would barely fit with less than an inch space on either side. This is exactly what it did, without much hesitation. As a human driver, I would have stopped, tried to squeeze back up and find another way, or stop and try to locate the truck driver and ask them to move.