I can take my time to get car seats in and kids buckled, without feeling the pressure to hurry from the human driver.
I don't have to feel like my kids misbehaving are going to annoy a human driver, or get me a bad review in Uber/Lyft.
I don't have to worry about tipping, or the driver taking a longer route to charge me more.
I don't have to worry about small-talk, or awkwardly sitting in silence when I normally would be talking with those I'm driving with.
Obviously this doesn't cover all use cases for a car (pretty sure you can't load a kayak onto a Waymo because you'd block sensors), but it seems WAY better to me as someone who doesn't like to deal with the people aspect of Taxis.
In a world where waymo works as a taxi, it also works to deliver a human-drivable rental car right to your door (and send it on to the next customer when you're done with it).
So now the short term car rental user experience should be dramatically better, even if the robotaxi isn't appropriate for all the tasks.
This or an equivalent will arrive to a robo taxi near you when the service inevitably gets enshittified to hell and back.
Ads, trips shared with other humans, pay extra for heated seats, etc.
Is it Yuck? Yes of course. But it also seems extremely unlikely. And it's a lot less Yuck than thinking about what's in the sand in public playgrounds that all kids visit constantly. And while I have a reasonable chance of preventing them from licking the seats, I have no chance of preventing them from eating some sand.
This is just a bizarre irrational worry...
Do you and your kids take public transport regularly? In a failing city/society, that is.
Because if the answer is "yes, I do take public transport in a city that struggles to pay its bills and I still don't care that the chairs have weird organic substances on them" then fair-play to you, but for me personally at some point I had to purchase a personal car (when I was already approaching my mid-30s) because I just couldn't convince myself anymore that it is ok to not want to sit down inside of a train ("better stand up by the window, that seat is too dirty").
And these robo-taxis will be worse than public transport, for the main reason that there's no-one "standing guard" inside of them (and, no, Big Brother cameras placed inside of them, which should be a dedicated topic all by itself, btw, really won't change a thing in that respect).
That's just one tiny example out of sea of examples.
Before making such bold claims, you've got to know a little tiny bit of the topic or at least look it up to make sure.
I can almost guarantee that if they don’t already, the robo-taxis will eventually start asking for tips.
This is already the case at self-checkout in some stores for example.
As long as the companies can get away with it, they will tack on any number of extra fees and charges even if those fees and charges really don’t make any sense.
Hell, even tipping people does not really make sense the way it works in some places. A person working for a company should receive enough pay from the company itself that they don’t have to actually rely on tips in order to make enough money to survive. Tips should be a nice extra that customers willingly add because of good service. Not a forced extra percentage that they have to pay on every transaction just so that the company can pay less to their employees.
If people are willing to pay base charge + tip for an Uber, then that is what robo-taxies will charge too. Especially if one company is allowed to keep a monopoly on the technology.
