Vegas is an interesting place to launch IMO (and I believe they only operate in/around the strip). On the one hand all they really have to navigate is the strip which is just one giant straight road. But on the other hand most casinos on the strip have their entrances in the back and once you get off the strip and try to go up to one of these casinos it's a maze of roads. But that only speaks to the technical hurdles, I'm sure a big part of the calculus is that Vegas is very much a "novelty" kind of place and folks are much more likely to give it a shot when there.
Have you been to San Francisco or LA?
The robotaxis have a steering wheel? I thought they had campfire seating with 2 backward facing seats.
We don't really know what a special robotaxi hardware would look like.
It appears, based on my study of the footage on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIRW8bfy4kE, that it could possibly switch which side is the front and the back by just changing the color of the lights. With RGB LEDs that would be pretty easy to do. But my question is, when would that be useful?
It would be neat that it could pull into a driveway and then leave in "reverse", but that doesn't seem like it'd come up that often for a robotaxi.
The back wheels look like they can steer. That's useful for parking in tight spaces.
My sister and I would pass the time folding up a piece of paper and each of us got to draw part of a person without seeing what the other had drawn. Sort of like visual madlibs.
1. Congratulations everyone! Yay!
2. I absolutely recommend Zoox as a great place to work. Believes me, I’ve sampled many jobs, Zoox is up there with Google in terms of what the experience feels like in my experience.
3. Yay again!
As a waymo user, I'm looking forward to a little more competition in the market. I quite like waymo, but driving price down woudl be great.
> Simply open the Zoox app to take a ride from several destinations on and around the Strip.
This puts it dramatically behind Waymo where I can walk out on any block in the coverage area and tell it to take me to any other block in the coverage area, not to mention Uber and Lyft.
I'm sure Zoox can improve this, but right now it resembles a self-driving shuttle more than a taxi service.
What's considered normal for humans, driving higher than the speed limits, will not for automatic cars.
A robotaxi doesn’t care where it can or can’t drive. It just follows graph search and speed limits.
That means we can design cities around how we want them to look, instead of bending everything around today’s messy car infrastructure.
Think about SF, its size is (famously) around 7 by 7 miles. So it'd take 12 minutes to cross (as the bird flies) from one side to another at 35 mph and 17 minutes at 25mph. Which is completely unrealistic, because real travel times are dominated by traffic lights and congestion.
This calculation changes only when we're talking about long-distance travel on freeways. But honestly, I expect that fast long-distance trains with seamless transfer to self-driving taxis would be a better idea.
(Musk 6 years ago saying it's happening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8X8NdcV7Wc It hasn't yet of course)
Announcement: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation/zoox-headquarter...
Amazon owns it, not just funded them.
> There is no steering wheel afaik
Maybe the control is in a remote centre then
Here's a speculative but plausible take: Zoox and Waymo are both products of cloud computing and data gathering giants. Maybe that's the important factor.
Waymo, Cruise, Zoox, Pony.ai, Baidu's Apollo, Argo.ai and Aurora all have/had very similar approaches to the technology. Tesla is the major outlier and they haven't accomplished much in spite of the hype.
Said like someone who doesn't have elderly parents, and doesn't plan to age…
By far the worst part about said Ubers and Taxis is the driver. They're an unpredictable element in a situation where I greatly appreciate predictability. Unlike my parents, I didn't grow up with staff, so I'm not used to simply pretending this person I'm sharing a space with doesn't exist. Instead, I need to navigate the fuzzy line between courtesy and service.
Waymos have none of this shit. They're clean, show up when they say they will, I can play my own music, adjust the air conditioning, and have obnoxious conversations with my friends. They drive safely, and, as a cherry on top, they're cool as hell.
- get lost
- be late
- collide with a moving car
- collide with stationary object
- run over a pedestrian (bonus for multiple!)
Although from the article, it sounds like this might not be servicing a wide enough area to win the bet even if the time was extended a couple years.
1 it's not fully autonomous, there's a remote operator
2 not a wide enough service area as defined in the bet
3 it's a pilot program, also excluded in the bet
4 it's also a year late and the bet is very much still lost
lol but we're going to have self driving cars by 2015 guys!
An 8-10 year delay from expectations is not too bad all things considered.
Seems like robotaxis are getting ready for a big expansion, I see Waymos all over Orlando even though they don't offer service here.
Ubiquitous, and life changing for the millions of people who use them daily?
Apollo One has already launched service in the UAE and is expected to launch in Singapore and Malaysia by the end of the year. They're also expected to start testing in several European countries by the end of the year. The question I have at this point is, will only China benefit from launching this new global industry, or will the US manage to also be competitive on a global scale?
…what does this mean? Are vibes another way of saying you feel like it without evidence?
This valley has congestion issues pretty much all day everywhere, plus a traffic light management protocol that results in very long light cycles.
Many of us when coming to a red light where there are multiple lanes and traffic is light, will make a point to not stop in the right lane when there is no right turn only lane. This is so people who are making a right turn can make a right on red instead of waiting for a green.
Zoox does not do this.
Sometimes there is not quite enough space between vehicles to get into a lane while cars are stopped at a light, such as getting into a left turn lane. Often, some light taps on the horn (or even just sitting with the turn signal) will result in drivers pushing up tight to let you into the left turn lane.
Zoox does not do this.
Zoox will change lanes many times for no apparent reason, making drivers think it is turning right or left at the next intersection, but it does not turn.
As best I can tell, Zoox has issues with pedestrians. I think that the operator (in the test vehicle) takes over when pedestrians are present, because so far I always see them operating the steering wheel when there are pedestrians.
As a driver, I don't like any of the automated drivers because I feel there is a thing that can do serious damage and nobody is accountable. These are all owned by corporations whose sole accountability will be financial, nothing more, while drivers are held to both financial a punitive accountability.
Further, these are all mega-conglomerates for whom there is no real regard for the destruction their property causes. They are politically connected, so will never lose their operating license. The are funded by the largest investors mankind has ever known. Nobody in these organizations has any respect for morals or ethics, instead fostering a system that promotes psychopaths.
I don't want them here. I haven't spoken to anyone who lives here that wants them here.
Why change the topic to safety?
Insurance IIRC is 3 highest in the nation. I'm paying $3000 per year with max limits full coverage and this is lower than most people I talk to.
Utterly disturbing announcements and rollouts like this aren't prominently linked with comprehensive testing videos.
"We're a tech company, just trust us"
The only thing I like about this is the potential to make Tesla look bad.
Do you think I care about the people IN the car?
Self-driving is about the safety of the people OUTSIDE of the car.
I already commute by train. I’d like to have something more flexible.
https://www.uber.com/us/en/ride/uberx-share/
Convergent Evolution happening in realtime- it's almost as if community pooled forms of transportation are the most efficient...
I've tried the current basic share option and it's not great, and I say that as someone who used pre-pandemic UberPool. You typically don't save much off a standard UberX ride, it's only available for exactly one person, the arrival estimates are wildly optimistic, and if the other rider isn't in the car they seem to never be ready when you get to their pickup location.
It's unfortunately, but the current pricing model seems to attract passengers who really don't want to be paying for an Uber but at least this way they can save a couple of bucks, which means they're typically in a stressful situation. Very different vibe from the old, social and wildly cheap UberPool, but that probably was never sustainable.
We all know trains would be nice. Unless you have some plan to rework our government into something that will allow for innovation here, then I prefer to see progress, even if it's not ideal.
It's a dumb comment. But I find it interesting in how it reveals opportunities to leverage bridging expertise.
The infamous Dropbox comment [1] illustrated the complete lack of domain knowledge in marketing, sales and generally how non-tech people work that was commonplace among coders. A lot of people made a lot of money, and made a lot of other peoples' lives better, but bridging that gap.
This bus meme, on the other hand, illustrates a complete lack of domain knowledge around marketing and, in all likelihood, how governments and public transit work in the real world.
And that could work, if the car in front can communicate power/brake/turn commands to the cars in the chain. And if you could dynamically drop cars out of the middle when needed. And if you could dynamically add cars when they're neighboring and going the same way. All those could be tricky, but they seem quite solvable.
No it wouldn't. Those hotel shuttles and taxies are ideal for anyone with luggage as you don't have to carry your own heavy bags with you. The train doesn't want those people slowing things down for everyone as they get all their bags on/off the train.
Airport lines are a good idea because many thousands of people work at airports and thus don't have luggage. They are also useful for travelers taking a short trip and thus don't have much packaged. However Vegas as a vacation destination is expected to have a lot of people with luggage and less people who are light travelers.
Once tourists drop their bags in their room they should be using transit for every trip until it is finally time to return to the airport.
Of all the places to try a gimmick, Vegas is the right place.
Yes, that's why they call it the Las Vegas strip. It is an entire city literally designed for tourists.
