We recently started using Waymo more often:

- Quality of Lyft and Uber rides have gone down significantly.

- Consistently spacious, clean and quiet cars. You know what you'll get.

- AC always works and not up to the whim of the driver.

- No chatty driver to disturb our sleeping baby.

Negatives:

- Rides have usually 10% mark up over Lyft and Uber.

- Pick up and drop off tend to be a small walk from requested locations.

Forgot one more positive - you can choose a soothing music play list in the car and it automatically resumes in the next ride. Small but really nice detail when traveling with a baby.

Waymos are fantastic, I actually look forward to riding them every time. It's a quiet, peaceful space where you can relax for a bit on the way to your destination. Haven't had any issues with them except for one time where the car was super hot on the inside for whatever reason and the AC was not working.

Some curiosities from seeing them on the road a lot. You can tell it's them even when you can't see the extra protuberances:

- They take extended stops at stop signs, around 3-4 seconds.

- They have extra-bright headlights and brake lights.

- When waiting for a ride, they pull up next to parks and parking lots to avoid bothering residents. Their brake lights are on the whole time. If demand is low, they'll hang out in batches of 2-4. If a block has a hazy red hue at night, you know you've found a Waymo nest.

As a cyclist, I trust the Waymos significantly more than human drivers to not hit me (I've been biking in SF since Jan and already had 3 unsafe incidents). The more, the better, I say.

I love Waymos compared to my ride sharing experience.

The base car is appealing (currently Jaguars). They're spacious for a >6 ft individual like myself. The user interface is intuitive and fun. There's a cool factor that exists.

Against ride sharing, given the lack of a driver, there's no variability in driver with regards to ambiance, scents, cleanliness, chattiness, and smoothness of the ride.

I am very much looking forward to this expansion.

In my experience Waymo has been much worse compared to Lyft/Uber for longer rides.

A big problem with Waymo in its current state is how its routes are terribly inefficient.

It purposely avoids freeways and higher speed roads, opting to take more inefficient routes without regards to the number of stop signs, hills, and other factors which will inevitably lead to a longer travel time. It's almost like it's using a worse version of the "Avoid highways" feature on Google Maps, and getting to a further destination can take almost twice the amount of time as compared to a Lyft/Uber.

Another problem is its lack of human intuition and strategies when driving in the city during some kind of event where many of the roads are blocked off. A human driver would have been navigating the blocked roads throughout the day and already know where to go to avoid the crowds, where as Waymo naively follows its navigation system and gets stuck in a bunch of traffic for no reason.

It also drives annoyingly slowly which leads to frustration from human drivers who constantly try to overtake you.

Wooooooo! Goodbye Lyft and Uber. Honestly, I get a bag driver, use the AI for a while. Feels too sterile, switch back, get some interesting drivers. Waymo has everything going for it but good company. Love it.

Once it goes really mainstream, I can see angry Uber/Lyft drivers and/or their supporters destroy Waymos in large quantities (isolated incidents already have happened multiple times in SF [0][1]), driving economical feasibility to zero and causing Waymo to cease operations in some cities.

[0] - https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/11/24069251/waymo-driverless...

[1] - https://abc7news.com/waymo-sf-attacked-self-driving-car-inci...

Glad to see this development. The amount of FUD around AVs is too high, and allowing each individual municipality to set their own regulations for AVs would have been a ridiculous amount of red tape for these companies to deal with. Just to pull one particularly bad quote from this article:

> “I hope that, in the meantime, our communities do not suffer too much in terms of injuries and community damages due to the current regulatory gaps,” Cortese said in a statement.

What gaps? What injuries? What community damages? If someone can actually present statistics that these cars are more socially dangerous than an equivalent amount of Ubers and Lyfts, I would be very, very surprised.

They're fantastic. I can't wait to take one to the airport.

I know it's still the "honeymoon phase", but I actually do like Waymo when I'm walking, biking, driving another car, or riding in the Waymo.

https://archive.ph/gxy1S

Waymo rides in PHX area were a pleasent surprise. While on our trip, the waymo slammed it's brakes as a precarious event transpired that I'm almost positive if a human was at the wheel, would have resulted in an accident. Very optimistic to see how many lives they can save over the next decade.

Can’t wait to have it in my country.

With the current apps/services, 70% of the time the driver won’t stop talking on the phone, or won’t turn on the AC, or will drive in a way that’ll make you want to throw up, etc etc.

I'm still surprised that they, and most of their competitors, chose to start off in such difficult to navigate regions. I would have started off in a retirement community or the like.

Can’t wait to be able to hail a Waymo from SFO. They are truly a marvel of modern technology.

they should move away from the shitty jaguars and chryslers they have in their fleet though. Maybe Honda would make a good partner as they have the only US autonomous level 3.

And Elon Musk would improve on these 5,000 lb Waymo SUVs carrying 1-2 passengers in favor of 7,000 lb Cybertrucks carrying 1-2 passengers.

The improved 0-60 times alone will prove Elon the more effective accellerationist.

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Cool. Can I take one without my identity and travel patterns being tracked? Like, suppose I want to get picked up from work and dropped off at my girlfriend's house in San Mateo. Something I might not want my soon-to-be-ex's lawyer to be able to subpoena. There's one of those machines onboard that are all over the place in supermarkets where I can feed bills right?

Or maybe not. Okay then, Luxor Cab it is. Cheaper, better conversation, more aggressive about squeezing through traffic, and doesn't violate my privacy.

I'm not against automated taxi services in principle. I'm just not interested if it's a package deal where I have to surrender my physical comings and goings to a scummy data broker like Google.

Based on anecdotal evidence, I strongly suspect these are remotely driven cars, not completely self-driving, which means there is a remote saftey operator ready to take over if the ride starts to go bad. "Self-driving" sounds sexier and is the ultimate goal, but if it were my company I'd probably lead with "remotely monitored by safety driver" to calm any fears people might have. I'm guessing the percentage of people who are willing to put their lives in the hands of this tech is rather small and the percentage of people who don't trust tech is rather large.