"Waymo's focus on ride-hailing makes some sense. The reliability requirements for ride-hailing are much lower than trucking, making it a more lenient business. If you have a truck full of cargo, it's a major issue if something goes wrong and it can't reach its destination on time. The truck routes are many hours long over long distances and usually have some kind of delivery time attached. Your self-driving hardware and software has to work perfectly during all that. Ride-hailing is way easier. Trips are usually measured in minutes and in a localized area where you can easily dispatch support people if something goes wrong. Because the app is a central point of customer bookings, you can easily pause and resume accepting customers anytime. That makes it easy to shut down the fleet to deal with technical difficulties or bad weather. You can also rigidly control your service area and accept or decline trips on a whim. Everyone can just use Lyft instead."
Most of this smells like bullshit to me.
If your technology can't hire extremely well-mapped, generally well-maintained highways, it can't possibly handle cities. Saying that you expect to fail and kick out the passengers and tell them to use some other service is in no way a usable service.
I think Waymo is toast, and they're trying for a soft landing and some kind of pivot.
This self driving over hyped tech only works in good weather and is political suicide to go after trucking with it since so many high paying blue collar jobs will be consumed.
It only makes sense if one doesn't know much about self-driving. What they quote and refer to as "bullshit" is very reasonable, these systems do break down because they can't handle every possible situation on their own. They do not have human intelligence.
With robotaxis what they currently do is human drivers go out and rescue the vehicle. You can't do that with a truck, it's not economical. This will be an issue for years to come, we're probably going to see more remote assist but unlikely for an 80,000 pounds killing machine driving at highway speeds.
Which brings us to another point: Regulation and risk perception. Cruise having some hickups and maybe being involved into some minor fender benders is one thing. Politicians and some of the public in the respective cities are already concerned. But a fully loaded self driving semi being involved in a crash and potentially killing some people could be the autonomous version of 9/11. That's a lot of risk, the licenses might be revoked and then their investment is toast.
Most of this smells like bullshit to me.
If your technology can't hire extremely well-mapped, generally well-maintained highways, it can't possibly handle cities. Saying that you expect to fail and kick out the passengers and tell them to use some other service is in no way a usable service.
I think Waymo is toast, and they're trying for a soft landing and some kind of pivot.