I love how we've gone from "Taxis are gross and dirty, that's why I love Uber!" to"Ubers are gross and dirty, that's why I love Waymo!" in the span of 5 years.
What do you think comes next? These cars are literally unsupervised.
Unsupervised in what sense? There's internal cameras that are periodically checked. Weight and seatbelt sensors that give alerts if a passenger is or puts objects in the drivers seat, or if too many individuals get in the car.
I'd be shocked if a similar or greater level of observability doesn't also exist outside the car.
I've had a dude with a Tagalog accent take over the speakers in my car and asked me and the folks I was inside with to leave because I decided to clown car it with friends visiting from out of state. With that said, there for sure is someone monitoring, but it's similar to how checkout at Amazon Go stores went.
I'd be curious to know how this monitoring scales over time.
We have computers that can drive a car in city traffic and you're worried that we can't have a computer look at the inside of a car and tell me if someone's left a mess? A non-ML model background subtraction algorithm from the 2000's could tell you that.
“Massive fart detected. Initializing ejector seat in 3, 2…”
I’m not sure how you could make that work. People that eat Indian food step in and it might get set off, so people will cry racism. You drive next to a particular industrial plant, etc..
I don’t work for Amazon but I have worked with the tech. The media really ran with a misunderstanding there - the error rate for JWO is dramatically lower than people seem to think.
Unsupervised in the sense that there's no driver there to clean the car when it gets dirty. At the same time, presumably part of the odor of an uber comes from the driver, so that helps. I wonder if waymos roll down the window (weather permitting) between riders, to air it out. Might be dangerous at a red light, since people could throw stuff in or even dive in through open windows.
True! Presumably they'd refuel the vehicles in these places as well. The number of depots would depend on how much time you want to waste having vehicles driving out-of-direction and (1) the cost of additional real estate plus (2) the cost of employees at each location.
> How do you remotely detect if car stinks or not?
Why do you think they need to? These cars go to a centralize location every night, I would assume, and cleaning at scale can happen. How often do you think an Uber driver cleans their car in comparison?
Not to mention the problem is pretty eminently solvable: let users flag a car as having an unacceptable condition. If that happens dispatch a new car and send the dirty car directly back to home base for cleaning.
The main problem with Uber/taxi quality is that the responsibility for cleanliness is on individual drivers, with widely varying results as a natural outcome. In fact a lot of problems with Ubers and taxis is downstream from the ownership and responsibility model.
The advantage of something like Waymo is that the responsibility is now on Waymo itself.
Worth noting that this is a problem in other lines of business: it's harder to ensure quality in franchises vs. stores operated directly by the brand. The more independent parties you have in the mix the more incentives become misaligned and the fewer levers you have available to ensure compliance to some standard.
This also isn't impossible to solve with human drivers, because ultimately this isn't a technological problem but an organizational one. Livery car services where drivers are employees (as opposed to independent owner-operators contractors) can centralize cleaning and training, and have more means to ensure compliance to a standard.
The "downside" of such a model is that there are many more laws to ensure you can't shovel your own expenses onto the employee.
> It's not like people constantly trash hotel rooms
I worked as a house attendant in an upscale hotel for years. Let me tell you from experience: a shockingly high percentage of people trash and damage their rooms. Not the majority, but enough to keep staff busy every day.
I can't believe I have to specify this, but I obviously meant "other than by the human watching the room". Equally I don't expect the Uber driver to be the one vandalizing their own taxi.
Uber started as off duty black car drivers doing gig work. Those were the default right? The random guy with a car gig was rolled out as uberx later?
But I'm completely with you on the unsupervised part. People doing all sorts of things back there that an ML might not identify. Now if they hire an army remotely to monitor, I guess that could scale because of wage disparities.
Not just wage disparities. You can probably watch the typical video of an individual sitting calmly scrolling on their phone back at 32x speed. More complex scenarios with multiple people at 16-4x. Even assuming they pay 'car monitors' as much as drivers (which you're right, they probably don't) the cost for the monitors is still probably less than 10% the cost for equivalent drivers.
Not just wage disparities, but also time / location.
Quickly going through CCTV footage from a ride to catch "unusual things" takes much less time than driving. Even if somebody had to watch the entire ride at 1x speed and just one ride at a time, there's no need to do it when the car is idle or driving to pick up the next passenger. You can also hire a lot less watchers than you have drivers, because a surge in demand in one city can be serviced by watchers in many other cities. There's no need for night shifts either, you can make everybody work 9-to-5 in whatever timezone they're at.
Well it's because as Uber expanded and had to desperately fight for its margins, it started to lower its standards for UberX. Before, cars had to be fairly new and in a relatively good condition. Now it's no longer the case.
You have ID of who was in the car and when, and a 'report' button in the app for the next passenger. Easy enough, if something is reported you have the choice to wait for the next one while the trashed car goes to be cleaned or ride anyway at a discount if you solve it yourself - e.g: put the trash in a bag in the boot of the car. After N reports attributed to you, you get banned.
Uber can have reporting as much as this, or more. I can think of some: the driver owning the car incentivizes keeping it clean; bad reviews for dirty cars.
They supposedly use trip info for their own advertising. Says also "in some cases" shared with third parties for ads.
"We collect usage data that includes trip history, buttons or links you click on our mobile app, in-vehicle interfaces, wait times for our vehicles, and other actions you take with our products and services"
"We collect information about your location in a few different ways. When you take a trip, we collect the pickup and drop-off location and details about the vehicle’s route."
"We may also use your information to personalize services, advertisements, content, and features, communicate with you including marketing (which you can opt out of), service, and account messages, or communicate other information we think will be of interest to you "
"We will retain information we associate with your Waymo account, such as name, email and trip history, while your account remains active."
"Waymo will not disclose your personal information with a third party unless one of the following applies:
...
- We're involved in a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale or transfer of some or all of our assets
- In some cases to help us tailor ads and offers to your interests as detailed in the U.S. state law requirements section
- Comply with any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request
...
"
Public transportation is not a true panacea even where it’s seen most favorable. Car ownership increased 14% in Europe from 2012 to 2022, across the board:
The future will be a combination of trains, a more extensive robotaxi network for the last mile, which can be cars or vans, and a much smaller percentage of personal vehicles compared to today. Buses as they are today will decline.
You joke, but I've heard more than one argument about how self-driving cars will drastically improve traffic because, for inter-city travel, they will be able to drive very close together on the highway in a long convoy, leaving almost no space between cars...
I don't think it's such a bad idea, actually. There's value in having something that can drive in a "train", but that can also disconnect when needed and drive on its own.
If you're driving long distance, you get the advantages of a train, but door-to-door, with no scheduling conflicts and no egregious stop times. If your destination is 5 minutes away, it's still a car.
Or, you know, you could drive (or bike! or waymo!) to the local train station, which should have <30 min, well-scheduled, predictable headways to major cities, then take a train that goes 150+mph, and then drive (or bike! or waymo!) to your final destination, for _far_ less total energy expenditure.
Every car in a train-caravan is schlepping along its own engine, crumple zones, airbags....and with rubber tires...
What do you think comes next? These cars are literally unsupervised.