I've never even seen a Waymo and I haven't left North America for half a decade. Popular in SF does not mean inevitable everyhwere.
It remains to be seen whether robotaxis can 1. scale outside of certain cities 2. make a profit given the apparent teams of actual human remote drivers that robotaxi companies employ to get their robots out of trouble. I would love to see it, but the lack of speed and momentum points to it having some serious growing pains.
I rode a few in SF and can’t wait for them to come to Seattle. They don’t use actual human remote drivers, and the support person I spoke to when I had an issue had a Filipino accent, so I’m not sure they were even in the usa (although that totally could have been California also). I don’t think they wound need that many people anyways to do live support. Waymo is definitely being cautious, but the cities they move into seem to all be success stories.
They say they don't have drivers, but they do admit to having actual people that solve live issues that the car cannot understand, which seems like a semantic difference to me. If its one support person per 1k cars, its probably a non issue, if its one per 5 cars then its a totally different problem.
> Have you ever taken a Waymo? You see them on every street in SF now
Man I can tell you 99.9999% of people in real life outside of silicon valley tech hubs do not give a single shit about these things. City dwellers are already so disconnected from reality, but silicon valley takes it to a whole other level.
Only terminally online tech solutionists get a hard on for these things
Have you ever taken a Waymo? You see them on every street in SF now.