Waymo Takes a Step Closer to Airport Rides at SFO
First-ever autonomous vehicle-only collision, man arrested for trying to take over a Waymo, and why $UBER is a great buy right now
Waymo is now offering $10 off your first ride! Click here to secure your discount (only 5 redemptions left).
Top Stories of the Week
Waymo Takes Another Step Toward Entering Airport Taxi Market in San Francisco (h/t Road to Autonomy). No reason why Waymo shouldn’t be allowed to operate at SFO just like Uber and Lyft.
Self-driving fridge hit by self-driving Waymo recorded by self-driving Tesla (h/t Elliot Arledge). Ok this was kind of funny and there are some great comments in the Reddit thread, but how the hell did Waymo with all that lidar equipment not see a moving metal box? Honestly, it's kind of scary.
NHTSA finally releases new rules for self-driving cars — but there’s a twist (link). Regulators are saying they’ll ease up on the rules for fully driverless cars, but companies will have to share more data first.
Why some Bay Area blind people say Waymos are changing their lives (link, no paywall). Waymo should lean into areas like this where human drivers have been known to discriminate (destinations, race/name of passenger, etc).
Cool Rides
Thanks Waymo for the ride - amazing to be able to show a decade of progress in our field, to my family, in a true consumer product that just works end to end (link).
Riding in a self-driving car to the Phoenix airport. It was cool! Would you do it? (link).
Other Stuff
Alex Roy sets the first Tesla FSD cannonball run record (link).
Man attempts to take over a Waymo in downtown Los Angeles (link). Not a lot of details here but a guy was arrested early Thursday morning in downtown LA after he tried to take over a Waymo — sitting in the driver’s seat and refusing to leave until cops showed up and pulled him out. No one knows why he hopped in there in the first place 🤷
Waymo pickup coming from outside the service area -- LAX depot maybe? (link). I drove by the LAX depot on Saturday night around 9 pm (peak hours, right after the Rams game got out) and I saw dozens of them charging. Seems like the worst possible time to charge from a utilization/earnings maximization standpoint though.
The Greenwashing of Robotaxis (link). Interesting essay by Philip Koopman, where he critically dissects the idea of AVs saving the world through improved safety, reduced emissions, better transportation equity, greater accessibility, less congestion, and more efficient energy use.
Apparently people are NOT having sex in the Waymos, per an engineer there (link).
Goldman’s Eric Sheridan on $Uber and Waymo (link). There have been only two times in 10 years of covering rideshare that I thought $UBER was a slam dunk buy and right now is one of them. Supply is at an all time high, demand is stronger than ever and the Waymo threat is overblown. Waymo is doing 175,000 trips per week, live in only three markets and scaling slowly relative to Uber’s early days. Last month, Uber did 1 million trips concurrently. The scale these two companies are operating at, is miles apart.
It seems like there are more and more complaints these days about the decline in Uber and Lyft’s vehicle/driver quality. You can always get a ride reliably and with a good ETA (even though it may be expensive on NYE), but quality doesn’t always show up on a spreadsheet. And I think Uber has totally dropped the ball on this until recently.
What’s scary for Uber is that is the main area where Waymo shines: nice/clean vehicles, safe drivers, etc. Aka a consistent experience. Waymo will struggle to match the reliability and ETAs but we’re already seeing that a lot of people don’t care if they can get all the other things right, that Uber now does so poorly.
Wishing you a happy new year 🎉
Until next week.
-Harry