ABC7 News Bay Area
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2023–2024
5:01 · 1.5M views · Jun 29, 2023
An ABC7 News Bay Area reporter rides in a driverless Waymo robotaxi through San Francisco and documents the trip, including a couple of awkward moments. It is a short TV news segment showing what a robotaxi ride is actually like.
Cited in self-driving threads as a firsthand look at robotaxi rides, mostly to point out its glitches and doubts about readiness.
5 comments from Hacker News
I summon a Waymo car every few days, and it takes me from point A to point B for about the same price as an Uber or Lyft. This only works so long as point A and B are both in San Francisco, but for an average person in San Francisco with access to the app, self-driving cars are already here. You can argue that person isn't average for a number of reasons, but the cars are real and giving rides to members of the general public. this video is a news reporter's video of taking a ride in one, so you can see what it's like to ride in one. She's a news reporter and thus not your average person because she has access to Waymo because she's a reporter, but members of the general public are also getting access and are able to do this as well. After watching that, I think a reasonable average person could believe that self driving cars are here. As was said upthread, the future is here but unevenly distributed.
Maybe this is a fluke, but a few months ago an ABC reporter documented her Waymo ride and it had a couple goof ups. this video Ultimately, I don't think the driving screw ups were that big of a deal (just my opinion). The big deal though is the moronic lack of customer support. How hard is it really to have a customer support staff a phone call away that can reassure the customer and either debug the issue to get them sorted out or at least offer alternatives. It would do so much to improve the users perception. So, typical Google... Phenomenal engineering, and horrible customer service. Maybe it was a just hit piece though and they cut out some contextual video? No idea.
Then there is lady who highlights fundamental issues with the way these vehicles operate. This isn't a teething problem that will be resolved with an OTA - it shows the tech isn't ready to be used on public streets and probably shouldn't ever be. this video
Based on this recent-ish YT [1] video Waymo is also crap, just as Cruise is, as any car that stops at a green light, on the left-lane, is a danger to all the other drivers it shares the road with. [1] this video
I too did not realize Waymo is operating in SF and looked for some videos on YT and found this. It paints not so rosey picture about it: this video