Tariffs are easy, just pay them. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards are harder... But maybe there's a loophole for commercial transport? or maybe they paid to have the testing done?
Which isn’t even really that prohibitive because Chinese vehicles beat Western pricing by five figures.
Plus, all the sensor equipment is made in China anyway. There’s almost certainly no way to have it manufactured in the US.
On top of that, fleet sales don’t have to deal with the antiquated dealer network laws in the US.
And of course American market car manufacturers refuse to produce vehicles that are like this one: space efficient and reasonably sized, instead opting for gigantic bean shaped SUVs with sloping rear roofs that rob you of cargo space while taking up maximum curb real estate.
Ford E-Transit is an electric van for a lot of money. But it looks like Ford wants to stop making them, and 2 seat models look much easier to find. But you'd be able to fit your board no problem.
Your Transamerica pyramid picture is incredible among really cool pictures you have there. Quite cool to photograph for wikipedia like this, the world needs more people like you!
That art fixture's placement at the Mission Waymo Depot is kinda cool. It's evocative of a future in which humanity lives a life of indolence propped up by automation.
I don't think the goal is indolence. The goal is freedom. We want a post-need society propped up by automation. That doesn't mean that we should spend our reclaimed time idling, though, but certainly we could.
Looks like it's GAIA by Marco Cochrane, I remember seeing it out in the desert. It looks like it might not be related to Waymo and just on the adjacent property
As an old time burner, sometimes this kind of stuff seems like a flex, like 'you had to be there, sorry pleb' from the tech exec class. Anyway I'm glad they have something there than not.
It makes me think that we need more representations of humans on and in our cities, to remind us about who they are for. We can shift a small amount of architectural scale towards the human.
Reminds me of the half-buried in the sands of time sculptures in Blade Runner 2049; the surrounding self-driving auto depot only adds to the resemblance to some far off future.
When most road transport is automated it will seem crazy that everyone had to drive for themselves, or sit in the car with a complete stranger, who may prioritise their comfort over the traveller's with regard to audio, navigation noise, air 'fresheners' / diffusers, temperature. Perhaps analogous to having a flatmate; it's mostly done out of necessity rather than choice.
It's the world most complex model railway with cars (not just trains) that go around in predetermined routes, and also go to the charging station when their battery is low. And I guess Waymos are a version of that but with human-scale! (Oh they still need humans to plug the charging cables into them).
I wonder if they park themselves or if the maintenance people park them...
If you scale this over the next years, "manual driving is over" :-D
This is just the very very early beginning, like the first seconds after big bang, we haven really started this whole thing: If you put just more ressources here, we will have giant parking houses for just self-driving-cars, like "coming home over night and recharge"
And this technology will come on a mass scale, Im pretty sure - there is nothing that can stop this?
How will this affect transportation jobs?
If you are today a big insurance like Munich Re, and you see already today that self-driving produces already much less accidents (90% or so I read days ago?), and the tech is really new & "not 100% reliable" and you believe that this tech will be rolled out - one day you will start lobbying politicans that manual driving needs to be forbidden, except some rare cases.
>If you are today a big insurance like Munich Re, and you see already today that self-driving produces already much less accidents (90% or so I read days ago?), and the tech is really new & "not 100% reliable" and you believe that this tech will be rolled out - one day you will start lobbying politicans that manual driving needs to be forbidden, except some rare cases.
Why would insurance companies lobby for that? 90% reduction in accidents means 90% reduction in premiums, which means 90% reduction in profits.
Do insurance companies have a history of lobbying for safety regulations?
Unless it comes down massively in price, it's not going to displace manual driving for anything other than Uber/taxi. It's far cheaper to drive your own car in most of the us. If parking lots disappear and the parking that remains becomes similar in price to that of major cities and insurance rates skyrocket, then maybe that will change, but only by increasing the overall cost of transportation.
Can't they get out and kill the Ubers already instead of sitting in the lot?
(half-serious, but I have been wondering what are the reasons they don't just push the price towards zero during low hours?)
What amazes me about Waymo is how expensive the rides are. They're at least 20% more expensive than Uber (the much more expensive Uber of today, not the Uber of 2-4 years ago), sometimes 100-150% more expensive.
Having ridden a few of them in the area, I think they're worth it.
Waymos are 100% reliable. If you book it and it says it's coming at X time, it will definitely actually show up at X time. No more of, driver cancelled at the last minute because they don't actually want to drive to destination Y but Uber etc gave it to them anyways and they get dinged if they just cancel instead of claiming not to be able to find the rider etc. Or driver got lost or stopped for food or gas or something so is late.
It also gets to the destination exactly when it says it will. No weird routes because of the driver's whim or driving too fast or too slow. And no chance of bad music, loud conversation in some foreign language, annoying commentary, etc.
And I want them to be profitable to run too, so they have plenty of incentive to expand the program.
Seeing all these Waymos together like this... is depressing. You get a sense of the scale at which machines are replacing humans. This could be a scary movie made in 1970s about the robotic future... and that future has now arrived. What will the world look like 10, 20 years from now? What would a scary movie made today contain?
Robots and technology have been replacing humans for many decades. It's a positive thing and change is a natural part of life. It's hardly depressing, it's progress.
It's not like humans are somehow put on this earth only to do certain jobs or the same job forever. Contrary to 100+ plus years of predictions, humans will never become obsolete.
Just wanted to thank you for the Sutro Tower work (https://vincentwoo.com/3d/sutro_tower/), it was truly beautiful and I’ve been looking at it so many times, very nostalgic for me. This one is great too!
Could you please review and follow the site guidelines? "Oh, who cares." is not an ok way to respond to someone's work on HN, and is particularly bad when a thread is just getting underway.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
(of course I understand that it's disappointing when you're hoping for certain content and end up with something else, but still - please don't express that in a hostile way)
If you like that sort of thing, see "AGV Garden".[1]
(This is the port of Rotterdam, ten years ago. Sped up about 3x. Most big ports look like that now. Automated driving works really well when all those pesky humans are out of the way.)
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waymo_Zeekr_Vehicle_...
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waymo_Zeekr_Vehicle_...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Line_scan_photo_of_S... (If you're confused by that page, then so was I. It contains the full photo but it's so long that it gets compressed into a line a few pixels high.)
Presumably they use the loophole called "paying the tariff".
Plus, all the sensor equipment is made in China anyway. There’s almost certainly no way to have it manufactured in the US.
On top of that, fleet sales don’t have to deal with the antiquated dealer network laws in the US.
And of course American market car manufacturers refuse to produce vehicles that are like this one: space efficient and reasonably sized, instead opting for gigantic bean shaped SUVs with sloping rear roofs that rob you of cargo space while taking up maximum curb real estate.
And which number gets you there depends on your lifestyle.
And taking a job without any consideration of pay.
When most road transport is automated it will seem crazy that everyone had to drive for themselves, or sit in the car with a complete stranger, who may prioritise their comfort over the traveller's with regard to audio, navigation noise, air 'fresheners' / diffusers, temperature. Perhaps analogous to having a flatmate; it's mostly done out of necessity rather than choice.
It's the world most complex model railway with cars (not just trains) that go around in predetermined routes, and also go to the charging station when their battery is low. And I guess Waymos are a version of that but with human-scale! (Oh they still need humans to plug the charging cables into them).
I wonder if they park themselves or if the maintenance people park them...
Also, the footage feels like Satellite Reign https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFZVXG0g40Q (or the original game, Syndicate Wars)
If you scale this over the next years, "manual driving is over" :-D
This is just the very very early beginning, like the first seconds after big bang, we haven really started this whole thing: If you put just more ressources here, we will have giant parking houses for just self-driving-cars, like "coming home over night and recharge"
And this technology will come on a mass scale, Im pretty sure - there is nothing that can stop this?
How will this affect transportation jobs?
If you are today a big insurance like Munich Re, and you see already today that self-driving produces already much less accidents (90% or so I read days ago?), and the tech is really new & "not 100% reliable" and you believe that this tech will be rolled out - one day you will start lobbying politicans that manual driving needs to be forbidden, except some rare cases.
Lets come back in 10 years! :-)
Why would insurance companies lobby for that? 90% reduction in accidents means 90% reduction in premiums, which means 90% reduction in profits.
Do insurance companies have a history of lobbying for safety regulations?
e.g.: https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/200-wrr/Safer-from...
And sure, insurances are fine with making profits, but if they can get less catastrophes, they are fine with that as it reduces overall risk etc.
Feel free to check the corp publishing section on https://www.munichre.com/en/insights.html
A 90% reduction in accidents is a 90% reduction in _paying out_. That reduces operating costs.
Because they don't need a steering wheel, backseat, and many other things. They can also run close to 24/7.
How "massive" the price drop becomes I don't date to guess though.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/25/us/santa-monica-waymo-bat...
After all, self driving cars have some of the highest positive to negative externality ratio of any modern technology
If they can't be cheaper, then what's the point?
Waymos are 100% reliable. If you book it and it says it's coming at X time, it will definitely actually show up at X time. No more of, driver cancelled at the last minute because they don't actually want to drive to destination Y but Uber etc gave it to them anyways and they get dinged if they just cancel instead of claiming not to be able to find the rider etc. Or driver got lost or stopped for food or gas or something so is late.
It also gets to the destination exactly when it says it will. No weird routes because of the driver's whim or driving too fast or too slow. And no chance of bad music, loud conversation in some foreign language, annoying commentary, etc.
And I want them to be profitable to run too, so they have plenty of incentive to expand the program.
I once toured the one in Hamburg, which is highly recommended if you ever get the chance.
Nothing else has quite given me that feeling of being tiny next to this giant city-scale robot since.
It's not like humans are somehow put on this earth only to do certain jobs or the same job forever. Contrary to 100+ plus years of predictions, humans will never become obsolete.
Perhaps we need a euphemism for UBI: Let's call it "level-1 rich".
Waymos are safer - they have Lidar and Radar in addition to vision
Waymos have human fallback to remote operators
Google takes responsibility for Waymos, vs Teslas being privately owned
Google took a more regulator savvy incremental approach
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(of course I understand that it's disappointing when you're hoping for certain content and end up with something else, but still - please don't express that in a hostile way)
(This is the port of Rotterdam, ten years ago. Sped up about 3x. Most big ports look like that now. Automated driving works really well when all those pesky humans are out of the way.)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm_rlLyelQo&