California DMV approves map increase in Waymo driverless operations

It's been a long time coming, but Waymo is doing it. Waymo is scaleable and on the march! They've been announcing plans to roll out in new cities every month or 2 all year, and by the end of 2026 they'll be testing or offering the public rides over 30 metropolitan areas.

I'm most curious to see how they do in the winter city of Minneapolis over the next several months.

yeah - me too

Whoah, Waymo would be able to take one from Mountain View to Napa. (I get why Cupertino is excluded. But. Oof. Come on.)

It's disappointing that where I live is politically difficult and waymo won't come anytime soon.

why is there an approved map? like i get having a pilot somewhere but once that goes well (and we're way past that point), why isn't it just blanket approval everywhere. Why would one county be allowed waymos but not another.

I get that they might not be approved in the high sierras but just make that a deny list not allow list. Or even just deny the specific conditions you're worried about (snow).

why?`

Competition does encourage action. Glad Tesla started rolling out their robotaxies.

I suspect it's limited by what the request was for. Waymo has to create the high res map before they can offer service.

I'm so excited how much of Southern California is opened - Waymo LAX to SD after midnight (there's no trains or buses from 12 to 6)!!

Cupertino is in there, no?

The dancing robots are going to drive them.

Looking forward to the highway expansion next. I had to get from mountain view to san francisco yesterday, and waymo was _able_ to do this trip, it was going to take several hours and get routed up el camino real the whole way. Luckily I was standing very close to a caltrain station when I needed the ride, so i just caltrained, and then waymo'd from the SF station to where i needed to be.

So when will they be available for commercial rides? Can't wait to waymo from SF to Berkeley!

How do you get home if you do not have transit? What is the typical cost of a cab then?

It appears not to be. Here are the ones in Santa Clara County:

- Milpitas

- Mountain View

- Palo Alto Santa

- San Jose

- Sunnyvale

- Unincorporated Area (Lexington Hills area, overlapping Santa Clara and Santa Cruz Counties)

I don't know why it says "Palo Alto Santa"

Edit: I guess it's "Palo Alto Santa" to disambiguate between Palo Alto, which is in Santa Clara County, and East Palo Alto, which is in San Mateo County (BTW the westmost point of East Palo Alto is east of the westmost point of Palo Alto, but the eastmost point of East Palo Alto is not east of the eastmost point of Palo Alto).

Good idea, robots don’t fall asleep.

Why not say where you are?

Highway expansion is already here in many areas! Waymo has been laying the groundwork for this rapid rollout for so many years and it's amazing to see it all come together.

The effectiveness with which AVs have been able to test and spread despite local municipalities being fairly luddite about them does provide positive evidence for the idea that states are the right level of government for many of these decisions. If this had been entirely up to Bay Area municipalities it would have been infeasible, and this outcome and the lives consequently saved will be due to state-level decision-makers being able to make better decisions than local municipal decision-makers.

If the urban sprawl of the Bay Area were (correctly, in my opinion) represented as a single fused city-county like Tokyo, I think we would have better governance, but highly fragmented municipalities means we have a lot of free-rider vetos.

I’m looking forward to the day when the cost of taking one of these falls to somewhere 20% above the cost of fuel and wear and tear on the vehicle, making it incredibly cheap to take a ride anywhere you’d reasonably want to be driven to.

I think laypeople vastly overestimate how much the maps are a bottleneck compared to boring things like infrastructure to charge, people to clean the vehicles, integrating with local governments to allow things like disabling Pickup/Dropoff in certain areas at certain times, etc.

Even with local partners that all takes a lot of time.

There's an approved map because the approval process requires the manufacturer to specify both areas and conditions they are applying for, and documents supporting that the vehicle is ready to be operated autonomously in those areas and conditions (which doesn't just include technical readiness, but also administrative readiness in the form of things like a law enforcement interaction plan, etc.)

> like i get having a pilot somewhere but once that goes well (and we're way past that point), why isn't it just blanket approval everywhere.

Because “everywhere” isn't a uniform domain (Waymo is kind of way out in one tail of the distribution in terms of both the geographical range and range of conditions they have applied for and been approved to operate in, other AV manufacturers are in much tinier zones, and narrow road/weather conditions.) And because for some AV manufacturers (if there is one that can demonstrate they don't need this, they'd probably have an easier lift getting broader approvals) part of readiness to deploy (or test) in an area is detailed, manufacturer specific mapping/surveying of the roads.

More of the state is not allowed than is... at least by geography.

Also, there's a practical element. If I have to specify where they can't go, the default position is they can go anywhere... if I inadvertently leave an area out of my black-list where it really ought to exist: the default is "permission granted". With a white-list, the worst case is a forgotten or neglected area can't be operated in as a default and the AV provider will have an interest in correcting.

But also politics. It's a very different message to say we're going to white-list a given AV operator to exist in different areas vs. black-listing them from certain areas.

Maybe. It would still not be governed by Japanese politicians...

I didn’t think I’d be so pro Waymo but anecdotally I had a fantastic experience with one recently.

I was at a music show very late ~1-2am in SF and walked out to grab an uber to the airbnb I was staying at. I kept getting assigned an uber, then I’d wait 10 minutes, then they’d cancel. Rinse and repeat for 30 minutes, mind you I even resorted to calling Lyfts at the same time and nothing bit. Then I say screw it and download Waymo. 1 minute and it’s accepted my ride, and I know it’s not going to cancel because it’s a robot. 3 minutes and it picks me up. The car is clean, quiet, I can play my own music in it via Spotify, and it’s driving honestly more safely than some uber drivers I’ve had in SF. It’s one of the few things where the end result actually lives up to the promise from a tech company.

This is super awesome but to set expectations it appears that Waymo is quite limited by fleet capacity in all of its current operating zones, so as a practical matter it may be months or years before it operates in all these areas.

If you're interested in this stuff I highly recommend this podcast, not affiliated with it I genuinely think it's a great source to hear about the behind the scenes of fleet operations to meet demand: https://www.roadtoautonomy.com/autonomy-markets/

(Edit) I prefer using the apple podcast app, here's a direct link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/autonomy-markets/id177...

$150-$200 if you book ahead.

Curious why didn't you try Waymo until then? Was it just that it never had a reason to, or was something holding you back?

From my experience, lot of people actively seek out Waymo if it is available.

Waymo has so far been awesome, can't imagine choosing an Uber/Lyft over a Waymo when both are available options. I wonder how much they are bottlenecked by vehicle production though.

What's the pricing like? Taking an Uber/Lyft all the way from Mountain View to SF is outrageously expensive, I presume Waymo is the same?

Are you suggesting that Waymo is responding to Tesla? My reading it Waymo was always on a schedule and Tesla wasn't a factor

First slowly and then suddenly.

Last time I was in that situation, it was deliberating whether to spend the night in a hotel, the airport, or the train station until 6am when the trains start back up.

This gives me hope that once I'm too old to drive, this tech will reach my, very distant from the US west coast, corner of the world.

And if not Waymo and its car, then perhaps autonomous buses. There's already a shortage of bus drivers in my city and it's not getting any smaller.

Jeez. How much is a Waymo gonna be?

Not saying this HAS to happen. But I remember when Ubers were clean, quiet, cheap too. I think you are just looking at a product before the enshittification, when they still have to pretend they care about your comfort.

Are you a Waymo tester? I haven't gotten Bay Area access yet despite it being released, and when I checked with support they were just like "oh we lied, it's for trusted testers only."

I dug up my email and found they'd sent me the tester application form like a year ago and I just forgot to fill it out, so maybe they'll let me in sometime.

(Also, the chat claimed the support agent was named Al Pacino. Unless it was a pun on AI and I just couldn't tell with the font.)

I've never been in that boat but if you don't want an exorbitant Uber, it's probably cheapest to either get a hotel and take Amtrak in the morning or just rent a car. LA and SD are close enough that it often won't accrue any "one-way" fees

I took my first Waymo in SF this week. As a midwestern, freezing weather was my immediate first thought.

Lyft from MV to SF is like $100 I think? It's definitely not enjoyable but for Bay Area prices it's not ruinously expensive.

You /should/ be able to save by using shared rides, but in practice when I tried the driver was so mad they just dumped me on the side of the road and I had to call and get a refund.

The new Caltrain schedule isn't half bad though, if it came twice as often on the weekends we'd be cooking.

Also, if state government was Tokyo-level of public service then CA would have had decent public transportation a very long time ago, eradicating a huge part of the value proposal of Waymo.

> then I’d wait 10 minutes, then they’d cancel. Rinse and repeat for 30 minutes,

This is such a common problem in SF (esp in odd times / from the airport). Waymo has been a lifesaver in these situations.

I don't see any reason that individual Bay Area cities cannot pass laws against Waymo operating there. Why they would do so is a different matter. I'm hopeful though.

It will undoubtedly get enshittifed in its own way, probably higher prices, but at least it will be reliable when booked. Ubers seem to be a crap shoot these days if they're actually going to come and get you.

I don't know what it is but in basically every major airport I have struggled to get an uber/lyft. I expect at minimum one cancellation...

It looks like the map includes north of 280, so you can use it to go to Gamba Karaoke and Tea Era. And really, what else could you need from Cupertino?

Do the driving tests cover what you're supposed to do if you hit a Waymo or one hits you? I assume the cops are instructed just to ignore them?

"I know it’s not going to cancel because it’s a robot"

I won't be at all surprised when they start calculating their profits in real-time, if they aren't already, and cancelling or delaying trips that are deemed unprofitable in the moment. They are robots after all.

There's a huge difference between a robot who accepts all rides, and a two sided market as in the ride hailing apps. Without the factor of drivers picking their rides, the relatively small Waymo fleet has an outsize impact. The whole fleet is available 24/7/365. I would bet that Waymos rule the night.

I suspect the reason is that California cities do not, in fact, have control over this aspect of regulation. I won't claim to be a policy expert, but the failed SB-915[0] seems to imply that this is the case. SB-915 was a proposed bill to allow cities to permit or regulate AVs. It seems reasonable that if a law was attempted to be passed to permit cities to regulate AVs and the bill fails even after modification that it was the case that cities were previously unable to regulate AVs and cities remain unable to regulate AVs. Absent greater knowledge on the subject, that is.

0: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

Waymo's usually something like 50% more expensive than Lyft in SF, in my experience. But the drivers don't tailgate, have colds, listen to your conversation (AFAIK)...I'll generally opt for Waymo now if I have a choice. The biggest problem I have is that it's usually a longer wait due to the smaller fleet size, but if I'm planning ahead, I'll just book one for a given time, and that takes care of it.

BTW, this is the way: Assuming nothing exceptional, with the every-half-hour or better frequency, I use Waymo to get to a Caltrain station, take Caltrain to a nearby stop, and then Waymo from there to destination.

Uber, when it was launched, was limos only, and would come (with ETA) when cabs would not. It was expensive.

The story they told is that they were unable to get a ride. That’s not enshittification, that’s simply scammers on the platform not doing their job.

That won’t happen with robots.

They might raise the prices, or clean the cars less frequently, but if it shows up and runs the program, it won’t ever get worse than that.

How do you know it isn't already at that price?

Uber estimated that it costs Waymo $2/mile to operate.

Google says they charge $1.60 to $2.60 a mile, depending on location and demand, so Waymo is already almost certainly at the price you claim you'd be taking it.

I think you dramatically underestimate how much it actually costs to operate a car. Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business. Likewise, very few people depreciate their car over just 5 years. Or clean it inside and out every single day.

Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car. Also notice the comments talking about how the per vehicle price is high, how that flows into higher insurance, and all kinds of other things.

https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1il5d5i/unit_costs_p...

Maybe someday there will be a discount AV taxi company using 10 year old beat up Honda Civics that only get cleaned once a month and provide extremely barebones support to pull the costs down to $1/mile. That's a 50% drop in costs from today, so hard to see it coming very quickly. But that's still pretty expensive to be using as a daily commuter!

And note that the IRS per mile rate is $0.70/mile. It's not perfect but it is a decent third party estimate of the true cost of operating a car. Hard to see any taxi company charging anything less than that. So a 10 mile commute every day is still going to cost you $280/month in an AV taxi for the foreseeable future.

Used to happen to me constantly trying to go across the bay bridge in either direction when I lived in Oakland. I didn’t even mind the cancelations so much but the worst was when they would try and hide around the block, close enough to say they’ve “arrived” to try to get me marked as a no show and pocket the fee.

I took one in SF on a rainy, dark night when I was visiting a year ago. I was pretty impressed. That's not an easy city to navigate even on a sunny day and it did fine.

Waymo already does that through its surge pricing mechanism and limited availability of cars at busy times. And if they really don't want to serve you they'd just not let you book.

I wonder what the non-subsidized price of a Waymo ride would be.

In-Ride Ads coming soon to a car ride near you

> Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business.

And on the other hand, each Waymo parking spot is probably a lot cheaper per unit time than 250 square feet inside a house in a residential area. And presumably they need a lot less than 1 parking spot per car.

> Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car.

Doesn't that sound cheap? If a car can average 10 rides per day, that's $16 per ride.

What is the dark spot on the maps? Was that the current and then the less dark is the expansion?

No 3rd party arbitrage, much reduced pressure to accept fares they don't want (there's probably still some).

Lower prices for recommended destinations, ads played during trip, LLM engages the customer.

I once got stuck at the vista point at the north end of Golden Gate, because it turns out it's nearly impossible to approach from the Marin side even though that's closer. So like ~4 drivers in a row tried, got lost on the way and canceled.

The same exact thing happened to me last time I was in San Fran. I wanted uber because it was cheaper. Ended up taking a Waymo for more because no one else would take me.

They have a cancellation rate metric on their end that they are trying to avoid.

I have similar problems when I dated someone across the bridge.

They also lose a ton of money leaving SF at prime time / etc.

> Google says they charge $1.60 to $2.60 a mile

That’s surprising. I’ve been trying to find data on rates and crowd-sourced data and anecdotes seem closer to $6/mile

Uber still is like that if you choose that option. It just defaults to UberX because that's cheaper. I dunno, I've never been in a dirty Uber/Lyft.

But yes, I originally switched to them because Bay Area cabs just will not pick you up if they don't feel like it.

the same exact problems we had with Taxis. Sigh.

My general experience with Waymos and safety is that while they are generally quite safe and communicative drivers (They have a pedestrian yeild indicator that should be required by law) they tend to create safety issues because people drive stupidly around them. A lot of SF drivers seem to see them, think I know better, and then proceed to do something dumb.

I'm not really sure how to fix this problem.

Also if any Waymo engineers are reading this please make the pedestrian yeild indicator icon visible on the front of the LIDAR. In narrow streets the front is much more visible to pedestrians than the sides as the LIDAR is pretty far back on the car.

Japan Rail is public-private and many of the other train lines are fully private. "Public" is kind of an empty distinction here, Americans associate the two concepts because they think mass transit is a kind of gift you give to poor people instead of something everyone actually uses.

But there is plenty of need for car-shaped transit in Japan and people take taxis and use cars all the time. You might have luggage/equipment to take somewhere, it might be raining and you don't want to walk the last mile, etc.

(It's surprisingly hard to take luggage through transit in Tokyo. For instance, maps apps won't give you a transit route that uses elevators, even though everyone with a baby carrier would use it.)

Correct.

I’ve never seen a Waymo ride be even close to $2/mile

Same. I assume it depends on the destination

Person wants to go somewhat far from airport? That's more time on this single ride and less time pocketing peak demand money

Looking at the city limits, I don't understand why East Palo Alto isn't called North Palo Alto instead.

You're not allowed to smoke cigarettes in a Waymo, whereas UberX drivers are allowed to, I believe, off the clock.

I do worry in general about what the enshittification of Waymo will look like, though.

First used Waymo in Phoenix. It was a decent experience. The funny thing was watching it handle parallel parking. I mentioned it to the wife - self driving with parkinsons.

This last weekend, we were in the city (San Francisco) and literally drove by a Waymo trying to park and the wife started laughing - "you are right".

> Americans associate the two concepts because they think mass transit is a kind of gift you give to poor people instead of something everyone actually uses.

Huh, funny. This model actually explains American behavior to me greatly. Now I understand why the emphasis on transit in the US is primarily on cost and shelter rather than on quality of service. I always thought it seemed odd that they'd emphasize making things that are not useful free rather than making them as costly as is required to make them useful.

But I was modeling 'useful' as optimal transportation across fare-classes. They are modeling 'useful' as 'compassion to the less well-off'. This also explains opposition to HOT lanes and so on.

Is it clear that they are decommissioning them when they are done depreciating them?

“Map increase?” Is that hackernewsish for “larger area”?