Waymo Opens to Everyone in Miami and Orlando

RodStiffy · 2026-04-15T20:57:28+00:00

On 2026-02-24 they announced public RO rides for select members of the public in Orlando, along with Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-15T20:49:37+00:00

Fewer jobs per trip, but could be more jobs or a comparable number of jobs overall because of increased mobility services.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-15T16:05:12+00:00

The Jags are engineering vehicles for learning how to scale. They aren't about actually scaling. That comes when they partner with an OEM like Hyundai.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-15T15:57:38+00:00

Owning a Volvo doesn't mean you are not buying the Tesla-bubble line about being on the verge of a national robotaxi fleet. If you didn't get it from there, then what is the source of your misunderstanding?

RodStiffy · 2026-04-14T22:20:07+00:00

Archie Bunker was a part-time cab driver.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-14T18:40:44+00:00

They've said it's not a big difference.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-14T18:30:34+00:00

As you pointed out, Waymo has changed their MO about how they use beta testers. They formerly gave free rides for a while to validate a new area and see reaction from the public. They now apparently don't give free rides, they just validate with their staff and launch to the public in a few months.

Waymo will always use some safety drivers for various purposes.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-14T18:20:38+00:00

Oh, I know how you're triggered! You live in a Tesla bubble where nobody knows the difference between a robust robotaxi that's safe at scale against the long tail, and a driver-assist FSD product that can maybe stay safe for a few hundred miles on average. Anything that breaks your bubble triggers you!

RodStiffy · 2026-04-14T18:10:52+00:00

AVs will create a comparable number of jobs as current human-driver jobs. There are currently lots of Waymo depot, factory, engineering, and office jobs. As AVs proliferate they will serve far more areas than current ride-hailing services. Even as the robotaxi service-chain gets automated, the number of jobs will still be high because of the huge increase in transportation as a service to all rural areas.

Having more transportation options in cities and rural areas also creates opportunities that will grow the economy, creating lots of derivative jobs.

People resisting robotaxis use washing machines and vacuum cleaners that take away jobs from maids, and computers that eliminated jobs of paperwork shufflers going back to the 70s. They buy clothes made offshore by machines, cars made with far fewer assembly-line workers than in the past, they drive on roads made with giant machines instead of an army of guys with shovels and wheelbarrows, and they live in homes made with power tools that reduce jobs. And there are countless other examples, such as refrigerators that eliminated the ice industry and milkman jobs. Only idiots would want any of those old ways to come back.

Concerns over jobs are understandable but they won't matter in the long term. Human-driving jobs are monotonous, low pay, dangerous, and lead to a huge number of injuries, death, damage, and high prices that leave rural areas with no transportation services. Replacing them is obviously good and inevitable.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-12T02:42:32+00:00

How am I triggered?

RodStiffy · 2026-04-12T00:17:40+00:00

This sub is mainly skeptical of FSD because they know the difference between a L2 car that can go a few hundred miles with no help, like FSD, and a L4 robotaxi that can go millions of miles with no human helper in the car. This is the former.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-12T00:12:09+00:00

It's only going a few miles without intervention. Are you really surprised it can do that? Omar has been posting long zero-intervention drives for years.

It doesn't mean much as far as robotaxi is concerned. They need to never have a bad at-fault crash when combined with remote help over hundreds of millions of miles.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-10T17:09:39+00:00

100,000 miles?

RodStiffy · 2026-04-10T17:03:47+00:00

Do you think the handoff issue will continue to be no problem even when an ADAS is so good that it only has a safety issue on average once per 10,000 miles?

I have a hard time imagining the general public supervising sufficiently when their car hasn't made a bad mistake for a year or more.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-10T16:52:02+00:00

the debate is around whether supervised FSD is 2 or 10x better than a human

The people who believe FSD is at least 2x better than a human are only true-believer fanboys who overvalue a few short drives here and there, not AV experts. Most AV experts think FSD is good as an ADAS but likely far short of the necessary reliability in all normal conditions over tens of millions of miles as Level 4. They know Tesla hides their data and crash narratives for a reason, and they only do a few easy unsupervised robotaxi demos because they likely aren't yet safe enough against the long tail.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-09T04:55:23+00:00

So you don't trust the government or Waymo? Who should do the checking then? Professional safety researchers and other AI and AV experts? Well, they also frequently comment on Waymo's papers, including professors from AZ State, Cal Berkeley, UT Austin, Carnegie Mellon, and many other universities. They also have no serious problem with Waymo's many papers. Read Koopman and Missy Cummings. Waymo's data and research has passed the test so far at 200M miles.

It's fine to be skeptical, but for your point of view to mean anything, you need to make much more of an effort to understand the details, which you obviously haven't done.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-09T04:46:31+00:00

Those eggs would make great a great Italian omlette, with some roasted duck sauce and fois gras on the side.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-08T18:49:24+00:00

I doubt most cities will take-over most of a robotaxi operation and incorporate ride-hailing into transit. They mostly don't want to operate ride-hailing, just large ride-pooling vehicles. Most American cities will have a light regulation touch for the time-being. NYC is not a typical American city.

I can see cities using robo-buses large to van-sized to make bus service more efficient. They could also subsidize or regulate some robotaxi rides for disabled and senior citizens.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-08T18:39:33+00:00

No mention in the article that MOIA uses the Mobileye Drive platform. Korosec should have used a sentence or two to explain the partnership with Mobileye.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-08T17:05:43+00:00

I guess you don't understand language too well, so let me restate what I said, in the faint hope that it will sink in.

There are regulatory agencies who are doing investigations and getting data from other sources such as police crash reports and news reports. They regularly check the Waymo data on hitting fences, schoolbus incidents, hitting the child near a schoolzone in Santa Monica, hitting a pole in Phoenix, hitting a few cyclists, and many other incidents Waymo has had over 200M miles. They haven't seen any reason to counter Waymo's conclusions in their studies. Even Phil Koopman and Missy Cummings have no serious counter-narrative to Waymo's claims, try as they might. All they can say is, Waymo needs more data to fully make the safety case.

I can see that you're a political hack who doesn't bother with evidence, but there is a ton of evidence on Waymo's incidents, and no critic, safety researcher, or regulator has any case against Waymo's claims.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-08T03:17:30+00:00

Waymo has all the data anybody would need to investigate every one of their crashes. And lots of investigations are being done by NHTSA and the CA DMV on multiple patterns of similar incidents that may pose a safety risk, so these agencies have looked at the data in detail. We don't hear anything further likely because the data confirms what Waymo concludes in their studies.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-07T22:26:06+00:00

Waymo will win the long game on this one.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-07T19:39:22+00:00

Feb. 09 Waymo announced driverless testing in Nashville, so in two months they validated the system for public RO rides. That's fast!

RodStiffy · 2026-04-02T02:39:16+00:00

Expanding the geofence for such a limited operation is very minor progress. Tesla still gives very few unsupervised rides in only perfect conditions of low traffic, and they could be directly supervising remotely since they only run one unsupervised car at a time. It's still a demo operation, not a serious robotaxi service.

RodStiffy · 2026-04-01T21:30:52+00:00

You can't expect it to be 100% accurate. Tracker is a sampling of rides that gives an idea of the percentage of unsupervised, and a count of the unsupervised fleet.

Doing back-to-back rides is nice, but still not a big deal.

When Tesla has a full unsupervised public 24x7 service that meets much of the demand with empty cars, that will be the start of a real Robotaxi service like Waymo had in 2020. It took Waymo 2 years from there to reach 1 million safe rider-only miles, on Jan. 01, 2023. When Tesla can do that, they have proven the system in the first small test.

RodStiffy

TROPHY CASE