You’re narrowing the market for self-driving to the ridehail market in the top 10 US metros. That’s kinda moving the goal posts, my friend, and completely ignoring the promises made by self-driving companies.
The promise has been that self-driving would replace driving in general because it’d be safer, more economical, etc. The promise has been that you’d be able to send your autonomous car from city to city without a driver present, possibly to pick up your child from school, and bring them back home.
In that sense, yes, Waymo is nonexistent. As the article author points out, lifetime miles for “self-driving” vehicles (70M) accounts for less than 1% of daily driving miles in the US (9B).
Even if we suspend that perspective, and look at the ride-hailing market, in 2018 Uber/Lyft accounted for ~1-2% of miles driven in the top 10 US metros. [1] So, Waymo is a tiny part of a tiny market in a single nation in the world.
Self-driving isn’t “here” in any meaningful sense and it won’t be in the near-term. If it were, we’d see Alphabet pouring much more of its war chest into Waymo to capture what stands to be a multi-trillion dollar market. But they’re not, so clearly they see the same risks that Brooks is highlighting.
There are, optimistically, significantly less than 10k Waymos operating today. There are a bit less than 300M registered vehicles in the US.
If the entire US automotive production were devoted solely to Waymos, it'd still take years to produce enough vehicles to drive any meaningful percentage of the daily road miles in the US.
I think that's a bit of a silly standard to set for hopefully obvious reasons.
> ..is a tiny part of a tiny market in a single nation in the world.
Calculator was a small device that was made in one tiny market in one nation in the world. Now we all got a couple of hardware ones in our desk drawers, and a couple software ones on each smartphone.
If a driving car can perform 'well' (Your Definition May Vary - YDMV) in NY/Chicago/etc. then it can perform equally 'well' in London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, etc. It's just that EU has stricter rules/regulations while US is more relaxed (thus innovation happens 'there' and not 'here' in the EU).
When 'you guys' (US) nail self-driving, it will only be a matter of time til we (EU) allow it to cross the pond. I see this as a hockey-stick graph. We are still on the eraser/blade phase.
if you had read the F-ing article, which you clearly did not, you would see that you are committing the sin of exponentiation: assuming that all tech advances exponentially because microprocessor development did (for awhile).
Development of this technology appears to be logarithmic, not exponential.
He's committing the "sin" of monotonicity, not exponentiation. You could quibble about whether progress is currently exponential, but Waymo has started limited deployments in 2-3 cities in 2024 and wide deployments in at least SF (its second city after Phoenix). I don't think you can reasonably say its progress is logarithmic at this point - maybe linear or quadratic.
The promise has been that self-driving would replace driving in general because it’d be safer, more economical, etc. The promise has been that you’d be able to send your autonomous car from city to city without a driver present, possibly to pick up your child from school, and bring them back home.
In that sense, yes, Waymo is nonexistent. As the article author points out, lifetime miles for “self-driving” vehicles (70M) accounts for less than 1% of daily driving miles in the US (9B).
Even if we suspend that perspective, and look at the ride-hailing market, in 2018 Uber/Lyft accounted for ~1-2% of miles driven in the top 10 US metros. [1] So, Waymo is a tiny part of a tiny market in a single nation in the world.
Self-driving isn’t “here” in any meaningful sense and it won’t be in the near-term. If it were, we’d see Alphabet pouring much more of its war chest into Waymo to capture what stands to be a multi-trillion dollar market. But they’re not, so clearly they see the same risks that Brooks is highlighting.
[1]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FIUskVkj9lsAnWJQ6kLhAhNoVLj...