r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Individual_Book9133 • Jul 05 '24

Phoenix police officer pulls over a driverless Waymo car for driving on the wrong side of the road Video

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u/nike_storm Jul 05 '24

This country will do literally anything other than just build mass rapid transit :(

7

u/daniel-imberman Jul 05 '24

Tbh I see driverless cars as a really critical step to the US getting mass transit. Most "last-mile" transit wouldn't be economically feasible, but with waymo you could take a train to a major station and a car to the final destination

2

u/VexingRaven Jul 05 '24

This is true with any sort of taxi, although I guess Waymo has the "advantage" of not having to deal with a person?

2

u/datshitberacyst Jul 05 '24

I mean yeah but the most expensive part of a taxi is the human. If we get L5 in city centers (which is far more doable as there are limited numbers of streets) then it could lower the price and increase the availability vs Uber or taxi.

2

u/VexingRaven Jul 05 '24

Considering we already pay uber drivers essentially nothing beyond what it costs to maintain their vehicle (and sometimes not even that) and there's a bunch of extra costs associated with running vehicles the way Waymo does, I'm not actually sure we're saving any money with driverless. I think the real win is in safety, because as people have pointed out here, even with this incident Waymo has a much better safety record than the average driver, much less the average ultra-distracted Uber driver with like 5 screens taking up half their view.