Certain road hazards are a much bigger issue on the strip than most roads. Pedestrians frequently walk into traffic, and cars regularly stop illegally and swerve in front of other vehicles. It looks like the initial service area is tiny but if Zoox handles those cases well it's a solid technical achievement and bodes well for expansion.
reply> Pedestrians frequently walk into traffic, and cars regularly stop illegally and swerve in front of other vehicles
replyHave you been to San Francisco or LA?
Trust me, strip is much worse than LA and SF. People just forget most societal norms there.
replyVegas is also good for many other reasons: year round good weather, lots of tourists in need of taxi services, too hot to walk, too drunk to drive, etc…
replyAlso good from the tourist cities perspective. Self driving cars are absolutely a tourist attraction.
reply#1 place cabbies have tried to scam me. #2 being Boston. Uber is such a blessing
reply"Sorry my card reader isn't working, cash only."
reply"Oh, sorry, I don't carry cash. Better luck next time man!"
"Oh it just started working."
San Francisco, too. I'm so glad for Uber.
replyOne downside to Uber in Vegas is that airport pickups happen in some hot parking garage far from the terminals.
I remember once going on the way back a work trip on a whim, and regretting not checking that the weather was >100 degrees. That step outside was an oven.
replyIt's also kind of far and inconvenient to get to. It's like the inverse of those shuttles that take you from the arrivals loop of the airport to the ass end of the casino loading dock of your hotel (and 10 other hotels. So, unlike Uber, not even remotely worth it).
replyBaltimore was infamous for this when I lived there 15 years ago.
replyInterestingly Vegas is the only place I will use a cab over Uber or Lyft or (preferably) Waymo. Using the Curb app to pay electronically you avoid most of the BS with cash and "their card machine being broken", and once you've done it a few times you know the actual correct routes between places.
replyIt still snows in Vegas from time to time. Also, sandstorms are not great for visibility.
replyBoth of which are considerably more rare than snow in Chicago or rain in Seattle.
replyAWS Re:Invent is in December, so it's also a good time to show it off to potential evangelists (they've been teasing it for years).
replyThe Highlanders are testing vehicles: https://zoox.com/journal/autonomous-zoox-testing-vehicle
reply>> though in my personal experience I saw far more of the Highlanders than the custom robotaxis and all of them seemed to have a driver behind the wheel.
replyThe robotaxis have a steering wheel? I thought they had campfire seating with 2 backward facing seats.
I think that comment meant that the Highlanders have drivers.
replyZoox calls the person in the self-driving test cars an "operator".
replyIf by robotaxi you mean the vehicles used in the tesla test in Austin and now in the bay area, they are just regular model y with an emergency "stop so you don't kill me button" on the right side. They have a special version of the software that is unreleased. The current model Y's / "robotaxi" have all the regular hardware, including pedals and steering wheel and sensors. If you search, you can even find cases during the Austin Texas where the safety drier gets into the driver seat in a few situations.
replyWe don't really know what a special robotaxi hardware would look like.
It looks like this, and it launched to the public today in Vegas, that's why this is news.
replyIt may be a maze of roads to the backs of casinos, but it's still a small maze of roads. I would expect the mapping of it to be very precise by now.
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