I think they do. That's the whole point of brand value.
Even my non-tech friends seem to know that with self-driving, Waymo is safe and Tesla is not.
Once Elon put himself at the epicenter of American political life, Tesla stopped being treated as a brand, and more a placeholder for Elon himself.
Waymo has excellent branding and first to market advantage in defining how self-driving is perceived by users. But, the alternative being Elon's Tesla further widens the perception gap.
I'm probably not the average consumer in this situation but I was in Austin recently and took both Waymo and Robotaxi. I significantly preferred the Waymo experience. It felt far more integrated and... complete? It also felt very safe (it avoided getting into an accident in a circumstance where I certainly would have crashed).
I hope Tesla gets their act together so that the autonomous taxi market can engage in real price discovery instead of "same price as an Uber but you don't have to tip." Surely it's lower than that especially as more and more of these vehicles get onto the road.
Unrelated to driving ability but related to the brand discussion: that graffiti font Tesla uses for Cybertruck and Robotaxi is SO ugly and cringey. That alone gives me a slight aversion.
I don't know what a clear/direct way of explaining the difference would be.
Robotaxis market is much broader than the submersibles one, so the effect of consumers' irrationality would be much bigger there. I'd expect an average customer of the submarines market to do quite a bit more research on what they're getting into.
Totally rational.
A small number of humans bring a bad name to the entire field of regular driving.
> The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo.
What's actually "distinct?" The secret sauce of their code? It always amazed me that corporate giants were willing to compete over cab rides. It sort of makes me feel, tongue in cheek, that they have fully run out of ideas.
> they will assume all robotic driving is crash prone
The difference in failure modes between regular driving and autonomous driving is stark. Many consumers feel the overall compromise is unviable even if the error rates between providers are different.
Watching a Waymo drive into oncoming traffic, pull over, and hear a tech support voice talk to you over the nav system is quite the experience. You can have zero crashes, but if your users end up in this scenario, they're not going to appreciate the difference.
They're not investors. They're just people who have somewhere to go. They don't _care_ about "the field". Nor should they.
> dangerous and irresponsible.
These are, in fact, pilot programs. Why this lede always gets buried is beyond me. Instead of accepting the data and incorporating it into the world view here, people just want to wave their hands and dissemble over how difficult this problem _actually_ is.
Hacker News has always assumed this problem is easy. It is not.
That’s the problem right there.
It’s EXTREMELY hard.
Waymo has very carefully increased its abilities, tip-toeing forward little by little until after all this time they’ve achieved the abilities they have with great safety numbers.
Tesla appears to continuously make big jumps they seem totally unprepared for yelling “YOLO” and then expect to be treated the same when it doesn’t work out by saying “but it’s hard.”
I have zero respect for how they’ve approached this since day 1 of autopilot and think what they’re doing is flat out dangerous.
So yeah. Some of us call them out. A lot. And they seem to keep providing evidence we may be right.
Genuine question though: has Waymo gotten better at their reporting? A couple years back they seemingly inflated their safety numbers by sanitizing the classifications with subjective “a human would have crashed too so we don’t count it as an accident”. That is measuring something quite different than how safety numbers are colloquially interpreted.
It seems like there is a need for more standardized testing and reporting, but I may be out of the loop.
Driving around in good weather and never on freeways is not much of an achievement. Having vehicles that continually interfere in active medical and police cordons isn't particularly safe, even though there haven't been terrible consequences from it, yet.
If all you're doing is observing a single number you're drastically under prepared for what happens when they expand this program beyond these paltry self imposed limits.
> Some of us call them out.
You should be working to get their certificate pulled at the government level. If this program is so dangerous then why wouldn't you do that?
> And they seem to keep providing evidence we may be right.
It's tragic you can't apply the same logic in isolation to Waymo.
The difference is that accidents on a freeway are far more likely to be fatal than accidents on a city street.
Waymo didn't avoid freeways because they were hard, they avoided them because they were dangerous.
Maybe. We don’t know for sure.
You seem to frame that a bit like Waymo is cheating or padding their numbers.
But I see that as them taking appropriate care and avoiding stupid risks.
Anyway as someone else pointed out they recently started doing freeways in Austin so we’ll know soon.
Not sure how you read that. I'm saying Waymo was prioritizing safety.
Same argument, different sentiment.
Tesla FSD is crap. But I also think we wouldn't see quite so much praise of Waymo unless Tesla also had aspirations in this domain. Genuinely, what is so great about a robo taxi even if it works well? Do people really hate immigrants this much?
I don't live in a covered area, but when I am in range I will gladly pay 10-20% more for a Waymo ride than an Uber/Lyft/etc.
What’s so great about a robotaxi even if it works well? It’s neat. As a technology person I like it exists. I don’t know past that. I’ve never used one they’re not deployed where I live.
LIDAR gives Waymo a fundamental advantage.