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Waymo saved my life in LA.

When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road.

In less than a second, the Waymo moved into the left lane and kept going. I didn't even realize what was happening until after it was over.

Most human drivers would've t-boned the car at 50+ km/h. Maybe they would've braked and reduced the impact, which would be the right move. A human swerving probably would've overshot into oncoming traffic. Only a robot could've safely swerved into another lane and avoid the crash entirely.

Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.

16 comments

> Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.

This detail sent me, it's crazy that we can pay $25 to have a life saving robot take us across the city yet Spotify is going to blast ads at us the whole time for the sake of making an extra $0.18 (yes that's the actual number) per hour of listening time.

That's around 44.64 (0.18831) per month, no wonder ads are preferrable to companies over subscriptions! That's actually a lot for people that listen to music all day every day at work.

Imagine your last thing in your mind being an ad about mongoDB.

> it's crazy that we can pay $25 to have a life saving robot take us across the city yet Spotify is going to blast ads at us the whole time for the sake of making an extra $0.18 (yes that's the actual number) per hour of listening time.

Oh, the self driving car business will get there, believe me. This is just the first iteration. Designed to get everybody on board with the idea.

I wonder if Waymo gets a cut. I also wonder if riding in a Waymo at the time signals that you're in a demographic that can afford a Waymo and thus get more expensive ads.

> I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience.

You'll probably never forget that advertisement, which is an exciting business opportunity for Waymo.

They could partner with Spotify and other media content partners so that the Waymo can generate an adrenaline-rush near crash experience when a premium advertiser's ad is playing. /s (hopefully)

This is one of those comments that made me laugh nervously. It's straight out of Ubik or another PKD novel, which probably means it's less than 5 years away from being real.

If there’s a torment nexus to be built they’ll build it.

Might be Orhan Pamuk or JG Ballard's mantle to be picked up

How ironic that an Alphabet company, Waymo, only works with a competitor streaming music service, Spotify, and not their own, YouTube Music. I guess that shows how separate they are.

I think it's also a privacy thing; you have to go into the Waymo app and “connect” your YouTube Music account (even though both have the same @gmail.com address), because otherwise the terms of service of one do not allow sharing data with the other without user consent. (Contrary to popular perception Google is very finicky about privacy, at least privacy as defined as conforming to the terms of service.)

We do support YouTube Music and actually supported that before Spotify. But we only do ad-supported on Spotify and iHeartRadio (also paid Spotify).

In January YouTube music worked fine when I took Waymo in Menlo Park.

> Only a robot could've safely swerved into another lane and avoid the crash entirely.

Do you drive a lot? I feel like humans take evasive actions like this all the time.

Yeah I have done similar evasive maneuvers a bunch of times. Also people run stop signs constantly, a competent defensively driving human may have just not started driving forward yet when they saw the other car driving towards the stop sign with some speed. I’m not sure of the exact timing in the story but I’ve waited at a stop sign when I saw another car driving towards the intersection many, many times, and a small percent of the time they don’t stop.

Which isn’t to say that the average driver wouldn’t have hit it, it’s just not obviously superhuman.

Some do and some more successful than others.

Thankfully they've now shipped their own product, YouTube Music.

And Google Pay, imagine my surprise back in 2021 when I signed up for Waymo and realized I had to manually type in my credit card. No Google Pay??? C'mon y'all, you're Alphabet!

Next thing you know, they're going to add Alexa support before Assistant/Gemini. The PMs at Alphabet are famously incompetent. Another example from the archives: Google wrote the original official Twitter app for Android instead of letting Twitter do it themselves. It wasn't to help the Android platform because multiple third party Twitter apps for Android already existed.

Google only hires the best of the best.

I can almost guarantee, given the way no traffic laws are enforced anymore in LA and so many cars are breaking them that cutting off a waymo car in dangerous ways, because you know it has the attention and reflexes to yeild, will be a new thing.

If it becomes a new thing, it would be fairly trivial for Waymo to respond by sending footage of incidents involving reckless driving to local authorities.

To prevent over-reporting, they could even make a system which logs number plates and only reports it if (for example) the same car is involved in incidents 3+ times in a week.

Waymo supporting music services at all is stupid to me. They should just let you bluetooth your phone and play your own music. I don't want any of those services. I want my own music.

Why do you even want music?

There is a large group of people (maybe even the majority?) who, as soon as they get in a car, MUST immediately turn on the radio or some kind of extra noise source. Is this some kind of a Pavlovian reflex?

I'm always amazed by this, as my car is one of the few places where I have actual control over my environment (unlike on public transport, or at my workplace, or even in my home - neighbours can be noisy...). We are living in a sea of unwanted noise, bombarded by constant ads and "music", so it is nice to have a place of "quiet".

But think of the shareholders and their tasty dividends

> Waymo saved my life... Unfortunately the Waymo only supported Spotify

I chuckled

Nearly got T-boned in a Lyft in LA. I am lucky to still be alive as the driver was not aware and should not have been driving. Where available I've stopped using human driven rideshare.

Waymos have since added support for YouTube Music thankfully.

I think you're over-playing how decisively a Waymo will move and under-playing how decent the average human is.

I've ridden in Waymos. They don't exactly slap on the blinker and move at the limit of traction like someone about to miss their exit. If cut off they absolutely will go full brake rather than perform any sort of spicy lane change or turn.

> If cut off they absolutely will go full brake rather than perform any sort of spicy lane change or turn.

Essentially, a meat driver was waiting at a stop sign to make a turn onto the main road. I was in a Waymo driving on the main road and did not have a stop sign.

When we were 10 meters away from the intersection, the meat driver suddenly started to enter the intersection. I have no idea why.

Full brake would've hit the other car in the driver's side door at 40 km/h.

> under-playing how decent the average human is.

I got to SMFC in CSGO which means I'm in the top 3% of players in clicking on heads within 500 ms of them appearing on my screen. I have never reacted as fast as that Waymo did.

I think you're humongously overselling the average driver. I mean, the stats for waymo vs human drivers speak for themselves.

Great reaction time from the Waymo. But a 50 km/h side impact in a 5 star crash-rated Jaguar with curtain airbags is not "saved my life" territory, more like an insurance claim. The fact that you instinctively framed it as a near-death experience is Waymo most impressive engineering achievement.

> when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road.

I vaguely recall reading at some point that this is something human drivers learn to do around robot cars because the robots are so timid. Is that still the case, was it never the case, or has it stopped being the case?

If it's still the case, one could argue that if you were not in a robot, the situation would never have occurred in the first place! (On the other hand, if you were both in robots, maybe it also wouldn't have...)

They support YouTube Music now, thank god

I hope you are misremembering. Swerving is most often the wrong choice, and I would be disappointed if Waymo were opting for that. By far the best option is to panic stop. Human or robot, physics is a harsh mistress and swerving is more likely to make you lose control and end up in a much more unforgiving wreck.

It wasn't possible to stop at the speed the Waymo was moving at.

The Waymo didn't have the stop sign, the other driver did, at a three way intersection.

The other driver decided to suddenly enter the intersection, when the Waymo was like 5-10 meters away. This was after having stopped at the stop sign.

Either they weren't looking or intentionally trying to cause an accident. Swerving prevented the Waymo from crashing at 40 km/h into the driver's door.

I assume waymo has a constant full picture of what's around, so swerve should be way safer for a machine than a human

This depends a huge amount on car, driver and situation. It was the right advice for a learner driver in the 90s with no stability control, no experience and no side airbags, because if you’re going to hit something, hitting it front on is the least risky way. I’m not convinced it’s the right advice for a competent driver in a modern vehicle.

> swerving is more likely to make you lose control

Even if you're not a panicky human but a optimally regulated control system?

For a human this advice is true. But what if a computer can near-instantly calculate a perfect swerve within the performance envelope of the car and driving conditions?

There are many cases where swerving will avoid an accident that braking cannot and cars unexpectedly pulling out from the side are often among these. It’s not a majority, but it’s not at all rare.

Most often, but this seems to describe the rare exception.

Anecdotally it does appear that Waymo's do default to braking in many situations where a normal human would choose to swerve.

> Waymo saved my life in LA. When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road.

> ...

What?! Is this a generated comment?

Here is a photo I took inside of the Waymo outside of an Erewhon. Going to Erewhon and experiencing the $20 Hailey Bieber smoothie was on my brother's bucket list and riding in a Waymo was on mine.

https://files.catbox.moe/jdjwy5.jpg

https://files.catbox.moe/mh4ivw.jpg

I have included EXIF data in an attempt to prove this really happened and I'm not an AI commenting bot.

Do you not like people being funny, or is there something else you're reacting so strongly to?

I believe it is, in fact, humor.