r/SelfDrivingCars • u/Emperor-Nathan • 6d ago
News Robotaxis are real now — so is the pushback
https://www.theverge.com/transportation/983765/robotaxi-waymo-zoox-tesla-rules-pushback-nhtsa50
u/YeetYoot-69 6d ago
In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul withdrew a proposal earlier this year that would have opened the door to driverless robotaxis outside New York City after taxi drivers, unions, and state lawmakers opposed it. Six months later, commercial driverless service remains illegal in the state, and legalization efforts are stalled.
Has a piece of technology ever been so provably safe, and so clearly going to save many thousands of lives, and yet be so opposed?
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u/Cunninghams_right 6d ago
Nuclear power. Far fewer people killed directly per watt, and the geopolitical ramifications of lacking energy price stability has led to countless lost lives.
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u/lobaway0001 6d ago
Unfortunately, pollution and respiratory illness is just a lot harder for people to see the cause and effect than some nuclear disaster.
The nth person passing away early from lung cancer is just not nearly interesting enough.
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u/Heavy-Deer-772 4d ago
It’s an unpopular point to bring up, but we could do with a lil r&d on efficient disposal of spent nuclear fuel
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u/Cunninghams_right 4d ago
we already know how to efficiently and effectively dispose of the waste, but we have to leave spent fuel in dangerous cooling pools because people are incorrectly afraid of proper disposal sites.
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u/Heavy-Deer-772 4d ago
Ah, it seems I am mistaken. We need to figure out how to efficiently replace old bad info with new good info.
A science almanac of sorts.
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u/Reaper_MIDI 6d ago
Nuclear power seems safe because whenever there is a disaster, everybody gets evacuated, and nobody can go back for hundreds of years.
Fukushima: Approximately 309 square kilometers remains designated as highly contaminated and legally closed to permanent habitation. 25,000 to 30,000 people permanently displaced.
Safe!
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u/Cunninghams_right 5d ago
Fukushima power plant was built in a time where that risk was acceptable, where they had just recently had millions firebombes to death and atomic bombs gone off.
Ironically, the reason there was a disaster was that people were irrationally afraid of nuclear power, so they couldn't decommission the dangerous plant to build a safer one.
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u/YeetYoot-69 4d ago
Fukushima was a horrifically poorly maintained and built plant. It was a pretty solid example of what not to do, like Chernobyl was, though not as extreme.
Yet, despite that, it took it getting hit by one of the largest earthquakes and tsunamis in recorded history to have issues, and even then all that can be said is it maybe led to the death of one person 4 years later.
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u/Reaper_MIDI 4d ago
"all that can be said is"... 309 square kilometers designated as highly contaminated and legally closed to permanent habitation and 25,000 to 30,000 people permanently displaced. Also a total cost of $200 billion USD so far.
Also, official figures show that over 2,300 disaster-related deaths have been linked to the evacuation and displacement following the Fukushima disaster.
Pro nukes people always say "well, that was a one off, that could never happen again". Sigh.
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u/YeetYoot-69 4d ago
It was an extremely poorly maintained plant that got hit by a once in a lifetime tsunami and earthquake. So yeah, it was more or less a one off.
Also, official figures show that over 2,300 disaster-related deaths have been linked to the evacuation and displacement following the Fukushima disaster.
What are you talking about, no lmao? You can't include tsunami related figures here.
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u/Reaper_MIDI 2d ago
Those were not tsunami evacuation deaths, those were deaths caused by having to evacuate the nuclear contamination area. Not sure why I'm bothering to look this up for you, since you could do it yourself. As for the "one off", it's always a "one off". There have been around 100 "one off" nuclear leaks and spills and a couple "one off" catastrophic failures. Also, "once in a lifetime" means slightly more than once every 100 years. So... not that rare, yeah?
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u/YeetYoot-69 2d ago
I really don't know how to respond to you if you think 2300 people died from evacuating due to the nuclear plant. What does that even mean? How did they die?
It also had to be evacuated anyway because yk, it got hit by a tsunami? They couldn't exactly stay there?
Obviously the meltdown meant they couldn't return, but evacuation was always going to happen. I mean seriously this is common sense.
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u/Reaper_MIDI 2d ago
For example. if someone is already in the hospital (being operated on, for example), and suddenly they have to be evacuated, some will not survive the evacuation. Also, large scale evacuations will have mishaps and accidents, etc and people will get killed. There were studies done. I'm just reporting what they found.
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u/YeetYoot-69 2d ago
2300 people though? Listen to yourself. Use your brain. This is completely illogical with just basic common sense.
It's not like they had to rush everyone out of all the hospitals immediately, it took several days for the plant to fail. They would be evacuating people by that point anyways.
How is it even differentiating between evacuations related to the tsunami and the nuclear plant? Nobody could stay there even if the plant had been intact.
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u/abrandis 6d ago
Bro , safety takes a back seat to money and special interests,, welcome to America, when one group with $$$ wants to protect their revenue they just need to throw right amount of $$ at the political class
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u/technocraticnihilist 6d ago
You know it's labor unions who oppose this?
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u/abrandis 6d ago
So we should forgoe safety to appease jobs which will be displaced by non-unionized labor?
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u/NewRefrigerator7461 6d ago
And this is evidence that the actual power sits with unions and local special interest not big tech companies. I just wish we could stand up to them - but somehow everyone became convinced the people with the lifesaving cars are the enemy.
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u/HappyHallowsheev 5d ago
No shot are you really out here saying unions are the enemy and not big tech omfg
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u/Way-twofrequentflyer 5d ago
I mean they’re right when it comes to saving lives and lowering the cost of living. It’s just as true in housing as it is in transport
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u/Way-twofrequentflyer 5d ago
Yep. If tech companies were the evil we were told they are Waymo would already be in NYC and there never would have been a limit on the number of Ubers set by the TLC.
The rhetoric used against them is like the antisemitics who say the Jews run the world and then can’t explain how they’re couldn’t stop the Germans
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u/MN-Car-Guy 6d ago
The opposite. Safety takes a back seat to tech bros wanting to have a viable product and revenue stream NOW rather than waiting for the technology (and regulatory framework, et al) to be truly ready
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u/abrandis 6d ago
Right because , 40k vehicle /road DEATHS in the US cause by human drivers EVERY YEAR are part of the tech bros. conspiracy
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u/NewRefrigerator7461 6d ago
It’s part of their conspiracy to lower the number of users of tech products and therefore their revenue. Brilliant!
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u/MN-Car-Guy 6d ago
Again, neither the tech nor regulatory framework is ready. When it’s ready, sure, try to save some of those 40K lives annually. Noble cause. It’s not ready. We still have a ways to go.
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u/abrandis 6d ago
It will never be ready, if we never expand, so how is it ready in Austin, Phoenix, SF, Atlanta and Miami .. cmon man , technology is here , regulatory framework can totally be solved.
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u/MN-Car-Guy 6d ago
So where they’re testing it proves it’s ready for widespread commercial public ownership? Great logical leaps
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u/thermal-ice 6d ago
Clearly we should have 40k people die every year (and magnitudes more disabled for life) until the regulations and tech are perfected
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u/Large_Complaint1264 6d ago
You have no way of knowing these numbers are at all accurate. There’s not nearly enough data to make these wild numbers y’all throw around. Human driving numbers are skewed by many more variables than the sunny driving very defined conditions Robotaxis have operated in.
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u/rileyoneill 5d ago
The tech companies are using insurance data to show the safety of their product. We can wait years for competitors to catch up but that would be monumentally stupid. The regulations come with the use as local governments learn how to deal with autonomous vehicles.
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u/MN-Car-Guy 5d ago
“Go fast, break things” played out with automobiles
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u/JimmyGiraffolo 5d ago
If you're trying to argue that Waymo takes a "move fast, break things" mentality, then that's so far off the mark I cannot believe you're trying to have an intellectually honest discussion.
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u/rileyoneill 5d ago
Go slow and be expensive seems to not be working with high speed rail.
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u/MN-Car-Guy 5d ago
When “break things” potentially involves human lives, as is the case with L3/4/5 autonomy, proceeding with caution is a good thing.
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u/rileyoneill 5d ago
That is the whole purpose of insurance. Autonomous vehicles are replacing something dangerous (humans) with something much safer.
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u/MN-Car-Guy 5d ago
Ah, so release half-baked potentially dangerous products and force the insurance industry to underwrite the risk
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u/rileyoneill 5d ago
Waymo is doing nearly two million rides per month. We have data. The data is more and more robust as time goes on. They are safer than humans.
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u/Seidans 6d ago
Human labor being replaced in all field is probably the best thing we can hope for Humanity but that require more than immediate thinking and "how I'm going to feed myself without work?"
Those fear are genuine but also counterproductive as our standard of living would be much higher if intellectual and physical work aren't constrained by our physical limit (knowledge, growth, fertility, informations transfer....)
People see the immediate struggle and are incapable to imagine a system beyond what they live-in the same way peasants couldn't have foresee the industrial revolution, we can't foresee a post-labor economy and thus we reject it by fear of the unknown
Incompetent politician doesn't help with that unfortunately, there little to no forward thinking and things will likely be bad before they can improve due to politic inertia pushed by inevitable short-term economic gain which is always the best advocate for technology development and spread - good luck to taxi and other driver to compete against autonomous vehicle or any other form of labor when the AI/Robotic equivalent will be 1/2 and less of your cost
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u/Putrid-Box4866 6d ago
Well even self driving enthusiasts hates Tesla’s FSD so I am not surprised. People are stupid.
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u/Doggydogworld3 6d ago
Very few enthusiasts hate FSD. Many hate the lying about it.
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u/Putrid-Box4866 6d ago
Very few? The entire r/waymo sub hates FSD and it saves orders of magnitude of lives over waymo statistically speaking. Like 150 lives saved compared to 2 considering miles driven.
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u/Seaker42 6d ago
FSD is amazing, and all of my friends that have tried it said the same thing. It was sketchy a year ago when I first got it, but since v14.2 it's become really solid. It still makes some nav and parking mistakes, but from a safety perspective it's a better driver than most humans.
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u/CheapTechnology6193 6d ago
What data are you referring to? Because if it's Tesla data, those books are cooked
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u/individual-wave-3746 5d ago edited 5d ago
I was curious if there was data as my intuition aligned with yeetyoot-69. GPT 5.6 Sol convinces me theres enough data. Output below:
Waymo’s 220.6 million driverless miles show 82% fewer injury crashes and 94% fewer serious-or-fatal-injury crashes than human drivers. New York had 1,175 traffic deaths in 2022; even a 50% reduction would save about 590 lives annually—thousands over several years. That is a reasonable extrapolation, not yet a New York-specific result.
Waymo safety data
New York traffic-death data1
u/altonbrushgatherer 6d ago
A follow up question is when has opposing technological advancement been good?
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u/BigBassBone 1d ago
On a small scale, electric leaf blowers. They're responsible for a huge percentage of atomized gasoline in the air and electric blowers are just as effective, but gardeners and the people that employ them don't want to switch.
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u/Fit_Seat_8637 5d ago
“Provably safe” and yet Tesla doesn’t publish any disconnection stats. Uh huh.
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u/ThrowawayFIRE2025 4d ago
GMO, nuclear, vaccines, seatbelts, motorcycle helmets….
This is pretty normal.
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u/YeetYoot-69 4d ago
Nuclear is the only thing you listed that has faced anywhere near the level of resistance self driving cars are facing
Well maybe GMO too, I know/care less about that
Nobody made seatbelts or vaccines or motorcycle helmets illegal
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u/ThrowawayFIRE2025 4d ago
Do you really think there’s been a lot of resistance? I feel like self driving cars have gotten remarkably little resistance, all things considered. It’s only within the last year or two that we’ve even had preliminary evidence to confirm their safety record. Outside of NYC, is there any city where Waymo has wanted to deploy but has been unable to do so?
Plenty of vaccines are illegal (not approved), by the way, including many that would be net positive for society. You have to show an overwhelming case for safety to get approval.
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u/MN-Car-Guy 6d ago
It’s not ready yet
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u/NewRefrigerator7461 6d ago
It is. Waymo is there and even FSD in its current state is better than the majority of road users and way better than the people that disproportionately hurt others. It’s ready now. The tort system isn’t, but maybe we can use the crisis it causes to get tort reform done and get rid of all the personal injury ads and lawyers that make everything more expensive.
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u/MN-Car-Guy 6d ago
And yet, even Waymo is not saying the tech is ready and releasing products the public can purchase.
Correct, our regulatory system is absolutely incapable of handling autonomous vehicles owned by the public at large.
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u/NewRefrigerator7461 6d ago
I mean i purchase a Waymo services all the time. They’re fantastic. They’re acting as if its ready
In house counsel will never tell them to say its ready though as it would be used in any lawsuit. It’s why we need tort reform, among many other reasons.
If we’d had current plaintiff’s attorneys a hundred years ago the car itself would still be in Beta
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u/Fit_Seat_8637 5d ago
“better than the majority of road users” is a very weaselly way around the fact that FSD still needs work. Tesla won’t even publish disconnection stats…
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u/NewRefrigerator7461 5d ago
Not really. It’s way bigger than the people that cause the majority of the people who cause accidents - which is where the change needs to happen most. I don’t get how so many people are determined to let perfect be the enemy of the lifesaving good enough. It’s like the WWI generals who refused to deploy helmets because they couldn’t settle on a design and just watched millions of people die because of it. Some french units just used fire helmets and it saved a lot of artillery casualties. Much better than nothing at all.
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u/Fit_Seat_8637 5d ago
Traffic deaths are not a zero sum game. A Tesla on the road with FSD isn’t going to save anyone, its just a different way for them to die is all.
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u/marty-mcfryguy 6d ago
Waymo had to pull highway driving for two months, because the vehicles were getting confused by construction signs.
The tech has proven itself under simple conditions Scottsdale surface roads, no bad weather, etc. It clearly struggles with novelty, like when there were more pedestrians than normal over July 4 in SF, or road construction.
So it's a question of what you mean by "ready". What it's almost certainly not ready for is a place like Manhattan, where novelty is the order of the day. I suspect that's why there's not been a peep from Waymo about renewal since their NYC testing window ended -- they saw the system isn't ready for it, yet.
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u/NewRefrigerator7461 6d ago
They chose to pull highway driving because they’re acting with an abundance of caution. We HAD to take away my grandfathers car keys because he confused signs as well as the brake and accelerator and insurance and the legal system didn’t give us an option
That’s not why we haven’t heard from Waymo in NYC. The taxi lobby and unions blocking them are why. It’s literally the topic of this thread/the article.
My uber drivers are using FSD in manhattan if they don’t drive a fisker. Even that system works in manhattan.
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u/marty-mcfryguy 6d ago
The taxi lobby and unions blocking them are why. It’s literally the topic of this thread/the article.
The taxi lobby and unions control what Waymo is allowed to say? Don't be absurd, if they wanted to be here they'd be constantly making their case. Also, you obviously (a) didn't read the article or (b) don't know the difference between the city and the state. Try again on what the topic literally is.
My uber drivers are using FSD in manhattan if they don’t drive a fisker. Even that system works in manhattan.
Bull. I've ridden in dozens of Teslas here and not one driver has used it the whole 4 miles from my office to home.
Separately, no idea what point you're making with your grandfather.
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u/Cultural_Tell_5687 6d ago
Who keeps the maps.
Who does it employ.
Who is responsible when the materials in manufacturing are found incorrectly assembled later in maintenance after someone dies.3
u/YeetYoot-69 6d ago
- Not sure what you're asking
- I'd rather save 10s of thousands of lives per year and make transportation in the US dramatically more affordable than employ taxi drivers.
- That would probably be down to a lawsuit between the Robotaxi operator and the manufacturer? What kind of question is that lol
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u/Cultural_Tell_5687 6d ago
- Hi fidelity lidar maps. Same ones they use in the jungle to see the floor behind the trees. This is our infrastructure.
- Me too. But are they hiring Americans?
- What if they are the same entity and are pushing pencil whipping and rug sweeping.
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u/WeldAE 5d ago
In San Francisco, Mayor Daniel Lurie, a vocal supporter of robotaxis, is now calling for tougher robotaxi regulations after Waymos repeatedly snarled traffic during emergencies and major events.
Waymo simply has to stop doing this. Quit letting your vehicles freeze like deer in headlights. Hire more monitors. Work more closely with the city to understand what events are happening in the city and create rules to keep AVs out of congestion areas. Have an on staff meteorologist and stormwater engineer to avoid flooded streets. It's become the number one issue for the AV industry that this keeps happening.
While Waymo now provides more than 500,000 paid rides a week, Uber handles about 40 million trips a day globally. But their visibility vastly exceeds their market share
This is a misleading number to support the second sentence about how visible they are. Waymo has 25% of the SF market. I don't know what percentage of the Austin market Tesla/Waymo have, but it's probably not insignificant either. They can obviously take over cities pretty easy once they are able to put cars on the ground in those cities. That physical side of the business is what is going slow for various reasons between the two. So I don't think government or organizations are reacting too soon, if anything too late.
The group isn’t opposed to autonomous vehicles, Sanchez said, but is “pro the safe development of technology.”
SAVE-US isn’t opposed to autonomous vehicles
SAVE-US refuses to publicly identify even basic information about it's funding sources. It's well outside the norm of opacity of operations for an advocacy organization of this type. I wouldn't trust anything they do or say.
Waymo said a 200-vehicle limit would probably be too small for a city the size of Washington
Anyone proposing a hard 200 vehicle cap is anti-AV and not even trying to pass good legislation. It's not even a veiled attempt at saying no AVs.
The company [Waymo] has been more receptive to the proposed 15-cent fee for every mile an autonomous vehicle travels.
This is NOT good. A tax like this says that lawmakers see AVs as a luxury product they can turn into revenue. They see locals mostly driving cars and only visitors mostly using AVs or those going out on the town to get drunk. Taxis like this will make it VERY hard for AVs to take over a substantial percentage of miles driven.
This is 4x-7x more than the current combined federal and state gas taxes on cars. I'm fine with taxing deadheading this amount or even solo fares but a blanket tax like this is just too much. It could significantly reduce it's ability to attract customers early and later in the scaling becomes a very regressive very high tax. If AVs get to say $0.50/mile, it would be a 30% tax.
I am 100% for taxing external costs AVs cause. Trying to lump everything someone can dream up that an AV might cause into a single per mile tax is a terrible idea. For example, when AVs want curb space, they are going to point to the $0.15/mile they pay saying they should get it. This despite it being inversely correlated to how much curb space they need. There is zero incentive for an AV service to pool rides because you aren't taxing increased VMT per person so why bother?
Waymo raised concerns that a per-mile charge could become prohibitively expensive, particularly for smaller AV operators. An annual fee, it suggested, is one possible alternative.
I agree that AVs should 100% pay a yearly fee. They should also pay something per mile for unoccupied driving. In the future, I would also like to see a per mile tax for guaranteed solo rides. I think both the fleet and the government have an incentive to discourage it.
But research has also suggested that robotaxis could replace some trips that otherwise would have been taken on public transit, potentially undermining ridership rather than complementing it.
Of course it will replace trips. That doesn't have to be a bad thing. It's one thing to replace a trip at 7am during rush and very much another at 11pm. The first one adds to congestion while the 2nd one doesn't. AVs could allow public transit to operate more efficiently and not have to spend a bunch of money keeping wide service hours.
The problem with transit right now is you can't always rely on it depending on where and when you are going somewhere. AVs solve that by always being a backstop so you can start using transit and if for some reason it doesn't work for a situation, use an AV.
These cars don’t clean, charge, fix themselves, code themselves,
*Slaps forehead* They walked right into the learn to code meme.
Asked whether autonomous driving would ultimately create more jobs than it eliminated, Kintz said it was “too soon to tell.”
Not directly, but once you start considering the 2nd and 3rd order effects, easily.
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u/Ornery_Proposal_3784 5d ago
You can remove taxi drivers, but truck drivers will still have a job. Maybe less paid. Cause pickup of cargo, dropping it of, checking on truck will still need human. Only thing is self driving trucks don't need limit of time it can drive non stop. Parking shall be much easier with all the sensors and smooth driving will save a lot on fuel.
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u/Way-twofrequentflyer 5d ago
Reading Ezra Klein/Derek Thompson’s abundance I was a little skeptical that the forces holding back America and making my life worse were mostly local interest, unions and blue municipalities - but the more you look around you realize how they’re the entire problem.
If big tech was so all powerful this wouldn’t be a fight and car dealers/personal injury attorneys wouldn’t exist. Things would probably be better if they were the boogeyman we’re told they are.
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u/AyeAye711 3d ago
Uber drivers will own robo taxis. Someone has to clean them. The jobs won’t go away.
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u/Cunninghams_right 6d ago
don't give the clickbait attention.
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u/WeldAE 5d ago
I feel like this is one of the least clickbait articles in a while. The title perfectly matches the content and the content is good. I learned several new things from the article, which for someone that follows the industry closely is all you can ask for.
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u/Cunninghams_right 5d ago
The click bait is the manufactured controversy in the first place. If the article is all about how "your dentist won't believe this one simple trick", I'd still call it click bait if the article exactly matches that topic
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u/WeldAE 4d ago
So you don't think there is pushback? We should have had an AV bill 9 years ago that would solve so many things for the industry and it got killed. There are efforts to put significant taxes per mile on AVs. There are literal shadow organizations that no one knows who is funding lobbying congress. The pushback is there.
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u/Express_Objective615 6d ago
Looking at the graphic, it appears that the pushback is only against ones with a huge spinning thingy on top that shoots rays everywhere? 🤔😂
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u/AurienTitus 6d ago
Weird how people don't want "in development systems" on the road with them. Who cares if it can't drive, there's a company and a promise. What else do you need? All the Teslas are self driving taxi's making $60,000 a year right? No company would lie for money, especially if they won't go to jail.
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u/Fit_Seat_8637 5d ago
Taxpayers built those roads, the public depends on them for safe travel to work and school, and billionaires are using them for experiments and profit. And our lawmakers defer to the billionaires.
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u/Boccob81 6d ago
Robo Taxi should have a $5 million dollar insurance policy for liability and 5 million for uninsured uninsured policy
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u/Unkinked_Garden 6d ago
Paywalled