I don't know if we'll get there eventually, but if we do, I won't be surprised if it's because of Waymo.
I wish more people would experience it and see that the future is now.
It reminds me of putting on noise-cancelling headphones in an already quiet room. You suddenly gain an appreciation for just how much quieter things could've been thanks to the contrast.
Similarly, having a vehicle accelerate/decelerate consistently, always taking turns with the same sharpness, etc.. all of it builds to this subtle feeling of the car ride fading into the background of the experience. You didn't realize those were features of a drive you could appreciate until experienced.
It would just be cool to see what these guys have cooked up dev tools wise since Google has always been famed for good developer experience (often to such a degree that Xooglers are useless outside the exosuit).
It would rely on them being nice enough to leave at least some binaries on the thing though. Because I'm not sure how would one even get an in on how to boot the things without.
> New York abandoned its proposal to allow self-driving taxis earlier this year. New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has said he would heavily weigh the interests of taxi drivers in deciding on rules for the technology.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/technology/waymo-driverle...
They're growing fast, but I do wonder what they see as the bottlenecks: municipal approval, training, manufacturing? It's really unfortunate that lobbying is slowing self-driving rollout in some of the biggest and most important cities: NYC, Chicago, DC.
So weird little things for scaling, but overall it was a good ride till that point. Also, the dropoff was at a hospital/clinic and Lyft for the return trip had no issue with going into the property to the actual destination.
Those are also cities with a great public option for transit (unlike, say, Dallas or the Bay Area where different municipalities squabble). One might laud New York driving people away from car culture when the subways/buses can serve more people, greener.
The current mayor of NYC is a DemSoc so he might have some ideas about keeping NYC's money in the pockets of middle-class NYC citizens.
No contest.
People here only ride the bus when there’s no other option for them.
Waymo could make a bus too anyway, especially after they’ve been in an area a while and have data about where they’d have the most impact. Internet at large would probably decry it as enshittification.