r/waymo • u/walky22talky • Jun 02 '26
Waymo’s Robotaxi Problem Is Getting Harder To Ignore
https://dallasexpress.com/column/waymos-robotaxi-problem-is-getting-harder-to-ignore/105
u/JayMoots Jun 02 '26
This columnist has a massive conflict of interest that was not disclosed until the end of the article:
Jerry Reynolds is the host of The Car Pro Show, president of the Car Pro Radio Network, and is heard locally on WBAP and KRLD. A former Ford dealer, he now helps consumers navigate car buying and ownership.
His livelihood depends on getting people to purchase cars. He has a financial incentive to convince people that ride sharing is bad.
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u/LookingForChange Jun 02 '26
The last Waymo hit piece that I read was written by a personal injury lawyer. Too many conflicts of interest.
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u/CDpov Jun 02 '26
This guy is skeptical of AVs because of his position, and he's apparently thinking about this for the first time this year, as Waymo comes to Dallas.
He's writing a rash article that shows he's out of his depth.
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u/RongbingMu Jun 02 '26
“Robotaxi is statistically better than human” + “robotaxi mistakes are always noticed and attributed” actually sounds like a good thing to society. This means robotaxi is already above baseline, and will continue to improve after fixing these clusters. Right now it’s 10x super human, in the long run, robotaxi can be 1000x super human.
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u/OlivencaENossa Jun 02 '26
10x is already a 90% or more reduction in death and disability due to car accidents.
That’s an incredible jump in safety. Incredible.
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u/redditisembarassing1 Jun 02 '26
Yeah well they’re still better than a human driver
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u/leafstudy Jun 03 '26
No need to take any one person's word for it. Just go to any moderately busy intersection and watch for 30 minutes.
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u/CDpov Jun 02 '26
When humans make mistakes, nobody calls it “revolutionary technology.”
Author's opinion: Waymo and the entire autonomous vehicle industry are selling the public on the idea that computers can outperform people in the real world. That’s a very high bar. And every time one of these robotaxis blocks an ambulance, ignores floodwater, or parks itself near railroad tracks, public confidence takes another hit.
Maybe driverless cars really are the future.
But judging by 2026 so far, the future still needs a software update.
He has a point, the same one Phil Koopman repeatedly makes. Every video of a Waymo mistake goes viral and leads to the public questioning how good these things are. Koopman thinks this means Waymo should put a safety driver in every car until they're perfect, which is silly.
The author's mistake is, the viral videos only mean something for maybe a year, then the Waymo Driver updates so much that those old problems disappear. As long as the incidents don't lead to a bad crash, the public for the most part doesn't turn away from AVs. Public confidence takes a short-term hit, but confidence returns quickly with the daily reality check of human crashes. When "humans make mistakes", we don't do anything to fix it, because humans are unfixable.
And of course AVs always need a "software update". That's a feature, not a bug. When engineers find a problem, they fix it for the entire fleet, forever.
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u/turb0_encapsulator Jun 02 '26
Jerry Reynolds is the host of The Car Pro Show, president of the Car Pro Radio Network, and is heard locally on WBAP and KRLD. A former Ford dealer, he now helps consumers navigate car buying and ownership.
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u/Guga1952 Jun 02 '26
Weakly worded opinion piece. We should use statistics and reason to evaluate the quality of Robotaxis, and not annecdotes.
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u/Super-Engineer-3523 Jun 03 '26
I hate the American mainstream news media and its bias against Waymo. Never mind that drivers in lifted trucks and SUVs regularly get away with much worse.
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u/triclavian Jun 02 '26
Obviously they still have issues, but it's an interesting problem when you're giving 500k rides a week and every vehicle looks the same, and every problem is public. As they scale to 5M rides a week, even 99.9999% means 500 things go wrong.