I took my first self-driving car ride with my teenage son and it felt comfortably dull
I signed up to try Waymo as soon as it became available in San Francisco, and this weekend Alphabet’s self-driving car company finally invited me to give it a shot.
My son Marlon has been obsessed with self-driving cars this year, as we’ve seen more and more Waymos and competing GM Cruise vehicles tootling around San Francisco without safety drivers. We thought we noticed them getting more aggressive in recent months — nothing frightening, but they seemed to be pulling into intersections and merging into lanes more assertively, just like a normal San Francisco driver would do.
Last month, Waymo and Cruise won approval to operate driverless cars in San Francisco at any time of day. So with self-driving cars a common feature of our local landscape, we were excited to give one a try.
Saturday morning, we headed down to the local drugstore to buy sunglasses, then used the Waymo app on my phone to order a ride home. It would be about a five-minute drive, but would save us a steep uphill walk.
The car pulled up with my initials, MR, on the display below the rotating lidar sensor on the roof. The door handles were flush with the side of the car until I selected the “unlock” option from the app, at which point they popped out like normal door handles.
We both climbed in. The A/C was blowing cool air. The interior was bathed in light pink light from the iPad-sized console at the front of the back seat, and soft ambient music was playing. It definitely had a “welcome to the future” vibe. A female recorded voice gave us some instructions to fasten our seatbelts and not touch the brakes or steering wheel, then it pulled into motion.
The car performed as if a competent human were driving. It didn’t hesitate to cross the (imaginary) center line when it had to get around a parked car on a narrow street, and stuck toward the middle on a very narrow section with cars on both sides. The ride was smooth and the speed constant at just under 25 miles per hour.
We fiddled with the interior console to try and connect it to my iPhone to play music from my library, but the ride was so short that I only had time to download the Google Assistant (required for that function) before it was over.
For some reason, the Waymo wouldn’t drive us right to our door. Our house is at the top of a very steep crest on a narrow street that has four buses running up and down it every hour, so maybe it was too much to handle. As it approached our drop-off point, the voice told us that we’d be ending our ride soon, and to touch the handle twice — once to unlock the door, a second time to open it. We did as instructed, walked out of the car, and it pulled slowly off.
The trip cost $8, about the same as a Lyft or Uber. As my son pointed out, Alphabet doesn’t have any drivers to pay, so the money all goes straight to the company as revenue.
The ride itself was completely uneventful. A little boring, even. The whole experience reminded me of the way smartphones or the internet were miraculous at first, but now seem mundane.
I was a skeptic about the promise of self-driving cars. It seemed like one of those technologies that’s been perpetually a few years away. But after taking this ride, I can absolutely see it becoming a very common way to get around for short urban trips, as long as Waymo and its competitors can scale up in a cost-effective way.
Consumers, investors and regulators better get ready, because the technology is here and it’s so advanced it seems natural and safe upon first use.
WATCH: NBC Bay Area reporter takes a ride in a malfunctioning robotaxi
Courtesy: Uber Eats
Uber said Monday that Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, one of the company’s longest-tenured top executives and the head of is delivery business is leaving after almost 13 years.
Gore-Coty joined Uber as a general manager in France in 2012, and worked his way up to become vice president of mobility for the Europe and Middle East region four years later, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was named senior vice president of delivery in 2021.
“It’s hard to imagine Uber without Pierre, because there hasn’t been much Uber without Pierre,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement that was part of a regulatory filing. “As one of our first employees, he was a driving force behind our global Mobility expansion and stepped up to run Uber Eats just weeks before the first Covid lockdowns.”
The company didn’t say what Gore-Coty plans to do next.
Uber also said that Andrew Macdonald, the company’s senior vice president of mobility and business operations, will become chief operating officer, reporting to Khosrowshahi. Macdonald, 41, will oversee the company’s global mobility, delivery and autonomous businesses in addition to “key cross-platform functions like membership, customer support, safety, and more,” the filing said.
Gore-Coty is one of 11 people listed on Uber’s executive team page. Macdonald is the only one who has worked at the company longer. He joined in May 2012, four months before Gore-Coty, according to LinkedIn.
“These last nearly 13 years have been the ride of a lifetime,” Gore-Coty said in the statement. “It was a true team effort, and I’m so proud of what we’ve built and the impact we’ve had on daily life in cities around the world.”
Uber shares were little changed in extended trading after closing on Monday at $83.64. The stock is up 39% this year, while the Nasdaq is about flat.
Last month, the company reported first-quarter results that beat on earnings but missed on revenue. A month earlier, the Federal Trade Commission sued Uber, alleging that the company engaged in “deceptive billing and cancellation practices” related to its Uber One subscription service.
In an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Khosrowshahi characterized the lawsuit as “a bit of a head-scratcher for us.”
WATCH: Record earnings and policy uncertainty will slow the equity rally.
Packages with the logo of Amazon are transported at a packing station of a redistribution center of Amazon in Horn-Bad Meinberg, western Germany, on Dec. 9, 2024.
Ina Fassbender | Afp | Getty Images
German antitrust regulators warned Amazon on Monday that the company’s pricing mechanisms for third-party sellers could run afoul of competition laws.
The Federal Cartel Office said in its preliminary assessment that Amazon’s pricing controls limit the visibility of merchants’ products and, “based on non-transparent marketplace rules,” interfere with their freedom to set prices.
Amazon uses algorithms and statistical models to calculate certain price caps for products, the Cartel Office said. Products that are flagged as having “prices that are too high” or “prices that are not competitive” can then be demoted in search results, excluded from advertising or removed from the buy box, they added.
The buy box is the listing that pops up first when a visitor clicks on a particular product, and the one that gets purchased when a shopper taps “Add to Cart.”
“Competition in online retail in Germany is largely determined by Amazon’s rules for the trading platform,” Federal Cartel Office President Andreas Mundt said in a statement. “Since Amazon competes directly with other marketplace retailers on its platform, influencing competitors’ pricing, even in the form of price caps, is fundamentally questionable from a competition perspective.”
Amazon’s pricing practices not only threaten sellers’ businesses, but could also harm other retailers by deterring them from offering lower prices, the Cartel Office said.
An Amazon spokesperson said the company strongly disagrees with the Cartel Office’s preliminary findings. They added that any changes to Amazon’s pricing mechanisms would be “bad for customers and selling partners.”
“If Amazon is prevented from helping people find competitively priced offers, it will lead to a bad shopping experience for them, as we’d need to promote uncompetitive or even abusive pricing in our store,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “This would mislead customers into thinking they’re getting good value when, in reality, they’re not.”
Amazon can provide feedback to the Cartel Office on its preliminary assessment before it reaches a final decision.
Amazon in 2022 reached a deal with European Union antitrust regulators who were investigating its use of seller data and buy box practices. As part of the settlement, Amazon agreed to display a second buy box on products sold in Europe when there is a second competing offer that’s different on price or delivery.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is also probing Amazon’s use of pricing algorithms on its sprawling third-party marketplace as part of a wide-ranging antitrust lawsuit filed in 2023. Amazon has said the FTC’s complaint is “wrong on the facts and the law.”
The case is set to go to trial in October 2026.
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