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Waymo is partnering with Toronto's Element Fleet Management to run the fleet and says the work will create hundreds of local roles. It cites 400 million fully autonomous kilometres and claims 95% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers.
The thread was dominated by riders from other cities saying the same thing: it just works.
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A city launch is not the same thing as citywide availability. The operating boundary determines whether a robotaxi is a daily transport option or a useful novelty for a small set of trips.
Readers also framed expansion as a safety and operations problem, not just a map-coloring exercise.
No charges yet; the driver was uninjured-ish, cooperative, not intoxicated, and reportedly failed to keep a single lane. Tesla's own site says the feature 'requires active driver supervision and does not make the vehicle autonomous'.
The line that stuck: naming a product 'Full Self-Driving (Supervised)' is like selling 'Healthy Dog Food (Rat poison)'.
The proposed Walnut Creek building has zero three-bedroom units and needs state density-bonus waivers just to pencil out. Burke traces it to double-stairwell rules that force interior corridors, stretcher-sized elevators, and parking minimums.
The Copenhagen counterexample packs 149 units per acre at similar height with cross-ventilated family flats and a sunlit courtyard playground. The thread mostly agreed on the building code, then spent its energy fighting over Burke's robotaxi aside.
A former Uber engineer, a wife who won't ride alone, a rider who got a mid-trip lecture on religion: the thread filled with reasons people pay to skip the human driver. One commenter cited 400,000 Uber assault and misconduct reports from 2017–2022.
The dissent worth hearing: is engineering away every mildly uncomfortable human interaction actually a society we want? The most upvoted product idea wasn't Premier at all — it was Waymo-meets-Zipcar.
