In its next step toward full operation, Waymo is preparing to offer passengers free rides in San Francisco.
The Alphabet-owned driverless car company has been steadily working toward full, driverless operation. The company started offering rides to employees, along with some members of the public that were willing to sign NDAs.
According to Engadget, Waymo is taking the next step, having earned a Driverless Pilot permit to allow passengers to take driverless rides on a wider scope. The new permit allows the company to offer passengers driverless rides, although it still can’t charge for them.
The company still has to acquire a Driverless Deployment permit, which will allow it to charge for rides. In the meantime, however, select passengers will be able to try out the company’s driverless operations for free.
Our CPUC permit also allows us to offer drivered autonomous passenger rides in LA—our next ride-hail city. Stay tuned for more on that front in the coming months! https://t.co/njwjvIZOUhhttps://t.co/FteOLSq6Rh
Waymo is expanding its autonomous testing in San Francisco, accepting passengers, provided they’re willing to meet the terms.
Waymo has been working toward autonomous vehicles for years, and is one of the leaders in the field. The company has been allowing employees to ride in its vehicles, but is now allowing the general public to, according to The Verge.
Interested parties can apply via the Waymo One app and its “Trusted Tester” program. Individuals will have to sign an NDA, and they won’t be completely alone in the vehicle. A safety driver will be present to take over, should anything go wrong.
Even with its restrictions, Waymo’s new program is a significant step forward on the path toward fully autonomous driving.
Waymo has released a detailed report of its autonomous driving test scenarios, providing evidence of the technology’s ability to prevent fatalities.
Waymo is an Alphabet company focused on autonomous driving. In fact, the company recently announced it would only use the term “autonomous driving,” as opposed to “self-driving.” Autonomous driving is widely seen as the next major evolution for the automotive industry, with the promise of safer driving.
Quantifying just how much safer autonomous driving is can be difficult, as few companies have been willing to release their testing numbers. Waymo has now taken that step, and the results are very encouraging. Waymo’s simulated driving data provides a decade-long look at how its platform performs.
In total, the simulated Waymo Driver completely avoided or mitigated 100% of crashes aside from the crashes in which it was struck from behind, including every instance that involved a pedestrian or cyclist (20 simulations in total). This is the first time an autonomous technology company has shared its evaluation for how the system might perform in real-world fatal crash scenarios.
Significantly, drivers were 1.3 to 1.5x less likely to be injured in accidents that Waymo’s vehicles mitigated.
Waymo specifically tested 72 scenarios from public records of accidents that had involved a fatality. When the Waymo Driver was in primary control of the vehicle, those accidents were avoided 100% of the time.
Waymo then ran test scenarios where Waymo Driver was in responder mode, only taking action once the human driver had made a mistake. In those scenarios, 82% of accidents were avoided, while another 10% were mitigated. This gives Waymo a 92% success rate at avoiding or mitigating fatal accidents, even when the human driver has done something that would have caused an accident.
In other words, even when a human driver did something to initiate a crash, such as running a red light, the simulated Waymo Driver avoided or mitigated the vast majority of these fatal crashes.
This is good news for the auto industry and drivers alike, and will hopefully help remove barriers to autonomous driving adoption.
Waymo has announced it will no longer use the term “self-driving,” embracing “fully autonomous driving technology” instead.
One of Alphabet’s subsidiary companies, Waymo is a company focused on autonomous driving in what is quickly becoming a crowded industry. Waymo says it is making the distinction in an effort to save lives, highlighting that its software is far different than “self-driving” software that still requires human interaction.
It may seem like a small change, but it’s an important one, because precision in language matters and could save lives. We’re hopeful that consistency will help differentiate the fully autonomous technology Waymo is developing from driver-assist technologies (sometimes erroneously referred to as “self-driving” technologies) that require oversight from licensed human drivers for safe operation. Regardless of who or what is at the helm, safely operating a vehicle on public roads requires careful execution of all the elements of the driving task. Today, the Waymo Driver makes billions of decisions each day as it safely moves people and goods to their destination in fully autonomous mode.
The fact that Waymo is taking the time make a distinction between “self-driving” and “fully autonomous” is evidence of what’s at stake in the automotive industry.
The autonomous driving industry is estimated to reach a staggering $556.67 billion by 2026. As a result, companies like Waymo will be doing everything possible to set themselves apart and gain as big a piece of that market as possible.
“We are excited about a whole number of applications of what we call the world’s most experienced driver,” says Dan Chu, Waymo’s Chief Product Officer. We’re really focused on the core technology. We have ride-hailing, long-haul trucking, and then delivery as well. We’re also interested in personally owned cars. We’re very excited about the long haul trucking opportunity. We’ve already done a pilot with Google shipping some of their datacenter parts in Atlanta.”
Dan Chu, Chief Product Officer at Waymo, discusses the progress the company has made in advancing driverless technology over the last year in an interview on Bloomberg Technology:
Driverless Ride-Hailing, Long-Haul Trucking, and Delivery
We are excited about a whole number of applications of what we call the world’s most experienced driver. We’re really focused on the technology and core technology. We have ride-hailing, long-haul trucking, and then delivery as well. We’re also interested in personally owned cars. Many of our OEM partners are interested in that. I think we will be rolling those out over the course of the next few years.
We’re very excited about the long haul trucking opportunity. There’s a lot of demand for it. There’s really a foundation for it in the economy so we’re definitely interested in it. In fact, we’ve been working on this since 2017. We’ve already done a pilot with Google shipping some of their datacenter parts in Atlanta.
We’ve Been Rolling Out Fully Driverless Rides
The rollout (of driverless ride-hailing) has been going really well. I’m really excited about the progress. We started in 2017 launching an early rider program where we had over 20,000 people sign up in just a matter of days. Nowadays, we have thousands of riders that are taking rides. Most importantly, over the last few months, we’ve actually been rolling out fully driveless rides. Now we have riders in our rider programs in Phoenix who can hail a ride with a mobile app and have a car show up that has no driver at all and go ahead and take various trips with it.
We definitely have global ambitions. Our mission is really to make every single mile safer. We definitely want to get everywhere as soon as we can. But we do think the rollout will be city by city. It will be incremental. We will continue to expand as we are in metro Phoenix and go then beyond from there. We’ve already driven in over 25 cities. We’ve been testing in new ones as well. For instance, recently we started testing in Miami and we’ve also started testing in Los Angeles.
Waymo Rolling Out Fully Driverless Rides
We’ve Always Had An Approach Of Launching Incrementally
I have ridden in one (of our driverless cars). It’s an important part of our culture at Waymo for us to actually be what we call dogfooding or trying our own products. It’s an incredible experience. We really think it brings that bit of independence and that privacy and that time to yourself. I really do believe it’s a whole new product.
We’ve always had an approach of launching this incrementally. We think that’s the safest and responsible way of getting this technology out. If you look at the history of our project we’ve had the first self-driving car ride or a fully driverless ride in Austin. Then we had a fleet of vehicles in 2017. Then our Wymo One launched at the end of last year. So we’ve taken it incrementally and I think we’ve been doing that steady approach for a while.
I’m Convinced Of The Benefits Of Self-Driving Technology
I’m really convinced around the social impact and the benefits that self-driving technology will have. We look at road safety which is really core to the mission of Waymo. Over 1.35 million lives are lost on the roads every single year on a global basis. That’s one of the leading causes of death. Even in the United States, that number has been going up. Over the last five years, that number has actually increased and has gone the wrong way. For those reasons, road safety and some of the other benefits it might have on the environment and space usage it’s definitely the right focus for our attention.
We want to be part of the solution (in terms of jobs). One of the things here is that this change will be incremental. It’ll take time to roll out. The second is that we want to be part of creating jobs. Right now in Phoenix were already seeing some of that happening. We’re creating whole new categories of jobs that never existed before such as a Lidar technician or an AV technician.
Lastly, I think the other thing that often isn’t discussed in that conversation is around how mobility is an important part of employment. By giving people access to jobs is they’re going to be able to get those jobs. We know that in the United States over 20 to 30 million adult Americans aren’t able to get driver’s licenses for any number of reasons. So between the creation of jobs and giving access those are some of the ways that we hope to be a part of the solution.
Waymo Technolgy Now Powering Driverless Rides, Trucking, and Delivery – Dan Chu, Waymo
