Waymo Driverless Taxis - Updates and Discussion

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2017 closed beta testing

Waymo's Data Claims Its Driverless Cars Are 6.7 Times Safer Than You Humans (Sorry) | Carscoops

Over 7 million miles it says it reduced injury-causing crashes by over 80 percent compared to human drivers

www.carscoops.com

Waymo’s Data Claims Its Driverless Cars Are 6.7 Times Safer Than You Humans (Sorry)​

Over 7 million miles it says it reduced injury-causing crashes by over 80 percent compared to human drivers

Autonomous driving tech is under fire in a big way right now. Despite that, Waymo says that it sees a dramatic improvement in driverless car safety when compared to human-driven cars. The study has a number of encouraging figures, including the fact that Waymo recorded only three crash-related injuries over the course of more than 7 million miles.


Any time a company publishes its own safety data it deserves scrutiny. For instance, Tesla also says that its autonomous driving tech is safer than a human, but it doesn’t provide open access to the data it uses to make that assertion. By comparison, this study from Waymo seems quite a bit more transparent.

It compiles data from 7.14 million miles of driverless Waymo rides across three cities, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco. In an effort to compare that data to human driving in an accurate manner, Waymo says that it also analyzed human driving data from the same areas.

Accounting for all data, Waymo claims that its driverless cars experience an 85 percent reduction in injury-causing crashes. They also account for a 57 percent reduction in police-reported crash rates overall. Those figures represent a significant increase in overall safety for those in a driverless Waymo car compared to those driving themselves in the same scenarios.

“These reports represent a good-faith effort by Waymo to evaluate how the safety of its autonomous driving system compares with the safety of human driving. The results are encouraging and represent one step in our evolving understanding of autonomous driving safety,” said David Zuby, chief research officer of The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).

Of course, this data isn’t without its limitations. For instance, Waymo cars themselves are incapable of driving outside of their GPS boundaries. Human drivers don’t report every single low-level incident such as hitting road debris. By contrast, Waymo reports every one of those events and in the end, just 21 percent of those Waymo reports end up with a filed police report.

It appears that some autonomous driving software is getting better at piloting a car than the average human. While none of it appears to be perfect, it does make one wonder why more automakers aren’t pursuing robust and reliable versions of the tech sooner rather than later. It could spell far safer roads.

 

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The Waymo Driver navigating freeways​

https://www.emergingtechbrew.com/stories/2024/01/11/waymo-robotaxi-phoenix-freeways

Waymo expands robotaxi operations to driverless rides on Phoenix freeways​

“What Waymo is doing is methodically knocking down the barriers to AV introduction,” one auto analyst told Tech Brew.​

Coming soon to freeways: Waymo robotaxis.

The Alphabet-owned autonomous ride-hailing company announced this week that it will begin putting self-driving cars without human drivers on freeways in Phoenix. Rides initially will be open to Waymo employees for testing; later, the startup plans to expand the service to customers using the Waymo One app.

Waymo already offers driverless rides in Arizona and California, but this latest step marks an expansion beyond the surface roads the vehicles stick to now. The company also has logged “millions of miles” with autonomous vehicles on freeways, but with human drivers present.

In announcing the move, Waymo noted that opening up freeways on its ride hailing service will speed up some trips, such as pickups from the Phoenix airport.

“The ability to utilize freeways will be especially important as we scale our operations to other cities,” the company said in a blog post. “For this reason, we are laser focused on our freeway ride hailing testing.”

Waymo’s latest step forward as it scales up its operations comes amid setbacks for other players in the robotaxi sector, notably competitor Cruise. The General Motors-backed startup last week offered to pony up $75,000 to settle an investigation by state regulators in California into its handling of an October incident in which one of its robotaxis dragged a pedestrian underneath the car after she was struck by another vehicle, Reuters reported.

The months following the pedestrian crash have brought setback after setback for Cruise, including departures of top executives, large staff cuts, a pullback in investment from GM, suspension of the permit it needs to conduct driverless testing in California, and the company’s decision to take its robotaxi fleet out of service for now.

“There’s been a lot of negativity toward autonomy in general,” Mike Ramsey, an auto analyst for research firm Gartner, told Tech Brew. “Waymo was the original leader in this area and they continue to make incremental progress, and even while being leaders, they’ve always been very careful with their expansion. What Waymo is doing is methodically knocking down the barriers to AV introduction.”

Still, don’t expect Waymo or other robotaxis to be widely available across the country for years to come.

“It’s been 15 years [since Waymo started] and they’re just now getting onto the highway,” Ramsey said. “It kind of gives you a sense of how long this process is likely to take before we get to real commercialization.”

 

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Waymo looks to launch full fleet of robotaxis in Los Angeles

Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo is looking to expand its driverless robotaxi service in Los Angeles, where it is currently testing rides.

electrek.co

Waymo looks to launch full fleet of robotaxis in Los Angeles​

The Jaguar I-Pace EVs currently being deployed / Credit: Waymo
Alphabet Inc.’s autonomous driving unit Waymo is looking to expand its driverless robotaxi service in Los Angeles, where it is currently testing rides. Although, in light of the fallout from Cruise, it might not be smooth sailing.

Waymo, which already has a large fleet of robotaxis in San Francisco, hopes to procure a license in Los Angeles to operate and expand its service. Waymo has been testing its driverless white Jaguars in Los Angeles for about a year and rolled out a free “tour” last October offering rides in certain areas of the city to passengers as part of a promotion (reviewed here by Electrek‘s Jameson Dow). But now it wants to launch its full robotaxi service where riders can order and pay for rides via its app, as it does in San Francisco, and be allowed to ride in any part of the city.



On Friday, Waymo posted on X that it has applied for a license in Los Angeles and will continue working “with local policymakers, first responders, and community organizations.”

California, too, makes a prime location for the human-less fleet in that robotaxis are immune from receiving moving violations. California law enforcement can only write traffic violations to humans, not robots, meaning that autonomous vehicles operating in a driverless mode are only susceptible to parking tickets – although some activists and residents are looking to change that in light of the the accident involving a pedestrian getting dragged down a street by a Cruise robotaxi that failed to stop.

Waymo had said that it has a permit to operate 250 robotaxis in San Francisco, and that it deploys about 100 of them at any one time. The company also said that this month it would start testing its fully autonomous passenger cars without a human driver on freeways in Phoenix. It also is looking to expand to Austin.

 

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Waymo's Robotaxi Expands into Los Angeles, Starting Free Rides in Parts of City

Robotaxis began cruising the streets of Los Angeles in mid-March when Google spinoff Waymo starts offering free rides to some of the roughly 50,000 people

www.insurancejournal.com

 

[Menthol]

I don't know if USA society is ready for such of thing.

I saw a video on how American destroyed a Weymo car and food delivery bots.

This is crazy.

 

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I don't know if USA society is ready for such of thing.

I saw a video on how American destroyed a Weymo car and food delivery bots.

This is crazy.

It was a Waymo car but not one of the driverless ones.
Waymo has been offering driverless service (ie nobody in the driver's seat at all) since I think 2019.

 

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First time taking a driverless taxi in the United States!​