-Silicon Valley holds
a reputation
for being the center
of technology innovation.
It was home to the development
of the semiconductor,
the microprocessor,
and is now the home of Google,
Apple, Facebook, and more.
In the last few years,
a number of companies
have set their sights
on disrupting
a staple of American existence,
the automobile.
Uber, Lyft,
Google-created Waymo,
along with 60 other
companies and startups,
are currently licensed
in the state of California
to test autonomous vehicles
on public roads.
Since licensing began,
test vehicles have driven tens
of millions of autonomous miles,
with Waymo putting on more miles
than any other company.
Even so, tech-savvy residents
here have reservations.
-I've been in Silicon Valley
for 30 years.
I have been a programmer.
I have managed groups.
I have most recently been
a product manager.
I love the idea
of autonomous cars.
I want one really badly.
My husband doesn't drive.
He's from England.
He never needed to learn how.
But I want them to work.
I want them to work,
and they want it to run around
without anyone in the car,
without telling us
how they're gonna test it.
I don't trust it.
I don't think it's ready yet.
-The road space is social,
and we treat it as a social,
cooperative space.
It's not that the technology is
awful and terrible and horrible.
It's that the technology doesn't
do the thing it needs to do
to work cooperatively
in the road space,
and that's a really
important distinction.
It's distracting us from
the process of social driving.
It's one more thing
in our road space.
Now we have this other thing
we have
to kind of move around
and adjust to.
It can make it more unsafe.
-Companies in the Valley
are seizing on automation
as a solution to problems
facing car travel --
an aging population unable
to drive themselves,
pollution and congestion,
and sagging car-ownership rates.
In the U.
S.
, nearly 40,000 people
are killed
in auto accidents each year,
and autonomous cars
are commonly pitched
as a way to improve road safety.
But to get there,
autonomous cars
have to prove
their own roadworthiness.
-The nature of the problem
that we're tackling is
how do you develop, test,
and deploy
autonomous vehicles safely.
And so what that means
is roughly simulation and all
this associated infrastructure
around simulation.
We do a very specific aspect
of simulation,
which is autonomous vehicles.
Roughly, we build tools
for autonomous-vehicle engineers
to use to develop and test
and build autonomous systems.
Autonomous vehicles do test
in the neighborhood
where my family resides.
I think if you're
in Silicon Valley,
you just have to wait
on a street corner for a while,
and you see some number
of vehicles come by.
The citizens of Palo Alto
or Sunnyvale --
they also benefit
from this industry, right?
These are jobs being created.
Literally the citizens
who are living here
are the ones who are developing
these autonomous systems,
and you can see it
in the housing prices
in the Bay Area, right?
So there's an economic upside.
And that's the line.
-But in online neighborhood
bulletin boards,
at community meetings,
and elsewhere,
there's skepticism.
People say Waymo has not
provided
enough transparency
into its testing methods,
and its safety claims haven't
been independently verified.
Those tensions came to a head
in Palo Alto
and Mountain View recently,
as Waymo held a series
of community meetings
on its driverless car
testing.
-The neighborhood is going
to have to modify its behavior
to accept and adapt
to these vehicles being
in their road space.
So it still means we're taking
on a particular load of labor
that we're not paid to do,
because some company for profit
wants to test their technology
in our neighborhood.
-Though the race toward
autonomy continues,
when these cars
may be seen everywhere
is increasingly uncertain.
Crashes
in the last few years
have tempered excitement
surrounding self-driving cars.
During a nighttime test in 2018,
an Uber test vehicle hit
and killed a pedestrian
in Arizona.
Since that fatality, skepticism
of the rollouts has grown.
-If you just view it as no
testing or all testing,
it simplifies the problem,
and it does a disservice
both to our economy,
the autonomous-vehicle industry,
and the people who are dying
because of human-driven vehicles
and the public,
who is taking the risk
of testing autonomous vehicles.
So that's the balance.
I think in our lifetime,
to get 100% penetration
with autonomous vehicles
is probably not gonna happen.
That's just the reality.
-They're supposedly doing
this research
that's going to be
for the benefit of everyone.
And in our lifetime, it may be
that this might not even become,
you know, very developed
or realized.
So we spend, you know,
years of our agency
forfeiting to something
that we don't actually reap
the benefit of.
-There will be glitches.
There will be ongoing glitches.
It'd be just like
any other software program.
I want them to do public testing
that is open, okay?
I want them to tell us
what they're testing.
I don't trust them
at this stage.
It's too early.
They're too excited.
They're chasing the rainbow,
and I don't want them
driving down my street.
-Although Waymo has been
approved
for driverless
testing in California,
the company said
it has not yet started.
In a statement to The Post,
Waymo laid out its commitment
to safety in the Silicon Valley
communities where it tests.
