- It's 2018, where's my self driving car.
Oh, here it is.
This is Waymo, but you probably know it
as Google's self driving car project.
Now Waymo has long been considered
the leader of autonomous vehicles
and that's because it's been
working on this technology
longer than any other company.
It's vehicles have driven the most miles
and it has the lowest
rate of disengagements
or instances when humans have
to take control of the vehicle
and it's all been leading up to this,
a real robot taxi service
right here in Phoenix Arizona.
Waymo's been operating it
self driving cars in Arizona
for about a year and a half
and during that time it's even run them
without safety drivers behind the wheel.
Waymo's cars collect a ton of data
and Waymo feeds that into
it's deep learning algorithm
for labeling and processing
and this allows Waymo
to deploy what it calls
the safest driver on the road.
Now Waymo is ready to
start taking on passengers
and create a real business for itself.
It works basically the same way
as any ride sharing service.
You pull out the app,
you pick your destination
and hail a ride.
A few minutes later one of Waymo's
self driving Chrysler
Pacifica mini vans pulls up.
These are covered in high powered sensors
like Lidar, radar, and ultrasonic
along with a bunch of cameras
to provide a full 360 degree
omnidirectional field of view.
Waymo is calling it's taxi service Waymo One
and initially we were
going to show you a demo
of the ride that we took through Chandler,
but truthfully it was kind
of long and kind of boring,
but not entirely boring.
There were these touch
screens behind the head rest
that present a live view of
what the car sensors can see.
Other vehicles are blue,
pedestrians are white
and your trip is shown as a green line
that the Waymo follows.
It was pretty cool, but overall
the ride itself was
uneventful as it should be.
It was like being in the back seat
with a very cautious student driver.
And sometimes it would
take longer than usual
to make a decision like
this unprotected left
into a parking lot.
Now this is gonna be a
complicated turn right here.
We're taking a left hand turn
across traffic into this parking lot.
So the car is sort of
figuring out where it can go,
when it can go, if there's
no traffic signal or signage
to tell us when to go,
the car needs to make
that determination itself.
It needs to find that gap in the traffic.
Waymo programs it's
cars to be conservative,
to be safe drivers.
A human driver probably
would've gone right then.
That might be comforting to some people,
other people might find
that a little bit annoying
and would want to see the car
being a little bit more assertive
and that's something
that Waymo is working on.
It has been sort of trying
to develop it's software,
tune it's software in a way
that the car drives more
organically, more like a human.
There were moments when the care acted
more aggressively than I expected,
but it was the type of behavior
that you wouldn't notice
if you were being driven
by a human driver.
There were jerky moments
sure, but it never felt unsafe
and I never felt car sick for that matter.
- We want a service that
brings safety to all of roads.
That's really the core mission
and it's around making sure that
we constantly are tackling
this problem of road safety.
- So the company thinks it
can build a real business
by offering a safer, more convenient
and perhaps cheaper
service than Uber or Lyft.
To start out with Waymo1
will only be available
in a few towns around Phoenix
and it'll be limited to
just a couple members
of Waymo's Early Rider Program.
- For Waymo1 we'll have
an itterative approach
that will start with Waymo try drivers
and eventually we'll take those out.
- And when that happens,
someone hails a care,
it is possible a car
with no one inside of it
may role up to pick them up?
- That's our vision, that's
where we wanna get to.
Is somebody has that space to themselves.
- Waymo One will be limited to
only certain neighborhoods
meaning it'll be geofenced,
and the cars will feature
safety drivers behind the wheel.
Even though the company had said
it intends to deploy fully
driverless vehicles at launch.
So as you can see Waymo's approaching
this whole commercialization
thing super cautiously
and there's a good reason for that.
In March 2018 a self
driving Uber vehicle struck
and killed a 49 year old
woman in Tempe Arizona,
which is just a few miles from here.
The Uber crash brought those
early inflated expectations
about self driving cars
to a screeching halt,
but in the days after the
crash Waymo's CEO John Krafcik
said that it's cars would
have been able to prevent it.
- We have a lot of confidence
that our technology would be robust
and would be able to handle
situations like that one.
Cocky, sure, but now Waymo
has to bend over backwards
to prove that it's cars
are the safest on the road
and it needs to convert
a skeptical public,
who just doesn't trust self driving cars.
I've seen the surveys,
people just don't wanna
get into these cars.
But how do you make people believe
that a self driving car is
safer than a human driven one?
- One of the ways I think
is around experience.
We are working on building
the world's most experienced driver.
We've now driven over 10 million miles
on public road in autonomous mode.
That really allows us to
continue to learn new skills,
vet our current
functionality, and test out,
with the most extreme and
challenging situations.
- So self driving cars are suppose to be
the future of transportation,
but is the solution to all
our transportation problems
really more cars?
US cities are overwhelmingly dominated
by personally owned vehicles,
but that landscape is changing.
Millennials want better
public transportation
and more options to bike and walk around
and they're getting
that with dockless bike
and scooter programs growing like crazy.
And 51% of millennials don't think
that owning a car is worth the investment.
Just take Phoenix for example,
it's the 25th most
congested city in the US
and drivers here spend 34
hours a year stuck in traffic.
The real danger is for people
out walking around those cars
because Arizona has the highest
pedestrian death rate in the nation.
Between 2014 and 2017, 271 pedestrians
were killed in fatal collisions.
In 2018, 30 people were killed.
Are self driving cars really the solution?
- Driverless cars do have the opportunity
to reduce traffic fatalities
'cause they could reduce
a lot of the human error
that leads to that, but at the same time
we don't really have any
data that supports that
just because the number of
miles driven by driverless cars
so far is so small
compared to the data set
that we have for human driven cars,
but it also kind of side steps
one of the bigger problems,
which is how our streets
are actually designed
and how their designed to be
unsafe for a lot of people.
- So while Waymo's self driving cars
haven't caused any fatal collisions,
there have been reports of
some minor fender benders
and even a few injuries,
and Arizona drivers have
complained that these cars
can be a little bit
annoying to navigate around.
These antidotes also underscore
a really important point
about full autonomy, cars
that can drive themselves
anywhere under any conditions.
That it may take decades
for this to arrive, if ever.
Even Waymo's CEO John
Krafcik admitted this.
He said that, "Autonomy will
always have constraints."
Driverless vehicles will
need to stay on the road
almost around the clock to offset the cost
of the sensors, and the
hardware, and the software,
and the computer chips and everything
that makes them drive
without human beings.
That means keeping these
vehicles on the road
for hundreds and thousands of miles.
That's a lot of driving
and while Waymo's cars
may not succumb to the same
failings as human driven ones
they'll still occupy the same
amount of space on the road.
Now Uber and Lyft have been shown
to increase traffic
congestion in certain cities.
What will Waymo's contribution be?
Well to start out, not that much.
As the company eases it's way
into becoming a real business
it's main focus is gonna
be keeping up with demand.
I mean people are gonna wanna use this.
This is a robot taxi service.
It's the future, right?
So would you ride in a self driving car?
Leave us a comment in the comment section
and if you're interested in cars
or the future of transportation
check out this awesome video
that we just did about Tesla.
It's on youtube.com/theverge.
YouTube, You tub.
