Waymo begins robotaxi testing in Atlanta

Table Of Content

• Lucid slashes prices for its luxury EVs for the third time in seven months
• Waymo and Cruise dominated autonomous testing in California in the first year of the pandemic
• Different business models
• Hitting an orange cone
• Waymo vs. Cruise: Which handles San Francisco streets better?
• This is Tesla’s riveting fix for recalled Cybertruck accelerator pedals
• Electric scooter rider critically injured in hit-and-run, San Francisco police say

The full San Francisco service area is both a viable taxi market — after all this is where Sidecar, Lyft and Uber were born — but more importantly a potential market for car replacement. A service established here, with lower prices than Uber, could convince San Franciscans to give up ownership of a car. At present, it would probably be a drop from 2 or 3 cars, not a drop to having no cars, but this is a start. In San Francisco, the futuristic nature of driverless vehicles has become a tourist attraction.

Lucid slashes prices for its luxury EVs for the third time in seven months

It seems probable, however, that once the core case of a viable service can be made, we should see a “land rush” as the companies which have viable systems work to claim and expand to new territory. People would give up car ownership for this — they already give up car ownership in cities like San Francisco just through the use of transit/bikeshare/scooters/Uber/Lyft without the convenience and lower cost of a robotaxi. But a service like this might be attractive to a lot more people, to create a viable market.

Waymo and Cruise dominated autonomous testing in California in the first year of the pandemic

Is Waymo Safer than Cruise? – Robotics & Automation News - Robotics and Automation News

Is Waymo Safer than Cruise? – Robotics & Automation News.

Posted: Tue, 07 Nov 2023 08:00:00 GMT [source]

Sometimes it's schadenfreude about a big hyped thing that falls flat. Sometimes it's just a sense that the tech we all depend on may be harming us in ways we don't understand and can't control. All of this makes it harder to compare the results of the two companies. Waymo announced their statistics on the Waymo blog, and in a new academic paper with specific details on all their incidents.

Different business models

During the “safety driver onboard” phase of development, the safety record of responsible companies was generally very good, with the obvious exception of Uber and its negligent safety driver. Now Waymo is making the case that they have done the same with rider-only and uncrewed operations. Now, after a barrage of safety concerns and incidents with Cruise self-driving cars in recent months, the landscape looks starkly different. Cruise has paused all public road operations – both supervised and manual, laid off contractors and recalled nearly 1,000 robotaxis after a pedestrian collision. In October, the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise's deployment and testing permits for its autonomous vehicles, effective immediately, and last week, GM announced it would significantly cut spending on Cruise in 2024.

Waymo is full speed ahead as safety incidents and regulators stymie competitor Cruise

More worrisome to me was that on one of my trips — to a Warriors game at the Chase Center arena — at a busy intersection, a Waymo in front of us wouldn't respond to a traffic cop trying to wave it through a red light. Then another Waymo pulled up beside it and also didn't respond to the cop. So now three Waymos were sitting there, blocking traffic and waiting for the light. The traffic cop stopped trying to move us and just held his hands over his head in disgust. Waymo, which is owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet, has a couple hundred self-driving cars roaming around San Francisco, and access is still limited there via a waiting list, as well as by geography.

Hitting an orange cone

Waymo has been touted as a company that has moved slower and broken fewer things, but the company and its tech are not without their faults. These expansions illuminate one of the key debate questions in the field, particularly in consideration of Tesla’s approach. All leading robotaxi teams develop and maintain detailed maps of their driving territory, and don’t deploy in a territory (certainly with members of the public) until they have tested and certified their vehicle’s safe operation in that territory. While Tesla does not have self-driving, they are allowing customers to do driver-supervised driving on a large fraction of U.S. roads. The hope is that if they can make self-driving work, it would instantly work everywhere, while the other approach is built one region at a time.

Formerly known as the Google self-driving car project and now an independent subsidiary of Google parent-company Alphabet, Waymo has been operating in some capacity since 2009. Five years ago, the company launched what it billed as the "world's first commercial autonomous ride-hailing service" in the metro Phoenix area, then last year expanded to San Francisco. The company soon plans to launch commercially in Austin, its fourth city, and also recently began test-driving vehicles in the winter weather of Buffalo, New York. Much ado has been made of San Francisco’s major autonomous vehicle companies, Google-owned Waymo and General Motors-backed Cruise. But as regulators prepare to vote on the unlimited expansion of robotaxis in San Francisco, only a fairly limited subset of residents can say they’ve actually taken a ride in a self-driving car. Atlanta is just the latest in a string of territorial gains for Waymo over the last few months.

Riding in a Waymo felt almost like taking a normal Uber, awkward rideshare driver talk not included. It arrived right in front of the Safeway, took us on a slow and careful ride—not unlike driving with your grandmother—and felt surprisingly smooth for a robotaxi. The car made only one jerky turn and successfully passed a delivery truck stalled on Masonic Avenue. Instead of driving straight through Golden Gate Park, Cruise decided to go east on Lincoln Way before taking a strange southward sojourn on Stanyan Street, turning around in Cole Valley and heading back north.

Electric scooter rider critically injured in hit-and-run, San Francisco police say

And there's something to be said about time and experience and just rigor that no matter how hard you work, it takes time to do this. Inrix, the transportation analytics and connected car services, raised $70 million in a financing round from investment funds managed by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and Morgan Stanley Tactical Value. Ahead of the merger, Serve raised $30 million in a round led by existing investors Uber, Nvidia and Wavemaker Partners. New investors Mark Tompkins and Republic Deal Room also participated. The startup/soon-to-be-public company has raised a total of $56 million. Or maybe it's simply for people who would rather not interact with another human when they're in a taxi.

Earlier this month, Waymo began mapping Washington, D.C., and in November 2023, the company began winter testing robotaxis in Buffalo. While Cruise and Waymo have both said they would expand incrementally, and not all at once, scale is vital for the companies’ success. Developing, testing and deploying AV tech has cost Cruise and Waymo millions of dollars. Waymo has had to pull back on operations this year after Alphabet issued a slew of layoffs in the first quarter.

In a series of tweets, Waymo noted that its California data is less important to the company than its Arizona results, as well as its progress in other places, such as Detroit. Cruise is an independent company, based in San Francisco, that was acquired by General Motors in 2016 for about $1 billion all-in and is now, after several investment rounds, worth nearly $20 billion. I recently rode in Waymo’s service in the Noe Valley area of San Francisco and the ride was smooth and impressive. Waymo said it informed its test riders about the change Monday in an email, which someone also posted to Reddit.

Things are growing – to give you an idea, this year we have more than 10x'd [trips with public riders]… The ridership is increasing in both Phoenix and SF. We are well ahead of 10,000 trips [in each city] every single week… So it's going well. We're taking the time to respond to feedback and thoughtfully expand.

Yet I know of only one company—Waymo—that has launched a fully driverless commercial taxi service. And I only know of one company—Nuro—that's running a driverless commercial delivery service on public roads. You'd expect these companies to be capitalizing on their early leads by expanding rapidly, but neither seems to be doing that. Opponents of autonomous taxi expansions, including the Teamsters, have vowed to slow down the growth of companies such as Waymo. A bill pending in the California Senate would give cities and counties authority over robotaxi services — a power that currently resides with state government agencies.

Maybe its software has become excessively optimized for suburban Phoenix. Maybe its hardware or back-end support costs are too high to operate profitably. Maybe there are lingering safety or reliability concerns that Waymo wants to squash before expanding in a big way.