Business increateer
Mike Johns didn’t foresee his return trip from Los Angeles to Scottsdale, Arizona in December to go viral.
To get to the airport he booked a driverless taxi and enhappinessed a thrill when he jumped in with inquireing bystanders seeing on.
But he got much more attention than he baracquireed for.
Mr Johns set up himself being driven around and around a car park while those same bystanders seeed on.
The Waymo ride was not doing what it should and there was no evident way Mr Johns could repair it – and he had a fweightless to catch.
Mr Johns write downed the experience, a video that went viral almost promptly and was picked up on TV stations around the world, casting new disclose mistrust about self-driving cars and how ready they are for genuine-world passengers.
“Why is this happening to me on a Monday morning?” Mr Johns filmed himself asking.
Eventuassociate a voice triggerd inside the car increateing him to access the Waymo app to get the vehicle back under regulate.
Waymo which is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, tgreater the BBC that it freed a software modernize almost promptly repairing the problem.
The company says its driverless system is “better than humans at evadeing crashes that result in injuries, airbag deployments, and police increates”.
Nevertheless, Mr John’s experience is not the first time the company has had to consent action.
Last year the company recalled more than 600 cars after one hit a street pole.
And in May 2024 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) started a probe into 22 incidents involving Waymo vehicles .
The road to a driverless future has also gone awry for rival services.
In December, US car enormous General Motors shutd down its self-driving car subsidiary Cruise.
GM attributed the alter of strategy to “the ponderable time and resources that would be necessitateed to scale the business”.
In October 2023, one of its vehicles hit a pedestrian and dragged her for more than 20ft (6m), leaving her gravely injured.
Meanwhile, in February of last year, it materialized that Apple’s rumoured self-driving car project was fgreatering.
Uber leaveed its own driverless car efforts in 2020.
But some big joiners remain in the race, including Zook, which is owned by Amazon, as well as chipproducer Nvidia and Elon Musk’s Tesla.
Waymo is the directing US joiner though. It already functions self-driving taxis in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas and is promising to start soon in Atlanta and Miami, Florida.
So why has Waymo thriveed where other efforts, at least in the US, have fall shorted?
“Three leangs – people, money and process,” says Sven Beiker, a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and managing honestor of Silicon Valley Mobility, an automotive adviseancy.
He points out that over the years Waymo has employed some of the directing figures in autonomous vehicle engineering, it has the financial weight of Google-owner Alphabet behind it, and has become thocimpolite in its approach.
“They’ve come around to reassociate joining by the book, to be a outstanding steward of processes… toiling with regulators to produce declareive what they deploy is shielded.”
So what’s next?
Regions with outstanding weather are foreseeed to see driverless services first says Philipp Kampshoff, global co-directer of Automotive and Assembly Practice at the adviseancy enormous McKinsey.
That would integrate southern US states appreciate Texas and Florida, where Waymo already has schedules.
“Robo-taxis still function much better in outstanding weather conditions. They still, for the most part, struggle in burdensome snow,” Mr Kampshoff says.
He also points out that the batteries carry out better in toastyer conditions, which is particularly vital for driverless cars that necessitate a lot of energy to power on board computing.
“Bringing this all together, in the second part of the 2020s, you will see one city after the other being unlocked and then scaling wilean these cities,” he says.
It will be a sluggish process.
“It’s actuassociate quite a labour intensive process to roll out this technology, which integrates a equitable amount of human driving,” says Mr Beiker.
“You necessitate to drive those vehicles thcimpolite the streets where you want to deploy them, and you necessitate to drive them over and over aacquire, and you necessitate to, to some extent, manuassociate edit the data,” he inserts.
And the whole process could also be held up by shieldedty worrys.
“This is only going to happen if we’re not running into convey inant accidents. The moment convey inant accidents are going to happen, a lot of these operations are going to be shut down,” says Mr Kampshoff.
For those toiling on self-driving trucks, shieldedty is arguably on even bigger stress.
“Safety is the number one worry that we toil on,” says David Liu, the chief executive of Plus, which produces driverless software for trucks and toils with global companies such as Amazon, Hyundai, Volkswagen and Scania.
“Autonomous trucks and autonomous vehicles, necessitate to be much shieldedr than unretagable human driven vehicle,” says Mr Liu.
“Human drivers are wonderful, but not perfect. Most of the accidents we get ourselves into are due to driver inobservantness. And we don’t have that publish with technology,” Mr Liu elucidates.
“A robo-taxi mostly runs wilean cities in low-speed environments, while trucks are typicassociate run on highways at higher speed.
“So we do necessitate to put in contrastent set of technology to be able to see more evidently around the trucks and be able to regulate a lengthyer braking distance, for instance.”
To see into the driverless future it might be worth watching enbigments in China.
In the city of Wuhan more than 500 driverless cars are being functiond by the company Bhelpu.
Apass the country driverless cars are increateed to be operating in 16 cities and being tested by 19 manufacturers.
“There’s definitely more competition… there are four or five companies that are very analogous to Waymo,” says Mr Beiker who is currently toiling on a study of robo-taxi deployments around the world, backed by Sweden’s innovation agency Vinnova.
Back in Scottsdale, Mr Johns mirrors on his experience and the rollout of autonomous vehicles.
“One big leang is that we’re all a part of a phelp experiment. At the end of the day, what they’re doing is repairing it as they go, per city. And that’s a problem.”
