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General Intelligence
Actual Self-Driving Taxis Are Hitting City Streets
Waymo is officially launching a fleet of self-driving cars in Phoenix
OneZero’s General Intelligence puts the week’s biggest A.I. news into context.
Waymo, the driverless car company spun out of Google in 2016, is finally fulfilling its promise to bring truly autonomous cars onto city streets.
The company announced Thursday, October 8, that anyone in a 50-mile swath of Phoenix, Arizona, would be able to hail a fully driverless car in the “near term.”
This is undeniably a big step. Only 5% to 10% of Waymo’s rides so far this year have been fully driverless, according to Business Insider, for a select group of passengers who have signed NDAs. The other 90% to 95% of rides have been completed with a safety driver in the front seat who can stop the car from making a mistake that could kill someone.
The big step also comes with a big caveat: Waymo’s fully driverless feature is limited to a 50-mile area that the company has surely mapped to the millimeter. To give some idea of the amount of data each Waymo car collects, last year it released a dataset of the equivalent of what one car driving for 5.5 hours would collect, and it totaled nearly 2 terabytes of…
