Member-only story
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 data. The company has been testing in Phoenix for two years with between 300 and 400 cars, according to TechCrunch, meaning it has potentially logged petabytes of information about the city’s landscape.
“Just like a human driver who has driven the same road hundreds of times mostly needs to focus only on the parts of the environment that change, such as other vehicles or pedestrians, the Waymo Driver knows permanent features of the road from our highly detailed maps and then uses its onboard systems to accurately perceive the world around it, focusing more on moving objects,” Waymo wrote in a blog post last September.
Going fully driverless, in addition to bringing Waymo closer to its goal of building an all-purpose driving algorithm, could be a way to reduce the risk for safety drivers, who have been forced to work in potentially unsafe conditions through the pandemic and wildfires, according to The Verge. Though the effect will…
