Seven months after their planned launch date, Waymo is re-booting their driverless taxi fleet in Phoenix and anyone living in the suburbs of Chandler, Tempe and Mesa can hail one. In Waymo’s promotional tweet, they stated “you’ve been asking, and now it’s here”. But are we going to use it now that it’s finally an option? 

The Chrysler Pacifica taxis will be restricted to a 50-square mile area but Waymo operators will monitor the cars remotely and intervene if unforeseen circumstances arise, such as a road closure.  When you’re in the driverless car, it’s a strange experience. The steering wheel turns itself, the pedals move up and down like keys on a piano and the seatbelt still clicks into place despite the fact it has nobody to protect. Andrew Hawkins recounts “The vehicle drives more assertively than it has in previous trips…nudging its way into intersections in a way that feels less robotic than it has in the past”. There are about 600 cars in the Phoenix taxi-fleet but it is unknown how many would operate as driverless. Only vetted customers can currently use the Waymo One service but “over the next several weeks” they intend to “welcome more people directly into the service through our app.”

For the taxi fleet to be successful, customers would need to trust driverless cars. Chris Jones, an automotive analyst at a research firm in Canalys, stresses to the BBC “Trust will be important as people ask, for example: would I put my daughter in a Waymo to take her to school?”. Evidence suggests people aren’t completely yet ready to hand over their autonomy to a robot.

A poll conducted by Partners for Automated Vehicle Education revealed about 48 percent of Americans said they would never get in a taxi if it didn’t human driver. Understandably, this is an instinctive reaction but not one that is necessarily factually-sound. A 2008 survey by the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that human error was responsible for 95 percent of crashes. Stan Boland, CEO of FiveAI, tells The Guardian “When you eliminate human error, our roads become dramatically safer: no more drink-driving, phone calls at the wheel, carelessness, inattention or plain bad driving.”  It is anticipated that when the novelty wears off and self-driving cars become more common-place, people will slowly become accustomed. 

The Google-owned company has been working on their technology for years. Waymo began pioneering their self-driving cars in 2017 when they trialled Waymo Driver in the Metro area in Phoenix. Since then, their cars have navigated high-speed roads across a service area bigger than the city of San Francisco. Between five and 10 percent of their taxi rides given in 2020 were driverless and they used these journeys to consistently improve the driverless experience. They released questionnaires to passengers to gain insight and sought feedback from Waymo partners and federal and local authorities. 

Waymo plan to expand their coverage area and hope “in the near term, 100 percent of our rides will be fully driverless”. It took over three years to finalize the current 50-square-mile area in Phoenix and expanding to other parts of the United States, with much higher densities, may prove tricky. 

Some critics think Waymo is being far too optimistic with their expansion plans. They highlight that self-driving cars are only successful insofar as the maps remain high resolution and nothing changes to outdate the maps. Elon Musk agrees and tweeted “we barked up that tree for way too long (sigh). Gives a false sense of victory being close… but reality is just too messy & weird.” In another response tweet he said “Waymo is impressive, but a highly specialized solution. The Tesla approach is a general solution”. 

Perhaps Elon Musk is right or perhaps he is just bitter. Regardless, Waymo is the current industry leader. There’s a long road ahead and unlike so many other Artificial Intelligence developments, it is prudent that such companies are taking baby-steps towards the release of self-driving cars. It still begs the question; would you trust the robot?