Waymo and Cruise Permitted Commercial Robotaxi Services in San Francisco

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Today’s Highlights:

• 🤖Waymo and Cruise Permitted Commercial Robotaxi Services in San Francisco🚘

Cruise and Waymo’s Quest to Replace Human Drivers

Driving is an activity found everywhere. Whether to run errands, go to work, or simply have a day or night out with friends and family, you see people driving in every city, whether in personal vehicles or in rideshares. It has for so long become a universal activity that aside from actual laws, there exist unwritten driving etiquettes too.

After centuries of evolution, lots of people have often wondered how far driving can go, imagining that we would someday have people driving flying cars and cars that drive themselves. With such massive technological advancements over the years, what was once mere imagination has actually started coming true.

Not only are we getting closer to the first flying car available for ridesharing, courtesy of Joby Aviation, but we now have self-driving cars, often referred to as robotaxis, available in multiple American cities.

Cruise

Cruise, a San Francisco-based autonomous-vehicle subsidiary of General Motors, first started developing the concept of its self-driving cars in 2013. Founders Kyle Vogt and Dan Kan began by offering autonomous on-demand features it named RP-1 for the Audi A4, with hopes that the startup could retrofit all vehicles into a highway autopilot system.

Upon realizing that greater challenges are faced by people when driving in crowded cities, however, Cruise abandoned the RP-1 project and built a fully autonomous vehicle using the Nissan Leaf instead. The startup then applied to accelerator Y Combinator and was acquired by General Motors in March 2016 after graduating.

Fast forward a few years, and Cruise publicly launched its fully driverless robotaxi service in San Francisco, Austin, and Chandler, a city southeast of Phoenix, right before 2022 ended. The service started as a limited one, where services in Austin were only available on Wednesday to Sunday from 10 pm to 5.30 am in Austin and Monday to Friday from 7 pm to 2 am in Chandler.

Very recently, Cruise had just gotten a permit to offer its robotaxi services 24/7 across San Francisco, and the same applies to another commercial robotaxi company, Waymo.

Waymo

Waymo, also a San-Francisco based company, was founded by Anthony Levandowski and Sebastian Thrun. Waymo started developing self-driving technology in 2009 under Google's parent company, Alphabet, and has since gone through plenty of milestones.

Waymo strives to find a new way forward in mobility. Believing in self-driving technology being a safer, more efficient, and more accessible form of transport, Waymo spent over a decade developing its software.

By utilizing Google’s data centers, Waymo was able to develop a driving simulator that allowed it to teach its computer to drive and learn the ways of public roads, allowing it to drive in new environments and come across new experiences without leaving the garage.

The simulator allowed new scenarios and patterns to be taught to the car so that it could learn particular skills needed to excel in driving. Waymo engineers were able to identify any areas that needed improvement, adding new capabilities and improving existing ones whenever needed. The simulator allowed the team to drive the car for more than 3 million miles every day, totaling one billion miles of testing, equivalent to circling the equator five times every hour.

Aside from virtual environments, Waymo also tested its self-driving cars with 2 million miles of real-world driving, giving its cars the ability to detect and respond to emergency vehicles, master multi-lane four-way stops, and anticipate unpredictable human behavior on the road.

All that training gave Waymo the ability to complete the world’s first fully-self driven car ride without any human safety assistance. In 2015, a legally blind friend of Waymo’s principal engineer named Steve Mahan tested the car. Steve rode the car in Austin with everyday traffic, only accompanied by Waymo’s software and sensors.

This was exciting for Steve, as this was the first time in 12 years that he experienced being fully alone in a car. The car successfully navigated around four-way stops, a pedestrian with a stroller, unprotected left-hand turns, and various everyday road obstacles.

Since that first ride, Waymo has brought forth its self-driving cars to Phoenix, Austin, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

Trained Robots, Bad Humans

Both Cruise and Waymo believe in a future without careless and distracted driving. The two autonomous vehicles company have continuously pushed the narrative that humans are bad drivers and that their technology is crucial to building said safe future.

Cruise released full-page ads in the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Sacramento Bee with the headline “Humans are terrible drivers.” as a way to push its campaign. Cruise also released a petition for the CPUC to grant its expansion permit.

Waymo shared very similar sentiments through a blog post filled with a study on drivers speeding in San Francisco and Phoenix. The study shows that in 2020, speeding contributed to 11,258 deaths and 308,013 injuries, accounting for one-third of all traffic fatalities. The company expressed that the Waymo Driver is designed to follow speed limits and predict the maneuvers of vehicles around it, ensuring safe transport.

Concerns and Criticisms

The future Cruise and Waymo desire is getting closer since The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has officially given them permission to offer commercial robotaxi services across San Francisco 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The permit also gives the companies authorization to put an unlimited number of robotaxis on the road.

Regulators and various parties are in favor of this notion, including Jessie Wollensky, a blind woman who feels that being a Waymo vehicle would ensure that she would get to where she wants to on her own terms without fear of being harassed, groped, assaulted, or attacked. One of Cruise’s beta testers, Daniel Gregorski, feels similarly. As a nurse assistant working nights, he finds autonomous vehicles as a safer and more comfortable option compared to a taxi.

Some members of the public have also expressed that this form of transport may make streets safer and greener and that Cruise and Waymo may bring more unionized jobs.

Though various parties support AVs, there are several communities that have expressed concerns as well. Instances of AVs malfunctioning in the middle of the street, seen in cases of robotaxis blocking traffic at intersections and obstructing medical vehicles, have made residents hesitant about the expansion.

Some parties have also raised the issue of AVs discriminating against communities that are unbanked and digitally illiterate. The Americans with Disabilities Act community is also worried that robotaxis aren’t ADA-compliant* and has asked the CPUC to make clearer guidelines regarding this issue.

*ADA-Compliant: Also referred to as ADA compliance, stands for the Americans with Disabilities Act Standards for Accessible Design. This states that all electronic and information technology must be accessible to people with disabilities.

Another argument against robotaxis is the fear that they might take away even more jobs, from taxi and ride-hail drivers, for example, in a city that is already suffering from high numbers of homelessness. Lastly, in a city already over-crowded, some parties feel instead of focusing on technological advancements, the city should prioritize improving paratransit services and micro-mobility.

With the permit already granted and the two companies visibly eager for the expansion, we can only wait to find out how these self-driving cars will go, and whether or not they’ll run into trouble.

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