In November 2017, Waymo announced that it had begun testing driverless cars without a safety driver in the driver position. In October 2018, Waymo announced that its test vehicles had traveled in automated mode for over 10,000,000 miles (16,000,000 km), increasing by about 1,000,000 miles (1,600,000 kilometres) per month.
In Arizona, Waymo has fully autonomous taxi service you can use right now. https://waymo.com/apply/
Waymo is already using autonomous vehicles in AZ without a safety driver behind the wheel. There are fully autonomous Waymo vehicles driving around in parts of AZ.
just took a waymo fully autonomous (no safety driver, nobody in the driver seat, no manual override) taxi in scottsdale to lunch. was surreal. supposedly over 1m miles with no faults.
Waymo ordered 60,000 mini vans and 20k suvs. They are running full self driving in Arizona without safety drivers. Self driving is already here. Waymo just started petitioning California for the ability to start charging. I bet we see sf go live with Waymo taxis at the start of 2021.
Doesn’t Wayno already have level 5 autonomous vehicles operating in the Phoenix area? So far they’ve had about 65,000 driverless miles[1] (and 6 million miles with safety drivers). That number should increase pretty quickly now that they’re scaling up their service. So far it seems like the main problem is that they get rear-ended by inattentive human drivers.
I don't think that's the case at all. At Google I/O they announced that Waymo has been doing fully autonomous driving in a limited fashion with real people in Phoenix for ~6 months.
Right now we have fully autonomous vehicles operating within a roughly 100 square mile geo-fenced area of Chandler Arizona. They are overseen by remote operates who intervene when the vehicles get hung up. The vehicles stop and start at predetermined pick up points. But within those constraints, they work.
Waymo has been developing the technology for 9 years, and have accumulated nearly 8 million real world test miles in that time.For the last 18 months (or so) they have focused their testing in the Chandler area, but are not yet ready for a commercial launch.
For every new area they head into they need to solve specific problems at specific intersections. The vehicles are not yet validated for a full range of weather conditions. There is a huge amount of preliminary work that goes into preparing an area for commercial operations.
Developing an autonomous vehicle that can go anywhere as well as a human might just be 10 orders of magnitude than for commercial aviation, but what Waymo has is enough to disrupt.
> Decades of promises of self-driving cars. And still nothing able to drive without a driver.
Waymo have driven 20 million miles autonomously since 2009, and as of late 2020 claim 74,000 of those were done completely driverless. They're still a far cry from being common, but they're here and they're impressively safe.
Sure, you can move the goalposts and say it's not "true" self-driving until it can handle all environments and weather conditions and whatnot, but self-driving cars are here. The question is how fast they'll go mainstream.
Self driving cars are not almost there, they are already a reality.
Waymo is testing self driving cars hailing passengers without a safety driver since last October and soon it will start a commercial service.
Uber gave up in December 2020 and sold off their technology to Aurora.
Waymo is now offering rides in Phoenix AZ with no "safety driver".[1] "Waymo One is our fully public, fully autonomous ride hailing service. Now anyone can take fully autonomous rides anytime they're in Metro Phoenix. Just download the app and ride right away."[1]
Waymo also now has significant non-Alphabet investors, having raised US $2 billion in 2020.
Waymo is the only one actually scaling driverless taxis. They’ve gone from providing public rides in 1 city (Phoenix) to 3 cities (+SF, LA) with a 4th one (+Austin) coming soon. They’ve given more than a million rides, with the majority of them in the last year. No one else is doing this.
If other companies thought they’d hitch on to Waymo after they started giving rides in 2017, then that’s on them. Because Waymo has been pretty clear that their scaling is going to be methodical and not instantaneous.
In Arizona, Waymo has fully autonomous taxi service you can use right now. https://waymo.com/apply/
Is that a lot of hype? Maybe.
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