Does anyone know what Waymo is doing in Phoenix? I saw a lot of there cars there but they were always being driven by someone in the driver seat (Jan-Feb 2022). They say they are driverless there but I never saw it and probably saw 500 Waymo cars/Waymo cars 500 times while there.
Is Waymo still planning to launch soon in Phoenix? They were going to start offering rides to the public this fall without the employee in the car. Or did they change their mind? If anyone has ridden in those vans I am curious to know how well their early rider program is performing in terms of not needing the human driver to intervene. I check the news for a Waymo launch every day, because it will be one of the most significant events in the history of self driving cars.
Is tesla able to perform at Waymos level in phoenix because I would expect them to be showing that off if they could? Let's be real, there has got to be some teslas with autopilot in Phoenix and the fact that they aren't trying to upshow Waymo with their Phoenix autopilot stats shows they cannot beat Waymo.
Same here (downtown Phoenix area) -- the driverless Waymos have been awesome. Occasionally they get confused but it seems pretty rare. They're better than a lot of the other drivers on the road out here.
I'm mostly excited that they upped the allowed passenger count from 3 to 4. Usually we take a car if we're going out to dinner with friends but the 3 passenger limit made taking one of these a pain in the ass or impossible.
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.
I think you are really understating it. I believe Chandler, AZ has been Waymo's proving grounds for years, and according to this article (https://www.wsj.com/us-news/waymo-phoenix-arizona-self-drivi...) the Phoenix area is the leader of autonomous vehicle service.
The cars that have been driving around Mountain View have been level 3, since there was still a driver. Waymo does have level 4 cars in Phoenix right now, which is incredibly impressive. Whether or not they are capable of fully driverless functionality in Mountain View right now is unknown, but I sincerely doubt it given it's their hometown and if they could they would.
Waymo is clearly the leader and making great strides, but they're not there yet. By the end of this year when they officially launch to the public in Phoenix we'll have a much better idea of how far along they really are.
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.
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 have self driving cars without safety drivers going around Phoenix so they at least kind of work. I don't know if that will roll our globally in the near term but it might.
Wow! Waymo is now confident enough in their vehicles that they're willing to risk letting the public use them completely unsupervised? This seems like a huge milestone for self-driving car tech.
I wonder what their current disengagement rates are for Chandler; at this point it has to be really close to zero, right?
Lyft has been dispatching Waymo self-driving vans (with safety drivers) in Chandler AZ for a while now. I've opted out of Waymo for my occasional rides with Lyft, so I can't say how frequently they show up. But I can say there are lots of the vans running in the service area.
reply