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Waymo finally let a reporter ride in a fully driverless car
It's been almost two years since Waymo first announced that it was testing fully autonomous vehicles on public roads. Not long afterwards, the company said it planned to offer a fully driverless service to the public by the end of 2018.
The rollout has been a lot slower than expected. Over the course of 2018, most of Waymo's cars continued to have drivers behind the wheel. When Waymo launched its commercial service in December 2018, every car had a driver behind the wheel.
But now Waymo seems to be cautiously moving forward with fully driverless technology. Last month, Waymo told people in its closed testing program that they'd start getting rides in driverless vehicles. Now in a new piece for Techcrunch, Ed Niedermeyer reports on his own experience riding in a fully driverless car.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Sunday November 03 2019, @07:56PM (2 children)
Exactly...
They want to make transportation pods to obliterate the traditional point-to-point taxi-type service.
The problem is that model still jams the roads even worse compared to the larger-vehicle mass-transit type models.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday November 03 2019, @10:00PM (1 child)
Larger vehicles can be self-driven the same as small vehicles. It's a very small leap from single occupant self-driven taxi service to multiple occupant self-drive taxi service (e.g., Uber/Lyft shared rides) to self-driven mass public transit.
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(Score: 2) by drussell on Sunday November 03 2019, @11:08PM
Indeed, however that is not the model they are aiming for.
Things like commuter trains and busses are already manned by pretty much the minimum number of people, to the point that there is typically a need for many more security personnel that those actually operating the 'mobiles. :)