SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 04 2019, @01:59AM
The full story from the journalist is at https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/01/hailing-a-driverless-ride-in-a-waymo/amp/ [techcrunch.com] It's pretty interesting, pointing out that in addition to self-driving, the steps to removing the safety driver (human) also included negotiations with fire/cops to make sure the car did the right thing in around emergency vehicles, and a bunch of other "human" things.
Also mentions that these rides with no safety driver are in a very limited area, much smaller than the full area served by Waymo cars around Phoenix (with safety drivers). While not mentioned, I have the impression (again) that Google really appreciates the statistics--to be better than humans you have to be really good. And Google isn't in the game to get there first at all costs, they don't want to sacrifice a few cars/passengers for the cause.