Newsweek illustration/ Getty Images/Ready or Not, the Robotaxis Are Coming
By Monica Sager
Live News Reporter
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In Los Angeles, it is possible — right now — to drive from Santa Monica to West Hollywood without touching a steering wheel or gas pedal (provided you don't get on the freeway).
In Phoenix, you can go from the airport to an appointment downtown and back without interacting with a driver. In San Francisco, you can cruise the Embarcadero all the way down to Oracle Park for a Giants game, and then head over to the Presidio for a view of the Golden Gate Bridge without so much as checking your rear view.
Driverless taxi cabs, or robotaxis, long thought to be "just a few years away," have arrived, deployed by a handful of big American companies on the roads of a small but growing number of American cities.
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Now, two of the leading robotaxi providers told Newsweek they are just looking for people to embrace the technology.
"We envision a not-so-distant future in which people become less dependent on personal vehicles because of the increased accessibility and convenience of [autonomous] ride-hailing," Chris Ludwick, director of product management at Waymo, told Newsweek.
"This shared mobility model then enables people to more easily access other safe and sustainable transit options, like public transit, cycling, and biking; but we also anticipate driving alongside human-operated vehicles for years to come."
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Waymo, part of Google parent Alphabet, is the leader in the burgeoning space, with driverless taxis currently on the road in three cities with a fourth — Austin, Texas — on the way.
Ludwick said the company's mission is to become the "world's most trusted driver" and is scaling slowly with "extensive collaboration with local, state and federal regulators and community organizations."
The program in Phoenix serves the city and northeast areas surrounding it. Ludwick said this area now accounts for the largest autonomouss ride-hailing service territory in the U.S.
Because Waymo relies on extensive mapping done beforehand, the service takes time to deploy, though Ludwick said each market makes the next one significantly easier.
Meanwhile Zoox, owned by Amazon, said this month it is expanding its test fleet to Austin and Miami after establishing itself in San Francisco, Seattle and Las Vegas. Zoox differentiates itself from Waymo by its bespoke vehicles, which look more like robots than taxis.
"In contrast to competitors who are retrofitting traditional passenger vehicles with autonomous technology, Zoox has developed a purpose-built vehicle from the ground up with the objective to operate an autonomous ride-hailing service," Zoox spokesperson Marisa Steck told Newsweek.
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Andy Piper, the vice president of vehicle development at Zoox, noted that other developments "iterate on something that's been done before."
"It means evolution rather than revolution, but it's very rare that you get the chance in an automotive career to start from a blank sheet of paper," Piper said. "This was that opportunity."
Zoox vehicles are designed with carriage seating, with four seats facing each other and airbags designed to deploy in a horseshoe-shaped curtain between riders to keep everyone separate and protected.
"This isn't a car," the company's website states. "It's more like your lounge."
Zoox also employs a fleet of retrofitted Toyota Highlanders that it uses to test its autonomous software.
The promise of self-driving cars
There are more than 280 million registered cars in the U.S., and they spend more than 95% of their time parked, on average. When those cars are in motion, most of them are contributing to the quarter of U.S. air pollution caused by the transportation sector.
Those are the twin opportunities for the robotaxi industry, its supporters say.
"While switching to hybrid or all-electric vehicles can help cut emissions, it doesn't solve all of these problems," a blog post on the Zoox website reads.
Zoox sees a world where its all-electric vehicles are shared, on the road 24/7 with zero emissions and a constant stream of passengers. When one person isn't riding, someone else is.
"We reduce the carbon footprint associated with vehicle manufacturing because we're manufacturing fewer vehicles with greater utilization rates," the company said. "There's less congestion on roads, so everyone else can travel more efficiently too."
Self-driving cars "see" the world around them using a combination of radar, cameras, sensors and laser-based LiDAR that, put together, detect a constantly changing physical environment and tell the car what to do — from braking to steering to acceleration.
While robotaxi supporters claim the vehicles are the new "safest driver" on the road — often noting how inherently dangerous human drivers are — the technology is not infallible.
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The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has asked Zoox to provide information about two recent incidents in which the company's retrofitted Highlanders braked suddenly, causing motorcycles to rear-end the test vehicles.
Waymo is also being scrutinized by NHTSA over dozens of incidents involving its deployed autonomous vehicles. Most recently, a Waymo taxi drove into a telephone pole in Phoenix, leading the company to update its software to better account for such obstacles. Its cars were also set on fire by angry crowds in San Francisco earlier this year, days after one of the vehicles hit a bicyclist.
And General Motors' struggling Cruise unit was dealt a major setback last year when it pulled its entire robotaxi fleet after one of the vehicles hit and seriously injured a pedestrian in San Francisco.
But perhaps reflecting the public's growing acceptance of the technology, that incident was not the death knell of the robotaxi industry. Instead, GM said this week it would pour another $850 million into Cruise as it slowly makes its way back into testing in Phoenix, Dallas and Houston — with human safety drivers, at least for now.
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