waymo

An autonomous driving technology company developing self-driving vehicles and ride-hailing services to enhance mobility and safety.

Waymo

Waymo touts itself as the future of driverless vehicles. But many Americans find the technology difficult to accept because of safety concerns. There have been some accidents with Waymo cars. So how concerned should we be? To help answer that question, the company gave our Chris Fang an exclusive first look at one of its fully autonomous cars operating at a higher speed on a freeway in Phoenix. 

So we're getting on the freeway. You're along for a self driving first. We are the first true passengers invited for a ride on a freeway in one of Waymo fully autonomous electric Jaguar wires. Meaning there's no one behind the wheel. The car stays under the speed limit which is 65. Riding with us is wh Mo's principal software engineer Pierre kman. 

How important is it for Waymo to be able to operate on the freeway? Yeah, freeways are critical for wh. Uh, that's one of the number one requests we get from our writers. 

Wh, the nation's first fully self driving ride hailing service, is owned by Google's parent alphabet. It already operates.

More than 150,000 paid driverless rides a week in Arizona and California with plans to expand further to Austin Atlanta and Miami. But so far not on freeways but that's about to change after months of autonomous testing in the Phoenix area. Gathering data from tens of thousands of miles driven with the goal of adding freeway passenger service in 2025. 

Freeways are so important because it's all about time. They're a lot faster to get from point A to point B. My ride from the airport is about 15 minutes unless.

You take only surface streets and then it's 30 and competition is coming. Amazon backed Zuk aims to launch in Las Vegas next year. Elon Musk rolled out Tesla's Robo taxi concept in October. One very important thing on freeway is that stopping is not uh the right thing to do. So the car needs to find the right lane to maneuver into. 

What's the biggest challenge to getting the car to work well on the freeway? Part of it is the speed because the speeds are so high and the mistakes are so costly. Uh so it's really.

About uh never making a mistake. Driving defensively and predicting things that can go wrong is that the bar. Never making a mistake. So the bar is to make as few mistakes as possible and be safer than a human driver would be. 

Wh Mo sites its data showing in over 25 million miles driven its cars saw 72% fewer injury causing collisions compared to human drivers. But they are not perfect. Run to the parade as seen in viral videos like this one showing AO accidentally driving into a parade route before safely.

Pulling over the vehicles are equipped with cameras, radar, and other sensors allowing them to see a full 360°. The work now is focused on fine-tuning how the cars handle freeway driving, like dodging debris in the road. If you were going to give the WIO today a grade on this drive, how is it done? I would say 6 out of 10. Uh, I have a bit of a professional bias; I take off points easily. 

What do you think it needs to do better? So I think some of these small reactions could be smoother. Smoothing out the ride to.

Get its passengers in a faster lane for the new year for CVS mornings. I'm Chris Van Cleave in Phoenix. It's pretty cool, but I to me it would have the only way I would be comfortable is if every vehicle was a d driverless. Because you can't compensate for the mistakes that humans make, right? Yeah, I mean the statistics were interesting that it at least for weo based on their data that it's safer than when there are drivers. But there's just something for me still unnatural about seeing no one in the driver's.

Seat there was that shot where Chris was talking and the driver's seat's empty and I'm like what's happening. 

And it turns to him turn to you. I was like wait there's really no one in that car wow I need I need I need a face I need a name I need it all.

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