Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “I took a ride in Waymo’s fully driverless car”.
Hey it’s Andy with the verge I’m about to go for a ride in one of Way, most fully driverless cars here in Phoenix Arizona, as you can see, there’s no driver in the front, I’m not nervous. Are you nervous, I’m not nervous? Here we are riding in a minivan with nobody in the front seat with pedestrians and cyclists and other vehicles out on a public road. It’S a surreal experience. Google has been working on self-driving cars for over 10 years now in 2016, Google’s spun out its project as a separate company called way mo, and since then it’s been testing hundreds of vehicles here in Arizona mostly for an uber like ride-hailing service, called way mo. One few years ago, I had the chance to ride in one of way Mo’s driverless vehicles, but it was on a private and closed course and since then, most of the trips that way mo does in its autonomous vehicles, including the one that we took last year, Have trained safety drivers in the front seat until now says good morning way mo rider our destination is baby Ches Cajun kitchen.
That’S asked me to start the right. So let’s do that heading to babyface, Cajun kitchen make sure your seat belt is back all right. So we’re pulling out of this this parking lot right now and on to public road. Oh there goes another way: Moe car, as you can see, we’re in a way most central here they just wave to us.
I don’t think they knew that. Maybe there was anybody in the front seat there and we just made a right-hand turn and changed lanes into the center lane. It’S very natural. So here we come some construction right here, which is a very challenging for self-driving cars and it kind of held it with really no problem at all.
It slowed down a little bit now. It’S changing lanes and just kind of breeze past that construction site there, as if you know it, was being driven by a human. Quite honestly, this is our destination, nothing really eventful to speak of, and now it’s coming back right now and we’re gon na take it for a ride back to where we came from, which is the watershed way. Moe was nice enough to. Let us choose the pickup spot and the destination for where we’re going. We had to vet it with them first, but still it’s nice to know that there’s a little bit of dynamic decision-making going on here with this, with this car I’ll get in verse, 2.
The you don’t mind all our stuff is still here. That’S great! You can trust these robots. This time, I’m going to press the button up here on the headliner there’s another way that we can get the car to get going, and that was a pretty nice acceleration. They’Re not as cautious as you might maybe expect it was felt very organic yeah. That’S really really weird seeing the side of the steering wheel, kind of move on its own, like that. I, like the this. The notice on the steering wheel to says do not touch steering wheel or pedals. The vehicle will pull over as sort of a warning to anyone that might try to mess with the the driverless car. It looks like we’re gon na be taking a right-hand turn here on Henkel, which looks like it’s gon na be into some bit of a residential area, so away from sort of the more heavily traffic commercial zone that we are in and into more of a residential Zone we’ve interest in so it looks like we’re, making a little bit of a routing correction, we’re going back. The way we came and the car is making some adjustments into the route that it’s choosing. Obviously, it will allow that we have to make some allowances for a car with nobody in the front seat. It’Ll be interesting to see how way most smooths out some of those things, though, going forward, as this becomes a service that is available to more people, and it looks like we’re going to be turning into the left turning lane as we approach our destination. This is the part where I get a selfie for my own purposes. I’M about to take a left turn and a fully driverless car. We did it making our way slowly around the parking lot to drop us off at the entrance to the watershed and then we’ll be done, and we will say goodbye to our way mo.
Oh, it stopped for the pigeons you’d love to see it. You absolutely love to see them stopping for the pigeons. No other company is testing fully driverless vehicles at the scale and speed that way mo is the company has trained its AI with a vast data set of images and driving scenarios, it has a highly detailed high-def map of the whole area down to the centimeter.
It took way mo a decade to get to this point where it felt confident enough in the safety of its technology, to pull drivers out of the driver’s seat. But you know only for a tightly control 50 square mile area, mostly suburban and mostly dry conditions with a pretty basic road layout, and these vehicles aren’t totally alone in the wilderness way mo. Has a team of remote employees that watch the real-time feed from each of the vehicles eight cameras and can help with the touch of a button if the software runs into a tricky spot and needs a human eye to figure it out these these folks, don’t joystick The car or anything like that, but they can help answer specific questions that a car might have about an ambiguous situation and that’s where human, intuition and human understanding of the entire context is super-important, like you know that moving van, is it really staying there? Is it about to start driving? Well if the doors down and they’re unloading a lamp out of the back, it’s gon na be there for a while. That’S not something we’ve gotten around to making the cars smart enough to understand, but a human sees it in a moment and can make the Kin Kin send that signal. So it’s not really a command to the car. It’S just adding information when you think about self-driving cars, you probably picture something from like Minority Report or Total Recall, drive fully driverless cars with no one in the front seat or maybe no front seat at all or a steering wheel for that matter, while way most Driverless vehicles are getting us closer to that imagined future. There’S still a lot going on behind the scenes that we don’t see. I mean the level of production required for each of these driverless vehicles is immense: sensors cameras, compute, AI remote assistance operators, fleet managers, experts estimate that each self-driving test vehicle could cost $ 400,000 alone, and that’s just taking into account the sensors and compute.
It’S all of that really worth it way. Moe seems to think so I mean human beings are terrible drivers. The vast majority of vehicle crashes, like over 90 %, are because of mistakes made by human drivers. Self-Driving cars could be safer, but we really just don’t know yet there just aren’t enough of them on the road to really prove that out. So we’ll have to wait until they bust out beyond this tiny section of suburban Arizona and to a much larger and more dangerous and more complex world before we know whether self-driving cars are really worth all this effort. If you’d rather see a video about electric cars, we just did a drive with Porsches new all-electric Tyco on outside of LA in the mountains. It was a gorgeous video. I highly recommend you check it out at youtube.com, slash The Verge .