Progress in Fully-Autonomous Ride-Hailing and Trucking for the 2023-2020 Transportation and Transportation Challenges of the Autonomous Vehicle Industry
Only friends and family of Cruise workers will have access to the company’s rideride service, which is fully self-driving. But that will gradually grow to include people unaffiliated with Cruise. The company opened waiting lists for both cities this week and expects to begin offering rides once it has enough vehicles to meet the demand, a spokesperson said.
The company boasted that it would only take 90 days to go from zero to self driving in a city, without having to do as much testing as it had in San Francisco. Indeed, it did take years for Cruise to launch its paid driverless taxi service in San Francisco.
The company had originally planned to launch a commercial service there in 2015, but decided against it after determining that it wasn’t ready. The service later launched in 2022.
Last week, the National Highway Traffic Administration said it had opened an investigation into incidents in which hard braking by Cruise vehicles has resulted in rear-end collisions and blocked traffic. The company said it welcomed the scrutiny, noting that its vehicles have caused “zero life-threatening injuries or fatalities.”
Developing cars that can drive without a human is a unique challenge. Mistakes can have serious consequences if fully self-piloted vehicles are not prepared to handle them. The solution to these problems includes innovation in the areas of machine learning, advanced sensors, simulation software, and computing frameworks.
In 2023, this will lead to AV deployments across multiple markets. Over the years, many AV companies—we at Waymo, and others at Aurora, Cruise, Motional, Nuro, and Oxbotica to name just a few—have been making tremendous progress in cities as diverse as Las Vegas and San Francisco in the US and Oxford in England. Given the fundamental complexity of the problem, consolidation in the AV industry is inevitable and will continue. We will also see rapid and exciting expansion as a result of building on shared technical progress. Riders in San Francisco and the cities of Wuhan and Chongqing in China can already also hail cars with no human driver in the front seat. In the next year and a half, we will see the rapid expansion of fully-automated ride-hailing services in new markets.
Trucking will also see progress. Autonomous trucks are already hauling thousands of tons of goods for Wayfair, UPS, FedEx, Coca Cola—and even the Girl Scouts of North Texas. In a few years, big rigs will become more common in Texas and Arizona. Additional partnerships will be signed with carriers and consumer brands. The increases in freight volumes show how AVs could help solve the shortages of truck drivers. (According to the International Road Transport Union, the world was short more than 2.6 million truck drivers in 2021). If you live in the southwestern US, there is a very good chance that your new coffee table, sofa, or winter sweater will be transported autonomously.
While the San Francisco Transportation Authority supports the expansion of driverless technology, it wants more transparency and additional safeguards put in place. The data that companies should collect is how often their vehicles block traffic and how long it takes. It wants to restrict the operation of audiovisual companies during peak travel hours until they demonstrate that they can operate without interruption of street operations and transit services.
“A series of limited deployments with incremental expansions — rather than unlimited authorizations — offer the best path toward public confidence in driving automation and industry success in San Francisco and beyond,” the letter reads.
Zoox: A Safety-Function-Free Autonomous AV for the Public Roads of California, and Its Implications for Waymo
A Cruise vehicle tried to run over a fire hose at an active fire scene earlier this month, while another almost did the same. Firefighters say they could only stop the vehicle from running over the hose after “they shattered a front window” of the car. Other incidents involve Cruise calling 911 about “unresponsive” passengers on three separate occasions, only for emergency services to arrive and find that the rider just fell asleep.
Cruise has a publicly reported safety record with zero deaths or serious injuries in the millions of miles they have driven.
“These letters are a standard part of the regulatory process, and we have long appreciated a healthy dialogue with city officials and government agencies in California,” Waymo spokesperson Katherine Barna says in a statement to The Verge. “Waymo will have the opportunity to reply in our submission to the CPUC next week.”
Zoox is one of dozens of companies currently testing AVs on public roads in the Golden State. Despite being in a race to bring the technology to market, it is still making improvements by introducing a new type of car that lacks traditional controls and is not considered a car in the modern sense of the word.
The prototype was not made to meet federal safety standards or be over 25 mph. Firefly “was also never designed for production, as it was clearly a test/research vehicle platform (which Waymo then abandoned),” he added. The Zooxrobotaxi is fully street legal and has a comprehensive set of safety and comfort features for our riders.