Driverless Taxi Services Want to Take You for a Ride

Two companies seek approval to hit the streets of San Francisco.

April 06, 2023

SAN FRANCISCO—Two ride-hailing services are seeking regulatory approval to transport passengers in driverless vehicles through one of the most densely populated U.S. metro areas 24 hours a day.

According to the Associated Press, Cruise, a General Motors subsidiary, and Waymo, a Google spinoff, both want to meet that goal before year’s end. That would make San Francisco the first U.S. city with two totally driverless services competing against traditional taxis and ride-hailing platforms. But both companies still face numerous challenges, including complaints that their vehicles can make unexpected, traffic-clogging stops that threaten public safety.

Since June, Cruise has been charging people for driverless rides in less congested parts of San Francisco during late night hours. Waymo has been providing free driverless rides in a broader swath of the city while awaiting permission to start charging for the service.

Cruise recently applied for permission to begin testing its robotic vehicles throughout California at speeds of up to 55 miles per hour, which is 25 miles per hour faster than the maximum speed for its robotaxis in San Francisco. Since 2020, Waymo’s driverless ride-hailing service has been carrying passengers on less congested Arizona roads, and the company is now testing driverless cars in Los Angeles. Cruise also has tested its driverless cars in Austin and Phoenix.

″We still have work to do, but it’s improving at a pretty rapid rate,” said Kyle Vogt, CEO of Cruise. “As it gets fine-tuned, it will get really elegant over time, but also the safety continues to improve.”

Both Cruise and Waymo recently announced their driverless fleets have covered more than 1 million miles each without a major accident, but they’ve also experienced nagging problems in San Francisco that have caused traffic headaches and other nuisances that inconvenience people or, worse, block emergency vehicles rushing to an  urgent call.

“The expected things are easy, but it’s the unexpected things that humans react to in real time that are a concern,” Nico Larco, transportation expert and director of the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon, told the AP. “Best case, it will just cause confusion, havoc, congestion if the cars stop in the middle of the road. But the worst cases could actually be harmful to someone.”

Meanwhile, dozens of other technology companies and automakers have joined in a race to develop self-driving technology at a collective cost of more than $100 billion.

In the past year, driverless Cruise vehicles have obstructed firefighters rushing to a three-alarm fire and illegally entered areas where there were ongoing efforts to douse a fire. The abrupt braking and stops by Cruise’s robotaxis have also been under investigation by federal regulators.

Two Associated Press reporters witnessed the potential problems that driverless taxis can cause in mid-February after a Waymo vehicle safely transported them on a trip through San Francisco that required navigating hilly terrain, turning in rush-hour traffic and yielding to pedestrians darting out into the crosswalks. During one ride, the robotaxi stopped in the middle of the street after the reporters got out, and it remained there several minutes while a line of human-operated cars stacked up behind it. Apparently, a back door on the driver’s side hadn’t completely closed.

General Motors, Cruise’s owner, is so confident in the future of robotaxis it predicts Cruise will generate $1 billion in revenue by 2025. That optimism is in sharp contrast to the experience of Ford Motor, which paid $1 billion in 2017 to acquire driverless startup Argo AI, only to shut down the division in October following a $2.7 billion loss and failing to find a buyer for the autonomous technology.

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