Waymo would like you to stop being weirded out by the prospect of getting a ride from its robotaxis. But this Alphabet subsidiary has a bit of a traffic problem with its safety-first sales pitch: It’s not the only company trying to make self-driving cars a commercial reality, nor is it the most visible.Pop culture isn’t helping either, as the moderator of a Waymo-hosted panel held at Google’s Washington, D.C. offices reminded everybody. The season premiere of Grey’s Anatomy features a robotaxi from a fictional firm called RoGo—the car itself, inconveniently enough for the hosts, was called “Wayne”—repeatedly ramming an ambulance.
David Vise, a former Washington Post reporter and author of the 2005 book The Google Story, then invited his fellow panelists to address that anxiety.“It does reinforce why we’re doing what we’re doing with first responders,” said Matt Schwall, Waymo’s director of safety incident management, who described how Waymo visits local fire and police departments to explain how its self-driving system works before starting tests in a city. “That’s their fear of the self-driving car.”(He added that firefighters are often more interested in looking under the hood: “They’re used to cutting cars open.”) Vise, who noted his own pleasant experiences with Waymo robotaxis in the company’s first market of Phoenix, said that despite 50,000 people dying in car crashes every year in the US (the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s actual estimated total for 2022 is 42,795), any collision involving an autonomous vehicle is sure to spawn “a headline and a big story.” He also said both of the bartenders hired to work the subsequent reception had told him that they had qualms about getting into a driverless car like the Waymo vehicle parked outside.Pam Fischer, senior director of external engagement at the Governors Highway Safety Association, said the problem is not a lack of data showing that self-driving cars can improve on the human-driven kind. In December, Waymo released a study showing an 85% reduction in injury-causing crashes over 7.14 million driverless miles.“The public doesn’t really follow the data,” she said. “We have to find a way to tell the story that’s compelling, that’s reassuring.” She added that self-driving cars have the ability to get safer faster than humans can, saying, “The hardest thing we do is change behavior.”But Fischer also voiced skepticism that this progress would make full autonomous driving a routine reality anytime soon. “I don’t know that I’ll be running around in a self-driving car in my lifetime, on a regular basis,” she said. “I’m hopeful for my children and my children’s children that this is where we’re going to get to.”Jane Terry, VP of government affairs at the National Safety Council, urged the industry to standardize on vocabulary to help people understand when a car manufacturer is offering full or partial autonomy versus driver assistance. “It’s hard for consumers to keep up,” she said. “If the consumers aren’t there, if they aren’t bought in, if the perception that what happens on Grey’s Anatomy is going to become the reality, it will be hard to change people’s minds.” Riding can be believing, Waymo’s Schwall said: “In terms of trust, the most important thing is experiencing the vehicle.” But with Waymo only offering driverless rides to the public in Phoenix, San Francisco, and now Los Angeles, very few Americans have a chance to hop into one of its heavily modified Jaguar I-Pace electric vehicles.And Waymo’s competitors have hit their own bumps on the road to autonomy. Uber shelved its self-driving efforts after one of its vehicles killed a Tempe, Arizona, pedestrian in 2019 (the ride-hailing firm has since inked a partnership with Waymo). In October, a GM Cruise robotaxi ran over a woman in San Francisco who had fallen into its path after a human driver hit her; the California DMV then yanked Cruise’s operating permit, after which Cruise suspended service nationwide.
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Then there’s Tesla, which opted to open a beta version of its “Full Self-Driving” software to anybody willing to pay back in November 2022, after it had elected to remove radar and ultrasonic sensors from its vehicles to rely only on a computer-vision system. The FSD moniker itself is a misnomer. A support article on Tesla’s site clarifies that it and the carmaker’s Autopilot and Enhanced Autopilot assisted-driving modes “require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.” But many Tesla drivers seem to have disregarded that advice, sometimes with fatal consequences. With nobody on the panel mentioning the Full Self-Driving elephant in the room, I had to ask: Does Tesla’s approach complicate this trust-building work? Terry’s response: “Can we just all agree that there are no self-driving vehicles available for personal purchase in the US today?” As the audience applauded, she said “Names are important, words are important.”Fischer made the same point, also without saying the word “Tesla.”“They will say that it’s not self-driving, but that’s not how they’re marketing and selling it,” she said. “And I think it’s helping to stir the pot when it comes to the fear.”Her takeaway: “It’s this perfect storm of confusion that we have to address.”
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