Waymo is beginning to operate electric Jaguar I-PACE SUVs in San Francisco with no human safety driver at the wheel.

Waymo

Waymo, the first self-driving company to launch a US robotaxi service, said it’s shifting to fully autonomous vehicle operation in San Francisco and expanding the service area where its Arizona robotaxi fleet operates into downtown Phoenix.

The Alphabet Inc. unit, which began testing Jaguar I-PACE electric SUVs loaded up with cameras, laser lidar sensors, radar and computers in San Francisco in 2020, said it’s operating some of those vehicles without a human backup driver behind the wheel. For now, they’ll only be hauling Waymo employees, rather than paying customers. Cruise, backed by General Motors, is starting to offer paid autonomous rides to commuters in San Francisco, although Waymo claims it’s the first company to have robotaxi services in more than one location.

“We’re particularly excited about this next phase of our journey as we officially bring our rider-only technology to San Francisco—the city many of us at Waymo call home,” co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post. “We ‘ve learned so much from our San Francisco Trusted Testers over the last six months, not to mention the innumerable lessons from our riders in the years since launching our fully autonomous service in the East Valley of Phoenix. Both of which have directly impacted how we bring forward our service as we welcome our first employee riders in SF.”

The arrival of autonomous ride services in a dense, urban environment like San Francisco is a big accomplishment for a technology that’s proven to be more complex and challenging to perfect than anticipated a few years ago, despite billions of dollars of investment and, in Waymo’s case , more than a decade of R&D. Along with Cruise, Amazon’s Zoox unit is also preparing to launch a San Francisco-based robotic ride service. Competitors including Argo AI, backed by Ford and Volkswagen, and Motional, supported by Hyundai Motor and Aptiv, have plans for their own autonomous ride services in Miami and Las Vegas, respectively.

In addition to its robotaxi program, Waymo is starting to deploy autonomous semi-trucks, initially in Texas, and has been lining up customers and truck builders for what some analysts think could be a compelling business owing to rising demand for freight and a shortage of long-haul truck drivers.

Waymo began giving test rides in autonomous minivans in suburban Phoenix in 2017, and introduced fully autonomous rides in 2020, limiting the service area to East Valley communities including Chandler and Tempe. The company is planning to make the service available in downtown Phoenix as well though just like in San Francisco, initially, only Waymo employees will be getting rides in that part of the city.

“It’s not a matter of validating your technology for certain streets, but deploying a confident Waymo Driver that is prepared to handle what could happen on that type of street anywhere,” Dmitri Dolgov, also Waymo co-CEO, said in the post. ” Just as our learnings from Phoenix’s East Valley transferred to San Francisco, our learnings from San Francisco are already informing our progress in downtown Phoenix.”

Though it’s been generating revenue for a few years, Waymo hasn’t yet disclosed that information or said when it expects to become profitable.

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Employees of Cruise, the self-driving subsidiary of General Motors, will be the first to jump inside one of the company’s autonomous vehicles that operate in San Francisco without a human driver in the front seat. Certain members of the public will also be able to ride, but they won’t be charged a fare.

Cruise co-founder, CTO and president Kyle Vogt was reportedly the first to ride the driverless AV, and he gushed about it all over Twitter.

1) Monday night was a night I’ll never forget. I’m still speechless. I got to take the first ride, by anyone, ever, in a *driverless* robotaxi on the streets of San Francisco.

This was officially ride #1 for @Cruise. Full story and vids below.https://t.co/GDjVcvMrvK

— Kyle Vogt (@kvogt) November 3, 2021

“Around 11pm Monday night we launched an AV without anyone inside for the first time,” tweeted Vogt. “Until now we’ve been testing with humans in the driver’s or passenger’s seat, so this was a first. It began to roam around the city, waiting for a ride request. At 11:20pm I used the Cruise app and summoned my first ride. After a few minutes, one of the Cruise AVs (named Sourdough) drove up to me and pulled over. Nobody was inside the car. I pressed the ‘start ride’ button and the AV smoothly pulled back into traffic.”

Vogt also said he requested five more rides that night. The rides had to be at night because according to the stipulations of Cruise’s “driverless deployment permit” from the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the company can only operate driverless between the hours of 10 pm and 6 am and at a max speed of 30 miles per hour Cruise received the permit in early October, which allows the company to deploy its vehicles without a human onboard, as well as charge fees for delivery services, but crucially not ride-hailing services.

Cruise’s first human-less deployment comes about a week after GM CEO Mary Barra said the company is confident that Cruise will begin commercial driverless ride-hailing and delivery operations by next year. Cruise has yet to apply for the final permit it needs, which would be from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), to be able to charge for robotaxi services. Until such time, only Cruise employees and non-paying members of the public will be riding around in Sourdough and other human-less AVs.

Cruise told TechCrunch it doesn’t break out numbers for how many driverless AVs are permitted, nor does it have any updates on when it expects to apply for its final permit from CPUC.

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that employees of Cruise would be able to ride in the driverless AVs. Cruise has just confirmed that certain members of the public will also be allowed to ride, but didn’t specify who would qualify to ride. Cruise has not opened its driverless service to members of the general public yet.

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A self-driving cruise car owned by General Motors Corp is seen in front of the company’s San Francisco headquarters, where it conducts most of its testing, in California, U.S., September 26, 2018. Picture taken September 26, 2018. REUTERS / Heather Somerville

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Dec 1 (Reuters) – San Francisco’s public transit operator has challenged Cruise’s request for fees for robotaxi rides, saying that on Wednesday promotional videos from the General Motors Co (GM.N) unit showed Cruise passengers illegally entering and exiting vehicles in the middle of the street rather than at the curb.

The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) said in a 24-page letter that Cruise’s recent videos show the self-driving tech company allowing unlawful behavior that also endangers nearby people and slows down buses, agency director Jeff Tumlin said. The agency also blasted Cruise’s application for failing to plan for services in low-income and minority neighborhoods or to accommodate wheelchairs.

“Together, the cruise videos document 14 stops to pick up or drop off passengers; they provide evidence that not one of these stops meets the requirements of the Vehicle Code and the Transport Code,” the agency wrote.

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Cruise said it will address the concerns in a letter to the CPUC next Monday.

GM’s Cruise, Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo (GOOGL.O), and others see San Francisco as a good proving ground for robotaxi services. With the federal government reluctant to enact regulations for autonomous vehicles, states have stepped in to regulate them. But local authorities in San Francisco and elsewhere have been scrambling to get a bigger say in the emerging technologies, which include Tesla Inc.’s (TSLA.O) Autopilot. Continue reading

The SFMTA letter responds to a cruise filing last month with the California Public Utilities Commission, which has the final say on whether companies can charge for rides.

SFMTA’s letter calls for Cruise’s request to be denied unless it can demonstrate that its automated systems can detect lawful on-street parking, parallel parking, and back-to-back parking.

The agency also criticized Cruise’s original deployment plan because it would ignore almost all of the city’s low-income and disadvantaged communities and serve only 19% of San Francisco’s Hispanic population and 24% of the black population. The company has also yet to test wheelchair-accessible travel, the agency wrote.

Additionally, Cruise said it would avoid streets with light rail lines but failed to recognize a long train route in its planned service area, SFMTA wrote.

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Reporting by Paresh Dave; Additional reporting by Hyunjoo Jin; Editing by David Gregorio

Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Dedicated charging area for Uber and Lyft in Mountain View, CA

Brad Templeton

Dealing with the “curb” has become a major challenge for both self-driving vehicles and human-operated taxis and delivery vehicles. Driving on the road has its challenges, but every trip also requires picking up and dropping off goods or passengers, which can be a completely different problem in the city. It’s one thing the robot taxi company Cruise has not yet resolved, which recently resulted in the San Francisco MTA it operates in denying its application for a permit to provide robot taxi services.

When I recently reported on Cruise’s first Robotaxi ride, I pointed out that it was strange that the vehicle never stopped for pick-up and drop-off, even when the driver was waiting in front of a temple that had a large and empty loading area. Instead, it blocked the lane and the driver got on and off. I suggested that this is simply because Cruise is doing things “one thing at a time” and resolving all of “Picov Andropov’s” (the famous Russian chauffeur from NPR’s “Car Talk”) on the first day. While it’s illegal, it’s very common for human taxi drivers to do the same too, especially when the streets aren’t crowded just because it’s easier.

The SF Muni does not seem willing to have it worked out later. That’s not unreasonable, but they should also be balanced out – if Cruise isn’t supposed to do PuDo (pickup / drop-off) on the street, then crackdown on Uber, Lyft and taxis should also be tough. We want all providers, including Cruise, to be safe, but we don’t want to slow down the autonomous developers any more than others.

In some places the curb is often empty and this is an easy problem to solve. If there is a light loading zone or a wide piece of curb, it isn’t too difficult for a generalized algorithm to identify and use. To do it really well, you’ll likely want to map every PuDo spot in the city, including official loading zones, parking lots, and other approved zones. Likewise, you want to identify no-parking / no-standing zones, bus stops and other places where it is not allowed and their opening times. You’ll also want to know more about official PuDo zones (which some cities have) and even special alleys that are often found in hotels and office towers. These zones can have additional rules for their use.

If you have such a map and you arrive at a location, it is not difficult to see which of the mapped PuDo zones near the destination can be used for free. Parking spaces can even be parallel parking. Robots will get very good at this, although there is an argument that it is often faster and less disruptive to traffic to stop in the lane and release a passenger than to park and drive in parallel.

For pick-up, a waiting passenger could be shown the map with the spots in his vicinity and he can click on a free one. If there is only one, they could even “claim” the space by partially standing in it and waving away cars trying to park there – but they shouldn’t wave away other cars trying to do a quick PuDo. Otherwise, they should update the app when they are given away. You should also consider walking until you find a space.

Some of the best stops are just outside residential driveways. This is a little annoying for the homeowner when it becomes a regular event – more on this below. Another interesting and common opening is in front of fire hydrants. It is legal to stand by a fire hydrant place in some cities, but the law requires a driver to stay in the car while standing in the fire trail. This law may need to be changed to cover robot drivers who would, of course, start driving immediately if they spot a fire engine, just as humans have to.

Pick-up of food

It looks different with delivery drivers. You usually have to walk to a restaurant or go to the door of a house to transport the food. This makes them less likely to block the lane. For delivery, most robot delivery services now signal the customer on the phone that the delivery is about to arrive and the customer has to go to the curb. In this case, a quick turnaround can make sense if it would also make sense for the passengers.

A managed curb

In this scene from a video, the Cruise car stopped in the middle of the lane to drop the company off … [+] Founder Kyle Vogt, despite two open curbs that he could use. This angered the SF MTA.

cruise

The future holds the potential for something bigger, namely a fully city-managed curb, including parking lots and PuDo spaces. Many, including respected parking expert Donald Shoup, argue that the idea of ​​free parking was a huge mistake, and that thought could even be extended to include short-term curb use. Today all commercial users of curbs are computerized – with an app or soon because they are robots. It is not impossible to have a system where the use of the curb can be managed, calculated and reserved, if only for 30 seconds.

This could also be done without better parking management, although it would certainly be very helpful if it were done as well. Perhaps one day all parking options will be handled by just one app that will select, reserve, manage and pay for parking spaces (street and private parking spaces) in your city. In this case, vehicles that need to do PuDo in busy areas could reserve a single minute in parking lots as well as PuDo spots to facilitate arrival. But they could still do that for the no parking spaces that allow PuDo. In particular, the rooms that some cities have assigned as “TNC only”.

A vehicle that is on its way to a PuDo (and that includes a human-controlled TNC with an app) has an estimate of its time of arrival that improves over time. His headquarters could ask the city to reserve a place through a time slot. This would prevent any other such vehicle from using that space at the reserved time. If it’s just a TNC spot, private drivers are not allowed to use it, although they might be found surprisingly in other areas there, so this needs to be handled – including passenger handling. As the vehicle got closer, the timing of the reservation was refined until it was completely precise and of course adjusted so that it didn’t overlap with others who were also so close to arrival.

Reservations would even apply to the gaps in front of residential driveways if they are large enough. I noted above that the constant use of these houses would annoy the residents of these houses, so the reservation system could limit the number of PuDos in such places. In addition, if the residents of these houses happened to be on the move with a smart app or a car, they could block reservations for free prior to their entry if they could block the resident. While residents don’t own the curb in front of their driveway, we don’t want to upset them too much. Using these spaces means a lot more PuDo capacity and less traffic jams on your street, so it’s a win-win situation. (A single driveway is often not wide enough for PuDo, but many driveways are paired or combined with an unusable curb.)

Clogged bulk pickup

Special efforts will be required to handle locations with extreme pick-ups such as airports, office buildings at closing time, and the largest stadiums of them all. While it would be nice to develop a distributed system to have this done, these places will only have a limited amount of PuDo space and it won’t be practical for all the cars to show up at the same time. There is a possibility that such establishments could contract to have someone run a system to manage their PuDo room. Robocar companies would talk to the server managing a building to handle congested times and let vehicles know when to get a reservation to approach the building and drive to their seat – probably only if their passenger is is immediately ready to board.

This is already partially the case with TNCs at some airports, but each of them has its own area and some of them manage it themselves. Taxi PuDo areas like Singapore Airport, where taxis park perpendicular to the street, are probably the best design compared to the often slow-moving taxi lines found in some locations. The busiest places (especially the stadiums and convention centers) can do well to put passengers on buses that go to the satellite PuDo places in the direction each passenger wants to go. In some cases, these vehicles (be it cars, vans, shuttles, or buses) can even travel a long distance as no one will avoid them.

These systems are likely to be related or identical to the systems used to handle larger and heavily trafficked parking lots. If vehicles do not approach parking lots or loading areas until they are ready for a quick transfer, there should be no congestion in those areas. Old parking lots that were no longer needed in the Robotaxi era are excellent candidates for staging areas. At an airport, one can imagine taking the old short-term car park and assigning most of the spaces to the PuDo, which can handle all but the busiest times. Of course, if they are building a Robocar airport, this could also happen on the unused parts of the airport perimeter, where airside vehicles take people without checked baggage directly from their aircraft to a gate in the fence and the PuDo area for ground transportation transfers.

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Waymo, the self-driving vehicle company under Alphabet, has launched a robotic taxi service open to certain verified drivers in San Francisco.

On Tuesday, the company officially launched its Waymo One Trusted Tester program in town with a fleet of all-electric Jaguar I-PACEs equipped with the company’s fifth generation of its autonomous vehicle system. This AV system, known as the Waymo Driver, is informed of 20 million self-driven miles on public roads and over 10 billion miles in simulations, according to Waymo.

The Waymo One Trusted Tester program mirrors the company’s strategy in Phoenix, where it launched its first commercial ride-hailing service a few years ago. The Trusted Tester program is a renaming of Waymo’s previous early rider program that was launched in Metro Phoenix in April 2017. Since it was over four years ago, these drivers are no longer exactly “early”, so a name change was appropriate to a Waymo spokesman.

In Phoenix, Waymo finally invited some of the early riders to switch to the Waymo One service, which allowed users to publicly share their impressions about the service and invite friends or family members who were not part of the early rider program. Waymo then opened the service to everyone.

San Franciscans can download the Waymo One app and express their interest in participating in the program, which Waymo says begins with an initial select group of different backgrounds and transportation needs, including wheelchair access. The company didn’t say how many drivers would be in the starting group or how many Jaguars it will roam the city, but it said drivers need to be willing to provide plenty of detailed feedback on their driving experience and sign a nondisclosure agreement .

Waymo will encourage drivers to use its autonomous service to assist them with their everyday mobility needs. Rides are initially free and begin in an initial area in parts of San Francisco, including Sunset, Richmond, Pacific Heights, Noe Valley, Castro, Haight-Ashbury, and more, with the expectation of growing over time. The service is offered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the spokesman told TechCrunch.

The company will have so-called “autonomous specialists” – another term for security personnel – in the front seat to monitor the journey and ensure a safe experience. These security drivers are contract workers and employed by Transdev. Waymo has long worked with Transdev to provide staff for some of its operations.

Waymo’s driver support team will also be available by tapping the button on the screen in the car or through the app if drivers have any questions during their journeys, the spokesman said.

Waymo’s first ride-hailing service was launched in Phoenix, but its roots are in California, particularly in the Silicon Valley enclave of Mountain View. It has been tested in the greater San Francisco Bay area for more than a decade.

The company started testing its Robotaxi service earlier this year by offering autonomous rides to its employees in the city.

News of Trusted Tester’s launch comes a week after Waymo announced it is expanding its Waymo Via autonomous trucking operations in Texas, Arizona and California and building a trucking hub outside of Dallas. The company also tested its fifth generation driver on Class 8 trucks in Texas that haul cargo for freight forwarders like JB Hunt to put the last $ 2.5 billion in good use.

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