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No driver? No downside. Robotaxis eye San Francisco enlargement

Two Waymo driverless cabs stop on a street in San Francisco on February 15, 2023 and drive across from each other before passing each other.

By Michael Liedtke | Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO – Two pioneering ride-hailing services are breaking new ground by applying for governmental approval to transport passengers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, through one of the most densely populated cities in the United States in vehicles where nobody sits in the driver’s seat.

If Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, and Waymo, a Google spinoff, reach their goal before the end of the year, San Francisco would become the first US city to have two fully driverless services, competing with Uber, Lyft and traditional taxis – all relying on humans to control the cars.

But Cruise and Waymo still face potential roadblocks, including complaints that their vehicles are making unexpected, congested stops that could annoy other travelers and endanger public safety.

Cruise has been charging driverless rides in less-congested parts of San Francisco during nighttime hours since last June. Waymo is offering free driverless rides in a larger part of the city and is awaiting approval to start loading passengers into robotic vehicles, which Google secretly began working on 14 years ago.

Efforts to roll out competing driverless services across San Francisco are proving to be the first step in a far more ambitious expansion centered in California — a state that currently has more than 35 million human-driven vehicles on its books.

Cruise recently applied for permission to test its robotic vehicles across California at speeds of up to 55 miles per hour (88 kilometers per hour) — that’s 25 miles per hour (40 kilometers per hour) above the top speed of its robotic taxis in San Francisco. Waymo is already testing its self-driving cars in Los Angeles – the second largest city in the United States

The California push comes in addition to Cruise, which is beginning to test its robotic taxis in Austin, Texas, as well as in Phoenix, where Waymo’s driverless ride-hailing service has been ferrying passengers along Arizona roads that are far less congested and challenging than those since 2020 the streets of Arizona San Francisco.

“We still have a lot of work to do, but it’s improving pretty quickly,” Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt told The Associated Press. “As it is fine-tuned, it will become more elegant over time, but the security will continue to improve as well.”

Saswat Panigrahi, Waymo’s chief product officer, believes the company’s past experience will pay off as the company applies its learnings from operating a driverless ridesharing service in Phoenix to busier cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles.

“The uncertainty is definitely a lot less now that we’ve run a fully autonomous service with real drivers,” Panigrahi said.

Both Cruise and Waymo recently announced that their driverless fleets have each traveled more than 1 million miles without a major accident. But even their robotic taxis have been struggling with pesky problems in San Francisco, which have resulted in traffic delays and other annoyances that could annoy people or, worse, block emergency vehicles en route to a fire or other urgent calls for help.

“The expected things are simple, but it’s the unexpected things that people react to in real time that are of concern,” said transportation expert Nico Larco, director of the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon. “At best, when cars stop in the middle of the road, it only leads to confusion, chaos and congestion. But the worst cases could actually harm someone.”

Two Associated Press reporters witnessed the potential problems firsthand in mid-February after a Waymo vehicle transported them safely on a trip through San Francisco that involved navigating hilly terrain, turning rush hour traffic, and making room for pedestrians to make who darted onto the zebra crossings.

During one trip, the robotaxi pulled up in the middle of the street after AP reporters got out and stayed there for several minutes, with a line of human-driven cars piled up behind it. It turned out that a rear door on the driver’s side was not fully closed.

In another Cruise-related glitch last September, an AP reporter took a roughly five-mile ride in a robotic taxi nicknamed “Peaches,” which repeatedly avoided the intended destination. The reporter eventually had to use the Cruise app to contact a dispatcher at a remote headquarters so the car could be pulled over — in the middle of the road.

Vogt noted that a number of improvements have been made since then, and indeed, two different cruise robotic taxis — one named “Cherry” and the other named “Hollandaise” — hit the same reporter and his colleagues at the designated designations during a follow-up investigation departed despite Cherry stopping at a bus stop that momentarily prevented the arrival of an oncoming bus.

A warning letter the San Francisco County Transportation Authority sent to California regulators in January raised broader concerns about the operation of robotic taxis, which cause headaches for those outside the vehicle.

The letter cited at least 92 reported incidents of Cruise robotic taxis suddenly stopping on the road as of December 31. At least three of the incidents blocked public transit lanes for periods between nine and 18 minutes.

According to the agency, over the past year, driverless Cruise vehicles have also prevented firefighters from rushing to a three-alarm blaze or illegally entering areas where ongoing attempts to extinguish the fire have been ongoing around the clock throughout San Francisco until there are more gives information about why and how often the cars regularly congest the traffic. The abrupt braking and stops of Cruise’s robotic taxis have also been under investigation by the federal supervisory authorities since the end of last year.

“We’re just very cautious,” said Tilly Chang, executive director of the San Francisco Transportation Department. “We want to be supporters and help make (driverless driving) possible, but we have to make sure it’s safe.”

Meanwhile, dozens of other tech companies and automakers have joined a race to develop self-driving car technology that collectively costs more than $100 billion. Your ultimate goal is to make money from robot drivers that are safer and cheaper than human drivers. Robotaxis could also lower fares for passengers, although Vogt believes consumers may be willing to pay more for trips without a stranger at the wheel.

Investments to date have resulted in a mix of successes, failures, and exaggerations from the likes of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who predicted nearly four years ago that the electric carmaker would have a giant robotaxi service by the end of 2020, but still hasn’t done so has. I’m nowhere near achieving that goal.

Cruise’s owner, the nearly 125-year-old General Motors, is nevertheless so confident that robotic taxis can drive more responsibly than humans and expand its driverless service to more US markets that he made the bold prediction last fall that Cruise would pay a billion By 2025, sales are projected to increase — a big jump from Cruise’s $106 million in sales last year, when the company also lost nearly $2 billion.

That optimism stands in stark contrast to the disheartening experience of another storied automaker, Ford Motor, which paid $1 billion to acquire driverless startup Argo AI in 2017 but closed the division last October at a $2.7 billion loss dollars after failing to find a buyer for the technology.

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