Autonomous Vehicles are not The Great. And yet we keep trying, mainly because there is a lot of money behind it. In the Bay Area, this has led to some predictable consequences, according to the news outlet Mission Local reports that San Francisco police and first responders are dealing with malfunctioning driverless cars that get in the way during emergencies or cause traffic problems. Incident reports show that quite a lot is happening.

In case you missed it:

reports Received from Mission Local, detailing issues local responders have encountered with driverless vehicles from Waymo and Cruise, both of which have permits to test on city streets. In 15 separate incidents, autonomous cars either failed, causing a traffic problem, or got in the way of a situation where officers and first responders tried to get the car moving.

In one incident That happened on April 25, a fire truck responded to a call. The fire engine turned onto a narrow street that was too narrow for two vehicles to pass at the same time. According to the report, a Waymo autonomous car was approaching from the opposite direction. As the fire truck approached, instead of coming by for the first responder like it should have, it did something else: It continued to approach the fire truck until it was less than 10 feet from it. And then it just stopped. Firefighters had to get out of the truck, approach the car and speak to the vehicle’s monitor to tell it to move. The monitor replied that he understood the situation, but apparently the car was not responding to commands. The fire truck had to drive down the street and drive around.

Other incident From the end of January, a driverless car had to get closer to the scene of the fire where a fire was being fought. According to the report, the vehicle kept approaching, so close that firefighters at the scene thought the car would run over the hoses and hinder the firefighting effort. So a firefighter took matters into his own hands to stop the car.

I yelled twice for the car to stop and banged my fist on the hood. After warning the car twice, I smashed the window and the vehicle stopped. Thank you very much.

While many of these incidents read like something out of a movie, the reality isn’t as entertaining. Lots of cops and first responders Mission Local spoke to do not want the cars on the city streets. But driverless cars are federally regulated, with support from the city that says the local government doesn’t have much say. In the meantime, responders must bypass them or hope they don’t get in their way. Or even better, let the vehicles recognize emergency situations and react accordingly, as one firefighter emphasized in a report. “The need for these vehicles to see a road closed by caution tape and warning sandwich boards,” the firefighter said, “is imperative.”

The post Autonomous Vehicles Are Getting within the Method of Emergency Responders in San Francisco: Report appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

This report, by Aaron Gordon for Motherboard, looks like a hypothetical dreamed up by a particularly cruel constitutional law professor:

For the last five years, driverless car companies have been testing their vehicles on public roads. These vehicles constantly roam neighborhoods while loading with a variety of sensors including video cameras capturing everything going on around them in order to operate safely and analyze instances where they don’t.

While the companies themselves, such as Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, tout the potential transportation benefits their services may offer one day, they don’t publicize another use case, one that is far less hypothetical: Mobile surveillance cameras for police departments.

It’s not quite as cut and dried as that last sentence. As far as we know, police departments do not have unfettered, real-time access to the recordings created constantly by autonomous vehicles. But they do have access to the recordings. That much is clear from the public records obtained by Motherboard.

The San Francisco PD has been using this footage to aid in investigations, apparently frequently. The training document says two things, neither of which address the particularly thorny constitutional questions they raise:

Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads.

There’s nothing untrue about this assertion and yet it says nothing about the processes used to obtain these recordings. That might have been a hypothetical if not for the following bullet point:

Information will be sent in how to access this potential evidence (Investigations has already done this several times)

yikes

That is problematic, as an EFF rep points out:

“This is very concerning,” Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz told Motherboard. He said cars in general are troves of personal consumer data, but autonomous vehicles will have even more of that data from capturing the details of the world around them. “So when we see any police department identify AVs as a new source of evidence, that’s very concerning.”

So many questions.

An AV will not have a human driver, which lowers the expectation of privacy. That expectation reverts to the company deploying it, which makes it somewhat comparable to a third-party record: data obtained by an automatic process that belongs to the company deploying the data-gathering device (in this case, a car).

Since there’s no driver to challenge searches, the responsibility lies with the company deploying the vehicle. And, since the recordings presumably cover public areas where the privacy expectation is further lowered, it might be possible to obtain recordings with nothing more than a subpoena (or a friendly sounding email!)

That’s where things get even thornier, in terms of the Fourth Amendment. The document does not describe the process the SFPD investigations team uses to obtain recordings.

First of all, how does the SFPD even know if AV recordings might be useful in ongoing investigations? Presumably, AV operators are required to inform local government agencies of their plans so that they can be overseen and undertaken safely. If cops know the routes traveled, it makes sense they would pursue footage recorded at or around areas where suspected crimes were committed.

But who governs this access? Has the city enacted any limits? Or is it just assumed that anything traffic regulators have access to should be accessible to law enforcement?

Moving on from there, how does the PD approach these companies? Private searches (which may be how these recordings are viewed by courts) are legally provided law enforcement does nothing to encourage searches companies (or their employees) may not otherwise engage in. Can cops request AV companies run routes through “high crime” areas in hopes of collecting footage of crimes in progress? All judicial signs point to “no,” but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

AV testing is AV testing. It really doesn’t matter much where it’s happening, so some companies may engage in test runs in neighborhoods investigators think might provide more evidence or intel. If this is happening, that’s a real problem.

Unfortunately, we only know what the SFPD has released so far: a training document that says AV cars capture footage and that investigators have utilized that footage in the past. Future public records requests may shed more light on the matter, but for now, this is all we have. At some point, evidence gathered by autonomous vehicles may be challenged in court. If and when that happens, we may get even more answers. But it seems like this isn’t a problem capable of being quantified with this minimum amount of information. That doesn’t mean it should be ignored. It just means more data is needed to draw any solid conclusions.

San Francisco Cops Are Accessing Autonomous Vehicle Recordings To Collect Evidence

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Early last month, a fire truck on its way to an emergency was prevented from moving forward, in part, by a Cruise AV test vehicle. This is one of a handful of incidents giving San Francisco city officials a break as a proposed permit program is being crafted for autonomous ride-hailing vehicles.

The event took place on an April morning at around 4 am as emergency responders were answering a call, reports Wired. Their progress was blocked by a double-parked garbage truck and as they pulled around to pass it, a Cruise AV test vehicle going in the other direction stopped next to the garbage truck, blocking the road completely.

“This incident slowed SFFD response to a fire that resulted in property damage and personal injuries,” city officials wrote in a filing submitted to the California Public Utilities Commission.

Read Also: Cops Pull Over Driverless Cruise Chevy Bolt In San Francisco For Driving Without Its Lights On

A Cruise spokesperson confirmed the incident to Wired, adding that the vehicle behaved as designed, yielding to the oncoming fire truck and contacting the company’s remote assistance workers. According to the company, the fire truck was blocked for 25 seconds.

The blockage was not cleared, however, until the garbage truck’s driver ran from their work to move the vehicle. Some have pointed out that if a human had been driving the Cruise AV, they could have simply backed up to let the fire truck through. It also bears repeating that every second counts when an emergency responder is on their way to a call.

The San Francisco Fire Department confirmed the incident, too, stating that although it had been in discussions with electric and autonomous vehicle manufacturers for training before the pandemic, “we have been successful with EV training and continue to seek industry training related to autonomous vehicles. ”

This is just one of a trio of incidents that San Francisco city officials pointed to in filings objecting to certain parts of a proposed permit program that is being crafted by the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates ride-hailing across the state.

The second was a highly publicized incident in which a cruise vehicle was pulled over driving at night without its headlights on. The third happened in late April and allegedly involved another cruise vehicle that stopped in a crosswalk while driving through a work zone, blocking traffic for five minutes.

These incidents point to the challenges of designing autonomous vehicles that can handle so-called edge cases in which something unlikely or unexpected happens on the road. Although a human driver would likely be able to reason out a solution, autonomous vehicles have a harder time responding to those events.

These edge cases are so challenging that some in the autonomous vehicle industry have reportedly conceded that no automaker will ever build a car that is truly capable of Level 5 fully autonomous driving.

The post GM Autonomous Automotive Blocked A Fireplace Truck In San Francisco That Was Responding To An Emergency appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

from the another-source-of-always-on-surveillance dept

This report, by Aaron Gordon for Motherboard, looks like a hypothetical dreamed up by a particularly cruel constitutional law professor:

For the last five years, driverless car companies have been testing their vehicles on public roads. These vehicles constantly roam neighborhoods while loading with a variety of sensors including video cameras capturing everything going on around them in order to operate safely and analyze instances where they don’t.

While the companies themselves, such as Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise, tout the potential transportation benefits their services may offer one day, they don’t publicize another use case, one that is far less hypothetical: Mobile surveillance cameras for police departments.

It’s not quite as cut and dried as that last sentence. As far as we know, police departments do not have unfettered, real-time access to the recordings created constantly by autonomous vehicles. But they do have access to the recordings. That much is clear from the public records obtained by Motherboard.

The San Francisco PD has been using this footage to aid in investigations, apparently frequently. The training document says two things, neither of which address the particularly thorny constitutional questions they raise:

Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads.

There’s nothing untrue about this assertion and yet it says nothing about the processes used to obtain these recordings. That might have been a hypothetical if not for the following bullet point:

Information will be sent in how to access this potential evidence (Investigations has already done this several times)

yikes

That is problematic, as an EFF rep points out:

“This is very concerning,” Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz told Motherboard. He said cars in general are troves of personal consumer data, but autonomous vehicles will have even more of that data from capturing the details of the world around them. “So when we see any police department identify AVs as a new source of evidence, that’s very concerning.”

So many questions.

An AV will not have a human driver, which lowers the expectation of privacy. That expectation reverts to the company deploying it, which makes it somewhat comparable to a third-party record: data obtained by an automatic process that belongs to the company deploying the data-gathering device (in this case, a car).

Since there’s no driver to challenge searches, the responsibility lies with the company deploying the vehicle. And, since the recordings presumably cover public areas where the privacy expectation is further lowered, it might be possible to obtain recordings with nothing more than a subpoena (or a friendly sounding email!)

That’s where things get even thornier, in terms of the Fourth Amendment. The document does not describe the process the SFPD investigations team uses to obtain recordings.

First of all, how does the SFPD even know if AV recordings might be useful in ongoing investigations? Presumably, AV operators are required to inform local government agencies of their plans so that they can be overseen and undertaken safely. If cops know the routes traveled, it makes sense they would pursue footage recorded at or around areas where suspected crimes were committed.

But who governs this access? Has the city enacted any limits? Or is it just assumed that anything traffic regulators have access to should be accessible to law enforcement?

Moving on from there, how does the PD approach these companies? Private searches (which may be how these recordings are viewed by courts) are legally provided law enforcement does nothing to encourage searches companies (or their employees) may not otherwise engage in. Can cops request AV companies run routes through “high crime” areas in hopes of collecting footage of crimes in progress? All judicial signs point to “no,” but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

AV testing is AV testing. It really doesn’t matter much where it’s happening, so some companies may engage in test runs in neighborhoods investigators think might provide more evidence or intel. If this is happening, that’s a real problem.

Unfortunately, we only know what the SFPD has released so far: a training document that says AV cars capture footage and that investigators have utilized that footage in the past. Future public records requests may shed more light on the matter, but for now, this is all we have. At some point, evidence gathered by autonomous vehicles may be challenged in court. If and when that happens, we may get even more answers. But it seems like this isn’t a problem capable of being quantified with this minimum amount of information. That doesn’t mean it should be ignored. It just means more data is needed to draw any solid conclusions.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, autonomous vehicles, monitoring, recordings, san francisco, sfpd, surveillance

The post San Francisco Cops Are Accessing Autonomous Car Recordings To Acquire Proof appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

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A couple of friends and I were out for a late-night walk at about 3 am on New Year’s Day when a Waymo self-driving car came rolling down 16th St. Then came another, and then another, and another. We stared in disbelief as at least a dozen tricked out SUVs glided by, silent but for the whirring of their lidar sensors.

Perhaps these four-wheeled robots had just come from a New Year’s party of their own.

While a motorcade’s worth of autonomous vehicles remains at an unusual sight, a self-driving car can be seen every minute or two in some parts of San Francisco. A growing number of these vehicles are now transporting passengers in fully autonomous mode, meaning there’s no backup driver behind the wheel.

San Francisco is the epicenter of autonomous vehicle testing in California, if not the world, where subsidiaries of leading companies — Google, General Motors and Amazon — teach their fleets the subtleties of city driving. If an autonomous vehicle (AV) can handle the chaotic conditions on the streets of San Francisco, these companies believe, it can handle just about anything.

Yet AVs remain something of a mystery to the general public — and not just because of their incredible technological capabilities. Basic information like how many AVs are being tested in San Francisco, where, exactly, they are permitted to travel without a backup driver and other details of their operation is difficult to find or unavailable to the public.

An Examiner investigation, consisting of public records requests, data searches, and interviews with regulators and AV companies bears out what’s obvious to city residents: The streets of San Francisco have become a giant, photogenic AV test course, where this technology will show its promise and perils in real time.

AV Capital

In a fast-moving field, where companies fiercely protect their trade secrets, precise data on autonomous vehicle testing and deployment can be difficult to come by. However, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) has made some educated guesses.

“It’s possible that there has been more automated driving on SF streets than in any other major city in the world,” said Julia Friedlander, senior manager for autonomous vehicles at the SFMTA.

While 50 companies are registered to test autonomous vehicles in California, just two companies, both of which primarily test their vehicles in San Francisco, accounted for more than 75% of the 4.1 million miles traveled by autonomous vehicles in the state last year, according to data from the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).

Waymo, a Google subsidiary, notched more than 2.3 million miles in 567 vehicles in 2021, the majority of which took place in San Francisco, the company confirmed. Cruise, a subsidiary of GM, recorded 876,000 miles of autonomous driving in 168 vehicles last year, all in San Francisco. Both companies do drivered and driverless vehicle testing, and offer limited driverless passenger ride-hail services.

Zoox, an Amazon subsidiary that tests in San Francisco as well as on the Peninsula, added 155,000 miles in 57 vehicles.

It’s no surprise that San Francisco, with its proximity to Silicon Valley, its varied geography and its (relatively) mild weather, would become a popular place to test AVs.

“We developed our vehicle in one of the most complex environments possible — San Francisco — to ensure that our vehicle can drive safely in even the most unpredictable circumstances and conditions,” Cruise wrote in a permit application obtained by The Examiner.

San Francisco also has value from a branding perspective. Its breathtaking views and unbelievably steep streets — the backdrop for so many movie car chases — figure prominently in the marketing materials for all three major AV companies testing in The City.

No city oversight

Even though a large majority of AV testing in the state takes place in San Francisco, the city has essentially no oversight over these companies’ operations. That responsibility falls to the state DMV, which regulates AV testing, and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), which regulates commercial operations like Cruise and Waymo’s ride hail services.

The DMV and CPUC do not require AV companies to disclose where their vehicles have traveled within California, meaning it’s impossible to know the exact extent to which their operations are concentrated in San Francisco.

State regulations have been a source of contention for SFMTA, which is accustomed to exercising broad regulatory power over The City’s streets, and sharing transportation data with the public. Over the past several years, the agency and other city departments have regularly submitted comments to the DMV and CPUC as they craft autonomous vehicle regulations.

The City has unsuccessfully fought for caps on the number of AVs deployed for ride hailing services, detailed origin and destination data to better manage traffic and universal wheelchair accessibility, among other policies.

SFMTA’s lobbying has been directly informed by its experience with ride hailing services like Uber and Lyft, which it says have undermined public transit and increased congestion. The agency is continuing to fight for state regulations that require disability access, safe pickup and drop off practices, and zero-emissions electric vehicles, Friedlander said. (Currently, Zoox vehicles and some Waymo vehicles are gas-powered.)

“AV companies and state regulators need to see cities as key stakeholders and work with us to maximize the benefits while minimizing the negative effects that could come from adding multiple new fleets of cars to San Francisco roads,” Friedlander said.

While he agrees with many of these concerns, Marcel Moran, a PhD candidate in urban planning at UC Berkeley who has studied AV policy, thinks the solutions are already clear.

“I can understand the rationale for wanting more information. But there’s also policy decisions that would make a difference regardless of vehicle type,” Moran said, citing examples like congestion pricing and transit-only lanes.

Situation on the streets

It’s only natural that AVs, with their bulky rooftop rigs, conspicuous branding and awe-inspiring technological promise, would attract extra attention from the public. They’ve also been observed behaving strangely: Consider the 50 Waymos per day that continually returned to a Richmond cul de sac last fall, or the platoon of Waymos I observed cruising the Castro in the early hours of 2022.

Waymo vehicles, mostly electric Jaguar I-Pace SUVs as well as some gas-powered Chrysler Pacifica minivans, go on different missions throughout The City to train the Waymo Driver, its proprietary artificial intelligence, in different environments, a company spokesperson said. The vehicles sometimes travel in groups back to base after a shift.

Cruise, which uses modified electric Chevy Bolts with nicknames like Poppy and Tostada, also drive around The City to practice certain driving skills and to more accurately map the urban environment, a company spokesperson said. Cruise vehicles can learn 40 times more quickly in San Francisco than in a more suburban environment like the Phoenix area, another location where both Cruise and Waymo test their vehicles.

AV companies approved for testing with a backup driver can travel almost anywhere in California. However, driverless commercial operations have a more limited geography. Cruise’s operational domain for its free, late-night ride hail service (available only to a select few members of the public) covers parts of the Richmond, Sunset, and Fillmore, and only includes streets with a speed limit of 30 miles per hour or less. Cruise plans to expand its operational domain to encompass 70% of The City in the near future, a spokesperson said.

Waymo redacted its operational domain for driverless passenger service from documents sent to SFMTA, following approval from the CPUC, citing proprietary trade secrets. The company also declined to share its operational domain with The Examiner. Waymo’s vehicles are approved to drive themselves at speeds of up to 65 miles per hour, and are currently providing driverless rides to employees in a portion of San Francisco.

With truly driverless cars now circulating The City, locals might wonder what would happen if these vehicles are involved in an accident, or get pulled over by the police.

It turns out, there’s a plan for that.

In their state-mandated “law enforcement interaction plans,” Cruise and Waymo explain how law enforcement officers can enter their vehicles and find the registration, and how first responders should act in all manner of unfortunate situations (a vehicle underwater, on fire, etc .) The companies also detail their cybersecurity efforts to prevent hackers from — in the absolute worst case — hijacking their fleets.

Regulatory frontiers

California regulators and the AV companies themselves have been forced to navigate these sci-fi scenarios in the absence of federal regulation. During the Trump Administration, when “regulations were considered evil,” the already slow process of regulating AVs was put on pause, says Steve Shladover, a research engineer at Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology at UC Berkeley, and an AV consultant for the DMV.

“In an ideal world, the federal government would have stepped out earlier and would have taken the lead on (regulations), but that didn’t happen,” Shladover said, adding that the Biden Administration has restarted the process of crafting AV regulations. In March, the US Department of Transportation released new rules to ensure that custom-built AVs, including the pod-like vehicles that are currently being developed by Cruise and Zoox, are still subject to rigorous safety standards.

California’s regulations could use some work, as well. Current data reporting “only gives a very limited view of the maturity of the technology,” Shladover said. “I believe that there will need to be disclosure of a lot more information about the way the systems are designed and developed and about their performance.”

California regulations require that AV companies report every collision and every “disengagement,” when a human backup driver has to take over for the computer. The latter requirements need to be more precise and consistent, Shladover said.

Protecting proprietary trade secrets and ensuring safe operations is “a very difficult balancing act” that might demand new layers of separation between publicly accessible information, and information accessible only to regulators, Shladover said. In a test of these boundaries, Waymo in January sued the DMV to block it from responding to a public records request for more detailed data on collisions, disengagements, and Waymo’s operational domain in San Francisco.

The stakes of this technological arms race could not be higher. Some of the world’s biggest companies are plowing billions of dollars into this technology, hoping for a revolution in freight and passenger transport. AVs, which are never distracted and are programmed to follow the rules of the road, could provide huge safety benefits in a country where cars kill 40,000 people per year, and represent the leading cause of death for teenagers.

But the industry has also sparked fear in labor groups worried about robo-drivers taking their jobs, environmentalists worried about massive increases in driving and emissions, and city governments hoping to prevent gridlock.

Today, the impact of AVs on the roads is a San Francisco story. But at some point in the future, the rest of the country and world will have to reckon with this new technology.

bschneider@sfexaminer.com

A map of areas where Cruise’s fully driverless vehicles provide late-night ride hail service. (SFMTA)

A cruise autonomous vehicle in traffic. (Craig Lee/The Examiner)

Amazon’s Zoox lags behind in testing miles, though it’s working to roll out a new pod-like vehicle. (Craig Lee/The Examiner)

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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.

The post Waymo Begins Totally Autonomous Assessments In San Francisco, Increasing Arizona Robotaxi Zone appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Waymo, the self-driving vehicle spin-off from Google, is expanding its autonomous ride-hailing service to San Francisco

fromThe Associated Press

August 24, 2021, 4:46 p.m.

• Read for 1 minute

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Waymo, the self-driving vehicle spin-off from Google, is expanding its autonomous ride-hailing service to San Francisco.

Selected “Trusted Tester” customers in the City by the Bay will be welcomed to ride in Jaguar I-Pace self-driving electric vehicles, the company said.

For the time being, the vehicles will have human substitute drivers on board. But at some point the company wants to drive the vehicles without them, as is the case now in the Phoenix area.

Waymo started the program with a few testers last week and is now expanding it, the company said. It wouldn’t tell how many vehicles are involved or when the human backups are scheduled to be pulled.

The approach is similar to what Waymo did in Phoenix when it launched a limited ride-hailing service in 2017. The company says it has offered thousands of fully autonomous rides on Metro Phoenix since October 2020.

People who wish to join the program can do so by downloading the Waymo One app.

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Walmart Inc. WMT, + 0.57%, announced an investment in San Francisco-based self-driving vehicle company, Cruise, on Thursday. Walmart has not disclosed the size of the investment.

The two companies began working together on a pilot delivery program in Scottsdale, AZ last November.

Cruise’s fleet of vehicles is also fully electric, which is another step in Walmart’s efforts to meet its environmental goals. This week the retail giant announced its efforts to protect pollinator populations.

“As delivery has become an integral part of our customers’ lives, we are focused on building our last mile ecosystem to benefit everyone – customers, businesses and the planet,” wrote John Furner, CEO from Walmart US, in a post on the Walmart website.

Read: Walmart is shifting more employees to full-time employment

Consumer businesses are paying attention and increasingly investing in the efficiency of their delivery service. Over the past year, customers have relied on household goods to grocery deliveries as COVID-19 has restricted store operations and restaurant capacity.

“Working from home and the growing desire to shop online are challenging retailers and consumer goods companies to fundamentally rethink how they serve the pandemic-adapted consumer,” Accenture wrote in a recent report following a global survey of 9,650 consumers.

Even as the vaccine adoption and recovery continues, experts expect some consumer behaviors to persist, including those that emphasize comfort.

“Leading retailers have adapted quickly to the rise of e-commerce and are using technology to serve customers in new ways,” said Jill Standish, director of Accenture’s global retail group, in the report.

Likewise: Lowe’s is making a bigger game for professionals with the introduction of new amenities

“Even in a post-pandemic world, companies need to satisfy consumers’ appetites for online shopping with fast delivery and invest more consciously to empower their people, supply chains, physical stores and digital channels. positioned to drive growth. “

Last month, Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. CMG, +1.83%, announced its investment in Nuro, another autonomous delivery company.

Kroger Co. KR, +0.63% and Ocado OCDO, -1.00% unveiled their first high-tech facility in Ohio on Wednesday that will help fulfill customer orders.

See: Kroger launches high-tech facility as digital competition between grocers intensifies

And Home Depot Inc. HD, + 0.36%, announced Thursday morning that it will add five distribution facilities by next year to serve the South Florida area only.

Electric vehicles were also in the spotlight with the IPO of TuSimple, a Tesla Inc. TSLA, + 0.14% rival, and a new vehicle from Mercedes-Benz.

Do not miss: Tesla’s self-driving truck rival TuSimple receives more than $ 1 billion in IPO and valued it at $ 8.5 billion

Walmart stock is down 2.8% year-to-date, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA is up + 0.44% over the reporting period, up 11.2%.

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