Fully self-driving cars for hire have been hailed as the technology of the future for years now.\u00a0That future has finally arrived \u2014 but only in some cities.<\/p>\n
Robotaxis, fully self-driving cars for hire, have been hailed as the technology of the future for years now. Has that future finally arrived? NPR's car maven Camila Domonoske joins us right now. Camila, hey.<\/p>\n
SCHMITZ: So, you know, I keep hearing from my friends in San Francisco and Los Angeles that they are able to order these self-driving cabs, and they're sort of, like, appearing everywhere. Are we going to start seeing more of these in the rest of the country anytime soon?<\/p>\n
DOMONOSKE: Companies definitely have big plans for expansion. Currently, there are about a dozen big cities where these are everyday technology. A lot of them are Waymos. That's really the industry leader here. These are these white electric vehicles with a bunch of sensors perched on top that kind of looks like a spinning top hat. You might have…<\/p>\n
DOMONOSKE: …Seen them even in cities where they aren't available yet. They're doing testing.<\/p>\n
SCHMITZ: Yeah, I saw one the other day in D.C. here, and it didn't look like anyone is taking it for a ride.<\/p>\n
DOMONOSKE: But that is on the long list of about 20 cities that Waymo plans to expand into. I asked David Margines, the head of product management at Waymo, about this question of whether the robotaxi era has finally arrived.<\/p>\n
DAVID MARGINES: I think the driverless future is absolutely here, and it's rolling out to more and more places. It's just not everywhere yet.<\/p>\n
DOMONOSKE: And then there are other companies with plans, too. So Amazon's Zoox just got approval to launch commercial operations. And then Tesla has big plans. They have designed a space-agey-looking Cybercab, but that's not actually been deployed in the wild yet. In the locations – the couple cities where they're running pilot programs for this planned robotaxi system, there's more familiar-looking Tesla models that are doing the actual driving.<\/p>\n
DOMONOSKE: Yeah, well, certainly the companies behind them have always said that they're very safe. But in terms of third-party research, this summer, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety looked at data from Waymo in order to track crashes per miles driven. And this is an independent group, but they were only looking at Waymo because Waymo is the only company that has publicly released the kind of data that they need for this analysis. David Kidd is the vice president for vehicle research at the group.<\/p>\n
DAVID KIDD: What we found is that Waymo vehicles – they're in crashes 68% less often than human drivers.<\/p>\n
DOMONOSKE: …Fewer crashes overall. That is based on miles driven. And in terms of the kind of crashes, they're also way less likely to be the vehicle hitting or striking another car.<\/p>\n
DOMONOSKE: Right. They might still get rear-ended by a human driver. Not so much you can do about that.<\/p>\n
DOMONOSKE: Now, there's an important caveat here, which is that this research was comparing Waymos to all human drivers, including ones behaving very badly. Many safety experts argue you should hold these systems to a higher standard than that. Maybe compare them to professional drivers or at least drivers on good behavior.<\/p>\n
SCHMITZ: Got it. OK, so another concern that we've all heard is how many jobs could be lost among taxi and ride-hail drivers. You know, what other issues are people raising besides safety?<\/p>\n