Waymo takes to the streets in more cities

(LOS ANGELES) — Waymo, the self-driving car division of Alphabet, first began offering its autonomous rideshare service on the streets of San Francisco earlier this year. Now the company is expanding, recently launching in Los Angeles.

Waymo’s electric Jaguar I-Pace SUVs operate as taxis, except there’s nobody in the driver’s seat. Using cameras, sensors and even microphones, it ferries riders to their destinations – if all goes according to plan – just as a human driver would.

“There is nobody behind the driver’s seat at all — in fact, often there’s nobody in the car at all, and it’s driving to pick somebody up,” says Andrew Chatham, senior director of commercialization, scale, and infrastructure at Waymo. He spoke with ABC Audio in LA for a new exhibit at the famed Petersen Automotive Museum highlighting the story of Waymo.

“So we use a variety of sensors on the car. There’s cameras, there’s radars and lidar — which is a laser range finding system. We take all that information, we look 360 degrees around us, multiple times a second, and we drive,” says Chatham.

And Waymo claims driving in one of their cars with the computers doing the work – accelerating, braking, stopping, and changing lanes – is actually safer than driving with a human behind the wheel.

“It’s very clear that it is ready for the streets — we’ve seen from statistics that it is safer than human drivers, so if you’re comfortable with those, you should be pretty comfortable with Waymo,” says Chatham. “Even more comfortable.”

But not everyone is comfortable.

“We’ve heard of these cars shutting down when they lose cell service, traffic being backed up, they don’t know how to maneuver through more, you know, winding roads. Blocking emergency vehicles. And also there’s an aspect of jobs being lost,” says Los Angeles City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez.

“So as far as I can tell, there’s some things where we just have to put our foot down and this is one of them,” he says.

This summer, police in Phoenix, where the company also operates, pulled over a Waymo vehicle for driving into oncoming traffic while trying to navigate around a construction area. That maneuver is why Councilmember Soto-Martinez says he doesn’t want them on his streets.

“We are elected to provide safety, to deal with transportation issues, and so many other things for our residents, that’s what we are voted for,” says Soto-Martinez.

Waymo said the incident in Phoenix happened due to “inconsistent construction signage.”

But like it or not, self-driving cars are the future, according to Rahul Jain, a professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in electrical and computer engineering and works with Google.

“This is really inevitable, it’s going to happen,” says Jain, though he adds that wide-scale adoption of self-driving technology is likely a long way off.

“Twenty years might be the right timespan, when we see this technology reduce in cost enough, and also advanced sufficiently that it will be in passenger vehicles that people can buy,” he says.

Even still, Jain says the technology is currently safe for passengers, so much so that the next step for autonomous vehicle companies could be removing the vehicle’s steering wheel.

“There’s definitely going to be some transition as this technology evolves, you know, then it will be awhile before people become comfortable, and then we can feel comfortable with the steering wheel also missing. But I don’t think we’re there yet,” says Jain.

Chatham says, in general, his company’s technology is always learning. Already, the cars know to pull over when they detect the sound of a siren or flashing emergency lights. Next, he says, Waymo is tackling how autonomous vehicles behave in inclement weather conditions.

“Sure, on the map the lane is over here, but according to how everybody else is driving and where the divots are in the snow, it looks like the lane is really over here,” says Chatham. “And that’s something that the car starts to reason about and it’s getting more intelligent with AI about exactly where we want to drive to be like a human.”

But Councilmember Soto-Martinez has another issue: driverless taxis could mean a human is out of a job.

“It’s definitely taking jobs right now. I mean, there are autonomous vehicles driving folks around with the many issues,” he says. “In my community, those jobs are often done by people who just arrived in this country. … If that’s going to be outsourced to an autonomous vehicle that is gonna cause all these safety concerns, I have big issues with that.”

Jain says history would show technology always takes jobs, and that jobs change over time.

“Eventually there is some adjustment in the labor market. People find other kinds of jobs, and start to do more interesting jobs than I guess, driving cars around,” says Jain.

Chatham says while nobody is driving the cars, plenty of people are working at Waymo.

“Waymo’s provided a lot of jobs. We’ve do use several human beings to run the service, we have people operating the depots, we have people working in desk-based jobs. I’m employed by Waymo,” says Chatham.

“And I think it’s also easy to forget that people spend a lot of their time just sitting in traffic, beholden to the steering wheel that they’re sitting behind. And they can free up that time, and make people productive. That is time back in people’s lives,” he adds.

Waymo is already looking at what their next vehicle will look like, a custom built van-like vehicle designed by a Chinese firm called Zeekr.

“The base vehicle is really built as a versatile platform. This is really a vehicle that’s built to be a high thru-put taxi service. It’s very comfortable,” says Chatham.

Listen to this story and more on ABC Audio’s new special, On The Move: