The slow but steady advance of driverless vehicles

Mike Johns did not expect his return travel from Los Angeles to Los Angeles in December to go viral.

He booked a driverless taxi to visit the airport and enjoyed an adventure when he was eager, eager.

But he attracted more attention than this, as he had bargained.

Mr. Johns found that himself was being run around and around a car park, while the same buyers saw.

Vemo’s ride she was not doing she wanted and no clear way that Mr. Johns could fix it – and there was a flight to catch them.

Mr. Johns recorded the experience, a video that almost immediately went viral and picked up at TV stations worldwide, fresh public doubts about self-driving cars and how much they are ready for real-world travelers.

“Why is this happening to me on Monday morning?” Mr. Johns filmed himself asking himself.

Eventually a voice inside the car became active, stating that to reach the Vaymo App to bring the vehicle back under control.

Waymo, which is owned by Google’s original company alphabet, told BBC that it released a software update almost immediately to fix the problem.

The company says its driverless system is “better than humans to avoid accidents, resulting in injuries, deployment of airbags and police reports”.

Nevertheless, Mr. John’s experience is not the first time the company has to take action.

Last year, the company recalled more than 600 cars after hitting a street pole.

And National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in May 2024 (NHTSA) Started an inquiry In 22 incidents associated with Vemo vehicles.

A driverless future road has also been provoked for rival services.

In December, US car giant General Motors Close your self-driving Car auxiliary cruise.

The GM attributed the change of strategy to “attribute a lot of time and resources, which would be necessary to scale the business”.

In October 2023, a vehicle hit a pedestrian and dragged him for more than 20 feet (6 m), causing him seriously injured.

Meanwhile, in February last year, it was revealed that Apple’s rumor self-driving Car project was turning,

Uber left himself Driverless car efforts in 2020.

But some big players remain in the race, including zooks, which are owned by Amazon, as well as Chipmekar Navidia and Elon Musk’s Tesla.

Although Wemo is a major American player. It already operates self-driving taxis in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas and is promising to launch at Atlanta and Miami, Florida soon.

So why Vemo has succeeded, where other efforts, at least in America, have failed?

“Three things – people, wealth and process,” Schne Baker, a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a motor vehicle consultation, Managing Director of Silicon Valley Mobility.

He explains that for years Wells have employed some major figures in autonomous vehicle engineering, the financial weight of the Google-owner alphabet is behind it, and is fully done in its approach.

“They have actually come to play by the book, to be a good steward of procedures … working with regulators to make sure what they deploy is safe.”

So what’s next?

In areas with good weather, first driverless services are likely to be seen, which is the global co-leader Philip Compassoff of Automotive and Assembly Practice at Consultancy giant Macinsse.

It will include South American states such as Texas and Florida, where Wemo already has plans.

“Robo-taxis still works much better in good weather conditions. They still, for the most part, struggle in heavy snow,” Sri Sampashoff says.

She also suggests that batteries perform better in warm conditions, especially important for driverless cars that require a lot of energy for electricity on board computing.

“Bringing all this together, in the second part of 2020, you will scaling after unlocked a city and then within these cities,” they say.

This will be a slow process.

“This is actually a fairly labor intensive process for rolling this technique, which includes the appropriate amounts of human driving,” Sri Becar.

“You need to run vehicles through the roads where you want to deploy them, and you need to drive them again and again, and to some extent, you need to edit data manually,” they say.

And the entire process can also be conducted with safety concerns.

“This is only happening when we are not running in major accidents. The moment the major accidents are going to happen, many of these operations are going to be closed,” says Mr. Compassoff.

For those working on self-driving trucks, security is also on great concern.

Plus Chief Executive Officer David Liu says, “Safety number is a concern on which we work, which makes driverless software for trucks and works with global companies such as Amazon, Hyundai, Volkswagen and Scania.

“Autonomous trucks and autonomous vehicles, need to be more secure than the average human powered vehicle,” Sri Liu says.

“Human drivers are great, but not innocent. Most accidents that we receive ourselves are due to the inadvertence of the driver. And we do not have the issue with technology,” Sri Liu explains.

“A robo-taxi mostly moves within cities in low-speed environment, while trucks usually run on highways at high speed.

“So we need to put in different sets of technology to be more clearly able to look around trucks and be able to handle a long braking distance, for example.”

It may be worth watching the development in China to see the driverless future.

More than 500 driverless cars are being operated by the company Baidu in Wuhan city.

Driverless cars across the country are reported to be working in 16 cities and tested by 19 manufacturers.

“Surely there is more competition … there are four or five companies that are similar to Wemo,” Sri Becar, who is currently working on a study of robo-taxi deployment worldwide sponsored by Sweden’s innovation agency Vinnova.

Back to Scotsdale, Mr. Johns reflects his experience and rollout of autonomous vehicles.

“One of the big things we are all part of a paid experiment. At the end of the day, what they are doing is fixing it as they go to the city per city. And it is a problem.”