You may not have heard, but the autonomous vehicle has now arrived
By: Enrique Dans
Tags: Waymo, Predictions, Autonomous Vehicles, Future, Autonomous Cars

No one said it would be easy. Much less that its deployment would be immediate, or that it would be available to everyone around the world. When I began writing regularly about autonomous driving in 2012 (Google’s official announcement was in 2010), my forecast was that the technology would be ready for deployment in 2020. Sergey Brin, in his presentation at the time, was optimistic and said 2017, a date when we were still talking, at most, about vehicles with safety drivers, driving at very low speeds and in very restricted areas, subject to the extremely odd accident over the years.

Since then, the roadmap has been followed, until a couple of days ago, on October 8, 2020, Waymo’s official blog announced the opening, not on a trial basis, of a completely driverless service for the general public in Chandler, Tempe and Mesa, three cities within the Phoenix (AZ) area with respective populations of 250,000, 200,000 and 500,000. Almost one million people who right now can download an app and order a completely autonomous vehicle with no one at the wheel to take them to their next destination. We all know that Waymo’s advertising tends to exaggerate, but this is real, this is verifiable. We’ve had a huge amount of news and announcements over the last few years, but few in the media have realized the importance of this moment.

The service is not being tested, it is not just a beta development for a closed group of people, it’s not being tried out on a specially designed closed circuit; this is more than just proof of a concept. In other parts of the world, such as China, Japan or Russia, tests are also progressing satisfactorily, and Elon Musk, who is pursuing a completely different development model, announced last July that Tesla’s fully autonomous vehicles would be available “very soon”.

Whether you have autonomous vehicles in your city depends on the concerns of legislators or local entrepreneurs: Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, commited his support in 2016 by inviting companies working on this technology to test in his state, and has already obtained his reward. Accumulating the detailed micrographs needed to start up the service — which then takes care of introducing the changes detected by the sensors as the fleet accumulates miles of experience — is simply a matter of time and dedication, which will happen as economic factors come into play. Micro-mapping the area where the service is now deployed and verifying it with security drivers took Waymo almost three years, which will make for a very slow roll-out at the national level.

But at this point, with legislators now prepared to accept a technology that has undergone millions of kilometers of testing with a negligible accident rate, it is important to understand that the challenge is no longer technological, but economic: the technology has lived up to the expectations of the experts, and although testing under a wider range of environments than Arizona, where bad weather or road quality comes into play, it’s safe to say that self-driving vehicles are already here. Anyone can come to one of these three cities, download the app, get into one of these vehicles and see how it performs amid the normal traffic of the city. But most importantly, we must now understand that autonomous vehicles are not some technological whim or geeky obsession, but the key lowering road deaths and congestion. The doomsters have been proved wrong, bringing to mind to mind the famous phrase, sometimes attributed to Thomas Alva Edison: “Those who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.”

Skepticals of the world, this is the moment to admit defeat: those who said it couldn’t be done have been proved wrong; those who said autonomous vehicles couldn’t adapt to real road conditions, that these vehicles would end up waiting at junctions for hours, that legislation would be held up, that nobody would dare use it, or my favorite (if only for all the times it comes up in discussions), the bogus trolley car dilemma. Well, here we are in 2020, with autonomous taxis on our roads without a safety driver, and with no one worrying about babies left in the middle of a road where you can’t do anything else that falling through a cliff or killing the baby. Entertaining, maybe, but purely theoretical, extremely unlikely… and fruitless.

Obviously, the economics will be an obstacle for a while. Running a service like Waymo’s work is expensive, as it has been to develop. The vehicles are loaded with sensors and are expensive, although LiDAR is now much more affordable. These taxis are still monitored, a process that will have to be refined to allow a single operator to monitor several vehicles, and finally, to be eliminated or replaced by algorithms. To understand the economic model, we will have to see how fast Waymo expands its fleet, the territories it operates in and what the public’s take up is like, which will give us a measure of the losses incurred with the service. But that’s how technology works: at first, you lose money. But if you manage to scale it up properly, the prospects, of course, are different.

We are in October 2020, and despite the difficulties, the pandemic and the technological doomsayers and pessimists, autonomous cars are already here, they work; don’t take my word for it, search the internet. And now, as my math teacher would write on the board under each problem or demonstration: q. e. d.