Status: 08/25/2021 11:27 a.m.
The Google sister company Waymo starts a robotaxi service in San Francisco. A success in the California metropolis could pave the way for self-driving cars.
While Tesla & Co. rely on driver assistance systems and thus semi-autonomous driving, start-ups like Waymo, Cruise and Aurora go all out. They want to advance autonomous driving and give non-self-driving cars a place in the history books.
It is an ambitious undertaking in which the Google sister company Waymo has now reached an important milestone. Waymo opens its Robotaxi service in San Francisco to a wider audience, as announced by the US company Alphabet.
A driving service for selected users
Since the beginnings of the company, which was founded in 2009, when Waymo was nothing more than a quirky project within the large Google corporation and still operating under the name “Google Driverless Car”, tests with self-driving cars have been running on the streets of San Francisco.
But with the new pilot project everyone can apply via the “Waymo One” smartphone app and take part in the “Trusted Tester” program. If you want to be transported by a self-driving electric SUV of the Jaguar I-Pace type, you do not have to pay anything at first, but meet other requirements.
The user undertakes to share and rate his ride-sharing experience exclusively with Waymo. “This gives us valuable feedback that allows us to improve our service,” the company wrote in a blog post. A confidentiality clause is mandatory. The safety driver who is to intervene in an emergency is also required.
Why San Francisco of all places?
Waymo has already offered such a service in a suburb of Phoenix in the US state of Arizona. There the cars are even on the move without a security driver. Nevertheless, the public ridesharing offer in San Francisco is a big step for the company itself and for the entire future technology of autonomous driving.
Because the driving conditions in San Francisco are not comparable to those in Phoenix. In Phoenix, there is less traffic and the streets are wider. In San Francisco the traffic conditions are sometimes chaotic, an extremely winding road is one of the most famous trademarks of the city even next to the Golden Gate Bridge.
Part of Lombard Street is considered to be the winding street in the world.
Image: picture alliance / HJS-Sportfoto
“If you can make it there …”
The weather in the two cities is also vastly different: while it is warm and constant in the desert city, the fog of San Francisco is so infamous that it even has its own Twitter account (KarlTheFog).
Last but not least, the competition in San Francisco is far greater: Nowhere in the USA are there more Uber and Lyft drivers than in the Californian metropolis. In other words, if a Robotaxi service manages it in San Francisco, it has a good chance of surviving in other cities as well.
Cruise and Argo AI as rivals
According to the Wall Street Journal, eight companies are currently making the streets of San Francisco unsafe with self-driving cars. The start-ups Cruise and Argo AI are the two biggest Waymo rivals, as they too want to set up a commercial driver service with the help of autonomous vehicles.
Cruise belongs to the largest US car manufacturer General Motors, Argo AI is supported by Ford and Volkswagen. Argo AI recently teamed up with the driver service broker Lyft and plans to bring robotic taxis to the streets of Miami and Austin this year.
Not a cheap endeavor
In the industry, cooperation and alliances are key to operating self-driving shuttles with economic success. Because the adventure of autonomous driving is an extremely expensive undertaking, as this detail also shows: Up until 2019, Waymo was only supported financially by the parent company Alphabet.
But in 2020 and 2021 the company had to get fresh money from investors outside the group. Waymo raised approximately $ 4.75 billion in two external funding rounds.
Hundreds of thousands of test miles
Quite a few market observers assume that Waymo and Cruise will likely take on the leading role in the future market of autonomous driving. Both companies were able to increase the distance to the competition in 2020, as data from the California traffic authority DVM shows.
Cruise covered more than 770,000 miles with its test vehicles in California last year, followed by Waymo with 550,000 miles. At Waymo, a test driver only had to intervene 21 times, at Cruise 27 times.
Cruise is Waymo’s fiercest rival.
Frustrated employees
But it is well known that the success of a company also depends on the satisfaction of its employees. And then there was a huge problem with Waymo: Recently, media reports were piling up about frustrated employees who complained about too cautious managers and too slow progress.
Numerous employees had recently left the company, including John Krafcik, who headed the company for five and a half years. The former Waymo boss had to admit in an interview with the “Financial Times” that the implementation of autonomous driving had become much more difficult. “I’d say it’s more of a challenge than launching a rocket and putting it into orbit around the earth.”