Waymo is doing alright in San Francisco as well. That's not directly comparable to Tokyo, either, but I expect it's a much less distant of a comparison than Phoenix.
In SF you still have clearly delineated sidewalks with curbs and crossing lights. Japanese side streets are basically equivalent to alleys and cars are guests. There aren’t too many streets like that in the US at all.
> and so many traffic violations and crashes that they were (eventually) barred from expanding their testing by the state.
As far as I can tell, that literally didn’t happen. Instead, they both got approved for a major expansion this year and have no new restrictions on any future expansions.
CPUC approved a major expansion this year, some local agencies raised issues and called for a rehearing, and CPUC reheard it and approved it again. There’s a member of the state legislature that has proposed a bill changing the process for such expansions to a less favorable one in the past who talked about maybe reintroducing it this session in response, but nothing like that passed that I can find.
You're confusing us with Cruise. Lots of reporting did the same, but we're expanding a lot across California. For example, now anyone can use our service in Los Angeles:
> One of the world’s first fully-driverless taxi firms has been blocked from expanding its business in California, where several of its vehicles have recently been involved in accidents.
> Waymo, which is the driverless car division of Google parent Alphabet, currently operates in parts of San Francisco. Attempts to roll-out its robotaxi service to Sunnyvale and Los Angeles were suspended for up to 120 days following a ruling by the California Public Utilities Commission’s Consumer Protection and Enforcement Division (CPED).
Unable to respond to the instructions of a police officer and it taking a minute and a half for employees to manually control the car: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ix98jFVyGxs
...and then a few minutes later, illegally entering an intersection and stopping, then continuing to block the intersection because someone made a u-turn 30 feet in front of it while it was stopped: https://youtu.be/CHEtQ3Egt0c?t=474
And here's the icing on the cake: your company harassing reporters, calling the police on them because reporters were following it: https://youtu.be/spw176TZ7-8?t=170
My very personal opinion is maybe it shouldn't be ok for humans either. Maybe the benefits of cars absolutely don't outweigh the contant risk of deaths and injuries they pose (especially in metropolitan aeras where they are easily replaced by other modes of transportation)
Reality is "because humans can take responsibility for their actions". And it seems the way our society is built, we'd rather have individuals take responsibility than question the system
But we see bad driving whenever we are out ambulating in the streets, anyway, even in a world with vehicles that are almost always operated by humans.
In this world we have today, illegal things happen on the road all of the time.
(And we've always seen it, at least in quasi-modern times. It isn't something recent. I'm absolutely certain that we saw it in the horse-driven era, too; we just didn't have much in the way of pocket supercomputers back then to record it with.)
I literally just watched a video of a Waymo vehicle driving through and over the debris of a fresh car accident. Sorry, one day this technology will be ready for primetime but it currently is not. I think its complete BS that Waymo and others get to operate and test on public roads. The decision to prototype and test novel technology in public spaces where it can and will kill innocent people should be determined by a public referendum in elections, where I would vote NO.
The US is, like in several other public welfare stats, a bad outlier in traffic deaths among industrial nations. Thank your corpo overlords. Create the problem, sell the solution.
Since this has been updated with a link to info about the “barred from expansion” that was referenced, note that the arricle with actual detail notes that it was an “up to 120 days” suspension by CPUC in February of this year (which would have expired in June at the latest), but CPUC actually approved a major expansion in March (and, after a challenge to that decision and demand for a rehearing, approved it again on a rehearing in June.) [0]
So, the idea that they are fleeing to Japan because they’be faced some kind of permanent, or even significant, barrier to expansion in California is wildly incompatible with the facts.
> How are things going in Arizona? So badly they pulled their fleet (before state regulators could) and a federal investigation was announced right after:
They didn’t pull their fleet, and the article you posted to support this doesn't say they did. It says they did a safety recall to fix an apparent software error; the service is still in operation, and the implication that they ran away in fear of state regulatory action is as baseless as the idea that they have been blocked from further expansion in California. For someone who is accusing everyone who disagrees with you of being an astroturfer or dupe of Waymo propaganda, you seem to be very fond of promoting arguments that twist what is in the notionally-supporting sources to the limit of what would be plausible taking them entirely out of context,and which rely on ignoring every other piece of information ine existence, as if you were not presenting good faith arguments but desperately constructing anti-Waymo propaganda of the same type you accuse your opponents of doing in support of Waymo.
I saw a video of a bunch of Waymos backed up on each other being too hesitant to make a turn. Kinda reinforced a fear I have of these things. Not to mention I would hate to try and wave one of these things to turn before me... or wink my headlights.
IDK, like I get the appeal for driverless cars, I just still don't like them.
Seeing something once doesn’t make it a real phenomenon.
Besides, if that is common, Waymo will have data on it and if it’s common enough, they’ll fix it.
I’ve sat in Waymos on 2 occasions, each on a separate ride, in which the car avoided collisions that would have happened due to bad human drivers. Your fear is worth examining closely as it’ll hold you back from enjoying this amazing technology.
I think you may mean something other than phenomenon ("an observable fact or event"). Seeing anything more than zero times makes it a phenomenon by definition.
