Name: Inside The City Where Waymo Tests Self-Driving Vehicles
Uploaded: 2021-06-07T16:44:05.000Z
Duration: 13 min 2 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona, there's a fleet of 600 minivans shuttling

Adverbs of manner

Ordering one feels almost exactly like calling an Uber, except for one thing:

It does feel like from when I first got in that it is just a normal car.

I don't think you could stand at a street corner or drive a couple of

I know that some of this technology is scary for many of our citizens, but

I think if you see other times in our economic arc that this has really

opened up new worlds for people and new opportunities.

This is my thirty third year in policing, and when I started in policing we

had vehicles, obviously, but there were there were no computers, no cell

phones. Pagers weren't even in existence yet.

So to see this technology in relatively a short 30 year span is just

Department of Defense hosted a 142 mile driverless car obstacle course

The farthest any of the entrants got was a little over seven miles.

The next year, the DOD tried again, this time five vehicles completed the

course, but a team from Stanford did it the fastest.

That Stanford team was led by a computer scientist named Sebastian Thrun.

So I didn't anticipate this to become a race for speed. It was one

In 2007, Google hired Thrun and he created Google X.

Two years later, Google X launched a self-driving car project.

In 2016, that project spun off as its own company, called Waymo, under

Here's an example of the Waymo Chrysler Pacifica minivan.

The company says it's tested its vehicles in over 25 cities in six states.

But the most miles seem to have been driven around Phoenix, Arizona.

From the police department's point of view, our mission is to keep our city

safe. So we recognize this technology as something that could really

impact our roadways because the overwhelming majority of collisions are

You get in the car and you have a seat and it has a start button.

And it's pretty trippy when you can see the fact that the car is driving

It's amazing to see how well the brain processes information, as a driver,

It's great to be a part of history, for my kids to experience.

My daughter actually liked it a lot, didn't she?

Right now Waymo is doing two main things in the Phoenix area: Around a

thousand members of the community have access to its rideshare beta

program, Waymo One. Users can summon one of Waymo's 600 vehicles 24/7 and

ride anywhere within a limited local region.

And these users are actually paying for the rides, it's not just a free

demo. It also has a partnership with Lyft and makes ten of its vehicles

available to the general public via Lyft's app.

I probably use Waymo maybe percent of the time.

The biggest limiting factor is that it only goes in a certain defined

area, mostly in Chandler and Tempe and maybe a little bit of Mesa.

If it went all the way downtown, I would probably take it a whole lot

The reason Waymo is limited to a small region is because its cars are

autonomous, but only in specific locations.

Everywhere it can drive has been carefully mapped and analyzed so that

even before sensing anything new, the vehicle already has a good sense of

The Society of Automotive Engineers came up with a set of standards

defining the levels of autonomy a vehicle could be, ranging from zero to

five. And right now, Waymo's vehicles are at a four: capable of full

Tesla refers to its driver-assist systems as Autopilot.

Nobody in the industry thinks that's the case.

Waymo and General Motors Cruise Automation are very close to having what

they refer to as level 5 cars, most of the time.

So right now it's standard for Waymo vehicles to have safety drivers behind

the wheel at all times, ready to take over if something were to go wrong.

And beyond that, there's a team of support staff on call to help riders.

The vehicles are constantly maintained by a team of people.

While the driving itself is done mostly by a computer, the system is still

A lot of the business promise and also the hope for these machines, these

autonomous vehicles, is that they eliminate labor and they eliminate the

need for human beings to drive and to be stuck in jobs like delivering

pizzas or picking up the elderly or the blind from their homes and taking

them to services, wherever it needs to be.

When we think through that a little more carefully, though, some of the

example, think of something like Meals on Wheels.

Maybe they can get out to the curb to get it, maybe not.

Even if they could, though, when that human driver shows up with a Meal on

So it's this human interaction that's still very much a part of these

I think there's still a ways to go before they're ready for prime time on

But we want to be helpful in the testing of it.

And then we want to make certain that, whether it's at the state level or

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Inside The City Where Waymo Tests Self-Driving Vehicles

potential

opportunity

eliminate

experience