Self-driving cars: Google and others map the road to automated vehicles

Waymo is kicking off the process of making its robotaxi service in Silicon Valley commercially available to everyone. The company announced today that its ridehailing app Waymo One will now be available 24/7 to certain customers across a 27-square-mile service area in California that includes Mountain View, Palo Alto, Los Altos, and parts of Sunnyvale.

Previously, Waymo’s autonomous vehicles were only accessible to the company’s employees for trips across Silicon Valley, which includes Google and Waymo’s respective headquarters. That contrasts with Waymo’s publicly available, 24/7 robotaxi service a few miles north in San Francisco.

Today’s the day: Waymo’s unlikely partnership with Uber is now live in Austin, Texas. The former rivals have joined forces in the hopes of accelerating the transition to autonomous vehicles, and as of today, any Austin resident with a desire to take a trip in a fully driverless robotaxi can open their Uber app and hail away.

But, of course, there are some limitations.

Eight years and $10 billion later, GM has decided to pull the plug on its grand robotaxi experiment.

The automaker’s CEO, Mary Barra, made the surprise announcement late on Tuesday, arguing that a shared autonomous mobility service was never really in its “core business.” It was too expensive and had too many regulatory hurdles to overcome to make it a viable revenue stream. Instead, GM would pivot to “privately owned” driverless cars — because, after all, that’s what the people really wanted.

General Motors said it would no longer fund its Cruise robotaxi service as it seeks to focus its spending on autonomous vehicle development specifically for personally owned vehicles. Now Cruise employees will be combined with GM’s internal teams working on advanced driver assist systems, like Super Cruise, as well as its project to develop autonomous vehicles to sell to customers for personal use.

Ultimately, the project became too expensive for GM to justify the huge amounts of money spent to prop it up. And the automaker found it increasingly difficult to convince its shareholders that the money-losing operation would eventually pay off. The robotaxi subsidiary lost a staggering $3.48 billion in 2023 and has been seen by some as an albatross for the automaker, sucking up cash and lacking a clear path to profits.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens to all those self-driving taxis when the world is asleep, one YouTube channel has you covered. Since the beginning of the month, software engineer Sophia Tung has been livestreaming a San Francisco parking lot that Waymo is renting to give its robotaxis somewhere to go during their downtime.

Tung told The Verge via email that the company appeared to “partially” take over the lot on July 28th, then later took over the entire lot. Waymo recently opened up its robotaxi service to anyone in San Francisco.

Federal safety investigators have opened a preliminary investigation into dozens of incidents involving Waymo’s driverless vehicles, including several “single-party” crashes and possible traffic law violations.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation is looking into 22 incidents in which Waymo’s robotaxis were “the sole vehicle operated during a collision” or “exhibited driving behavior that potentially violated traffic safety laws.”

The first race of the Abu Dhabi Autonomous Racing League (A2RL) took place on the Yas Marina Abu Dhabi Grand Prix Formula 1 track today, and I’m pleased to report that a race both began and ended. But the event was not without strife — far from it. During qualifying time trials, the driverless Dallara Super Formula racers outfitted with cameras and software seemed to struggle mightily to complete a full lap.

During the trials, cars randomly juked:

Self-driving cars have an image problem. They stumble into construction zones, block ambulances, run red lights, and even injure the occasional bicyclist or pedestrian.

Forget the fact that most autonomous vehicles operate each day safely, anonymously, and without fanfare. There are hundreds in operation today in California, Arizona, Texas, and elsewhere, and the numbers are only going to increase. But when they do make mistakes, people tend to notice. Numerous public opinion polls have shown declining support for autonomous vehicles (AV) over the years and a rise in outright hostility toward the technology.

Cruise, the self-driving car subsidiary of General Motors, tried to send a 45-second video to regulators of an incident in which one of its driverless cars dragged a pedestrian 20 feet but was hampered by “internet connectivity issues,” according to a report compiled by a law firm investigating the incident.

The law firm, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, was hired by Cruise to determine whether its executives misled regulators in the aftermath of the October 2nd incident in which a hit-and-run driver struck a pedestrian, knocking her into the path of a driverless Cruise vehicle. Its conclusions were detailed in a nearly 200-page report that was released today.

Two years ago, General Motors presented a vision for the future that involved “zero crashes, zero traffic, and zero emissions.” Today, that future seems further away than ever.

The automaker’s driverless car subsidiary, Cruise, announced last night the resignation of Kyle Vogt as CEO. The decision came over a month after an incident in which a hit-and-run victim became pinned under a Cruise vehicle and then was dragged 20 feet to the side of the road. As a result, California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s permit to operate driverless cars in the state.

For years, developers have been working on ways for driverless cars to communicate intent to other road users, either through audio recordings or visual cues. Today, Waymo says it wants to be one of the first companies to put some of these methods into practice.

The Alphabet-owned company’s driverless Jaguar I-Pace vehicles will use their roof domes, which are wrapped in LED displays, to communicate messages to other road users. For now, the company is going with just two messages: for pedestrians in front of the vehicle, shifting grey and white rectangles meant to communicate that the vehicle is yielding to them, and for drivers behind the vehicle, a yellow pedestrian symbol to let them know there’s a pedestrian crossing.

Waymo’s robotaxi service area in San Francisco is expanding to 47 square miles of the city — a significant expansion of the company’s driverless ridehail operations.

Last August, Waymo and its driverless rivals won approval from California regulators to operate their commercial service 24/7. The vote was a significant win for the tech industry, which has been battling criticism that its robot cars occasionally obstruct emergency vehicles and cause traffic jams.

Governor Gavin Newsom has vetoed Assembly Bill 316, which would have required human attendants in driverless vehicles over 10,000 pounds, reports Reuters. The bill saw broad support among state legislators and was backed by the Teamsters and other labor organizations. At the moment,

The governor wrote in his veto message that the bill “is unnecessary for the regulation and oversight of heavy-duty autonomous vehicle technology,” adding that the existing regulatory framework is “sufficient.”

Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company backed by General Motors, revealed a wheelchair-accessible robotaxi that it says could start picking up disabled passengers as soon as next year.

The reveal of the newly accessible robotaxi is a major step toward fulfilling the dream of people with vision, hearing, and mobility impairments, who have long held out hope that autonomous vehicles represent a new way of getting around.