The robotaxis are here |
San Franciscans are getting used to seeing little electric vehicles zipping around with no one in the driver’s seat. After years of hype and over-promising
This past week, I’ve been hitching rides with Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo and General Motors Co.-backed Cruise. Most of my trips were with Waymo, the outfit springing from Google’s self-driving project, while my colleague Emily Chang has logged miles with Cruise (see her impressions here).
Right now, the services work just like any ride-hailing product that relies on a human driver, a la Uber and Lyft. You use an app, confirm your pickup location, plug in your destination and wait for your ride.
When the car arrives, a tap in the Waymo One app unlocks the doors. After you get in and fasten your belt, you can use a touch screen to start the ride, or use the app. And… off you go.
San Francisco is the only city in the world where two players are running driverless services for the public 24/7 — though both are limited in who can ride where, and Waymo isn’t yet able to charge for rides. Other efforts in Arizona, Texas and China have more limited hours.
The endeavor isn’t without controversy. There’s been an uptick in safety incidents over the course of this year, San Francisco officials have said, and several lawmakers have opposed expanding the area and hours that paid robotaxis can travel.
In my experience, Waymo’s cars were pretty conservative, often driving below the speed limit. Though I did experience what seemed to be somewhat random signaling and curiously timed lane-change attempts. Sometimes, not seeing an opening, the car would give up and carry on. The ride could be a little jerky at times, and in encounters with pedestrians, the robotaxi tended to play it safe.
But for the most part, my rides were smooth and comfortable. The music selection wasn’t bad, either.
Other drivers were less chill. Getting honked at was common. People rolled their eyes at me from behind the wheel. And there was the occasional “Oh, look!” from people I passed by.
Waymo’s current fleet consists of about 200 cars in San Francisco. The company is doing about 10,000 trips a week across the city and the Phoenix area, and its goal is to do 10 times that volume of trips by next summer.
Thousands of public users — not including Waymo employees — are riding in a limited patch of San Francisco, and the waitlist is at more than 80,000. A smaller roster of 1,000 “trusted testers” have access to cars that can travel through the entire city.
Cruise, meanwhile, is averaging 1,000 trips a day in San Francisco, and on busy days has hit 2,000 trips. The company has 300 customized Chevy Bolt electric vehicles across San Francisco, Austin and Phoenix. Tens of thousands of people are signed up to ride Cruise here, a spokesperson told me, and tens of thousands more are on the waitlist. The company’s goal is to hit $1 billion in robotaxi revenue by 2025.
At the moment, Cruise’s paid service is confined by regulators to the northwest third of the city, though it’s looking to expand. And Waymo is hoping to start charging for its service. The California Public Utilities Commission is scheduled to decide on June 29 whether to award Waymo a permit to start charging for rides.
The Waymo One app already gives riders in the city a sense of what the service would cost. A trip I took from Pacific Heights to Ocean Beach and on to Twin Peaks (covering 10.5 miles, lasting 53 minutes) would have run about $30, the receipt showed.
As companies edge toward monetization, BloombergNEF sees a shift happening. Autonomous-driving companies are no longer just pursuing science projects, they’re building actual businesses. My Friday night spent riding to the Marina and day trip to Ocean Beach made this future easy to envision.
Of course, the services are still limited. For example, Waymo’s public service doesn’t yet cover the northeast corner of the city, where Bloomberg’s bureau is. So for now, my morning commute will remain human-driven. In a few years, who knows? —Ed Ludlow
A version of this story also appears in Bloomberg’s Hyperdrive newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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