Waymo has become the second company
to apply for the newly-available permit to deploy autonomous vehicles without
safety drivers on some California
roads, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. It would be putting its cars —
well, minivans — on streets around Mountain
View , where it already has an abundance of data.
The company already
has driverless cars in play over in Phoenix , as it showed in a few promotional
videos last month. So this isn’t the first public demonstration of its
confidence.
The recent fatal
collision of an Uber self-driving car with a pedestrian, plus another fatality
in a Tesla operating in semi-autonomous mode, make this something of an awkward
time to introduce vehicles to the road minus safety drivers. Of course, it must
be said that both of those cars had people behind the wheel at the time of
their crashes.
Assuming the permit is
granted, Waymo’s vehicles will be limited to the Mountain View area, which makes sense — the
company has been operating there essentially since its genesis as a research
project within Google. So there should be no shortage of detail in the data,
and the local authorities will be familiar with the people necessary for
handling any issues like accidents, permit problems, and so on.
No details yet on what
exactly the cars will be doing, or whether you’ll be able to ride in one. Be
patient.
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