I recently took a test ride with Waymo to see how close Robotaxi service is to prime time. There are hundreds of Waymo Jaguar iPaces running around San Francisco and a few other cities in the USA, and they are currently providing over 100K rides per week.
I picked deliberately challenging conditions for this test – a dark and rainy evening, with lots of traffic and road closures along the route – from the Palace Hotel to Macy’s Union Square, which would have been about a 15 min walk and is less than a mile, but a bit longer when you have to navigate the one-way streets in a car.
The Waymo app is very easy to download and use. The first problem was the car would not pick me up outside the hotel, rather I had to walk ½ a block down the street to the pickup point on a perpendicular street that the app sent me to.
I stood at a different spot on the street, but that was no problem for the iPace, it recognized where I was and pulled over right next to me. The car then had to make 3 right turns in light traffic to head to Market Street – and drove very smoothly. But once it went over Market, it should have made a left turn on Geary to head directly to Union Square – but it tried to avoid traffic (that was stopped to make the left turn) and missed the turn.
It proceeded up Kearney to make the next possible left, but then for some inexplicable reason, it paused to make the next left (to get back on route) and because there were pedestrians in the intersection it decided to go straight rather than wait. You can see the objects the car sees and the expected route on a monitor in the center console. The car then failed to make the next few left turns for various reasons (such as buses in the left turn lane) and eventually, about a mile off course, it did a right-right-right turn to head back towards Geary. The driving was still quite smooth and the car did a good job of avoiding double parked delivery vans, if sometimes making a bit jerky maneuvers.
However, it then took a premature left for no apparent reason and ended back on the wrong side of Union Square. Eventually, I hit the “pull over” button, and the car “said” it was going to pull over, but in the traffic, it took almost 10 more minutes to find a good place to let me out (a block away from my original destination). An Uber driver would have been able to navigate this route much more efficiently, and also been able to find a place to pull-over more efficiently.
So the summary is, yes, the car can drive quite well, but route planning in challenging, busy city conditions still seems to need some improvement. Overall, this has the potential to rapidly replace taxi services with drivers and I think that it will continue to scale out in more cities over the next few years. There is a link to a video of the entire ride below if you are interested.
