Google’s self-driving Waymo cars will be picking you up soon

A Waymo minivan similar to one that could soon be picking you up. (image: Fortune)

AUSTIN — A self-driving car from Google (GOOG, GOOGL) may be coming to a street near you. But you won’t be able to buy it, and you’ll have to wait longer to get a ride if snow regularly features in your city’s winter forecasts.

John Krafcik, CEO of of Google’s self-driving car unit Waymo, laid out the company’s ambitions and its potential obstacles in two SXSW appearances at SXSW, an onstage interview with Vice News correspondent Evan McMorris-Santoro and an evening chat with comedian Adam Carolla recorded for Carolla’s podcast.

The potential promise here is huge — safer roads for everyone, and consequence-free napping behind the wheel for people willing to pay about what a human-driven Uber or Lyft costs today. But you may need to get over the notion of traditional car ownership along the way.

The promise of self-driving cars

“We’re working to build the world’s most experienced driver,” Krafcik said in opening his sales pitch. “Everything that we learn in one of our cars gets passed to all of our cars.”

Waymo’s software has already driven 5 million miles in U.S. cities, including an “early rider” test in Phoenix using modified Chrysler (FCAU) Pacifica minivans that began taking signups last April. Waymo has since grown confident enough to remove the self-driving-car equivalent of training wheels: a human “safety driver” at the wheel as a backup.

Powering the vehicle’s self-driving capabilities is an array of cameras, radar and Lidar sensors, many on the car’s roof, which detect everything nearby from other vehicles and pedestrians to cyclists.

At the evening event, Krafcik displayed a Lidar view of the event venue, a bar on the east side of Austin, showing people as glowing outlines. Seeing himself lit up as if by radiation, Carolla joked “I think I just got testicular cancer, so thanks for that.”

In both talks, Krafcik emphasized that Waymo’s cars aren’t connected — they don’t need a 5G wireless link to go anywhere. “The car has everything it needs to drive on the car itself,” he told McMorris-Santoro. “There are no signals coming from outer space or something telling it to turn right.”

The resulting ride may not be too exciting but is safe. “It doesn’t speed,” Krafcik added. “It’s very persnickety about following the rules.”

The Waymo system also thinks well ahead, which he said invalidated the question of how a car would decide which pedestrian to hit in a crash. “We can see three football fields down the road,” he said. “We would come to a stop before we ran into these folks.”

He added that the software does have “a hierarchy of concern” about the relative vulnerability of other road users. Presumably, an awareness that humans are squishier than cars would at least direct it to take out a Prius before a pedestrian.

Tuesday evening, Krafcik cited another benefit. “Just a few of those cars provide a really good example for human drivers to follow,” he said, citing studies showing people drove better after the addition of autonomous cars.

When and how much

Waymo’s system represents a major advance over the semi-autonomous systems of Tesla (TSLA) and GM’s (GM) Cadillac subsidiary, both of which demand continued human attention. Krafcik said passengers quickly set aside hangups over needing to trust a computer completely — a Waymo clip shows Phoenix testers taking selfies and naps.

Waymo plans to have service in every major metropolitan area by 2028, with thousands of cars driving themselves by 2020.

Its rollout will begin across sunnier climates first, though. “Snow and ice are challenging for our current system.” Krafcik said Tuesday morning. For example, the car’s sensors don’t have defrosters, although the next revision will add them.

But even then, Krafcik cautioned that Waymo cars won’t be able to cope with the sort of weather — blizzards, torrential rain storms — that keep self-aware humans off the roads.

In the same vein, he asked that states refrain from regulating Waymo’s software more strictly than the human sort, notwithstanding anxiety about artificial intelligence. “Hold us to the same standards as human drivers,” he requested.

Waymo will offer these cars as a service, telling Carolla that a ride would cost about the same as an Uber or Lyft: “a couple of bucks a mile.”

Waymo has no plan to make or sell cars itself. “We’ve always considered ourselves, in this space, as enablers of the incumbents,” Krafcik said in the morning. For instance, Avis (CAR) and AutoNation (AN) help to maintain the company’s minivans.

Ford will begin testing self-driving cars in an unnamed city

Ford exhibited a self-driving delivery vehicle at CES 2018 this week – a modified Fusion. [Guardian]

The self-driving revolution is already upon us, with companies across the spectrum of the technology industry working hurriedly on the kind of software and hardware that will power the autonomous cars of the near future.

But it’s important to also figure out just how that technology will impact society as it hits the road in the coming years. Ford , for its part, is interested in how self-driving vehicles will not only operate in, but also change cities.

Now the automaker has announced it is working with a city in which it will operate its self-driving cars, and how specific businesses can benefit from the technology. Ford isn’t giving any specifics about what city it’s working with, even Ford’s vice president of autonomous vehicles and electrification, Sherif Marakby, wouldn’t spill the beans during an interview at CES 2018.

How self-driving cars will alter cities

Marakby, did, however, explain how by working with partner companies like Lyft, Dominos and Postmates, Ford can better understand the needs of the self-driving car market.

In a Medium post discussing the company’s efforts, Jim Farley, Ford’s executive vice president and president of global markets, explained how self-driving vehicles could be used to provide a means of transportation for people who don’t have access to mass transit.

What’s more, Farley explained how Ford’s partnership with Postmates will give the company a better idea as to how delivery services work in cities and how self-driving cars can be used to save individual businesses on the cost of owning their own vehicles.

Ford says it’s also expanding its work with Dominos and Lyft into cities, which should give them a better understanding of how people will react to major changes in services. After all, if a self-driving car delivers your pizza, you’ll have to go out to the vehicle to get your pie.

Ford already tried this in the suburbs and found that many people were more than happy to grab their pizza from a robot car. In the city though, getting your pizza from such a vehicle could mean running down flights of stairs, or taking an elevator, to your building’s front door, something that’s not going to be easy or convenient for everyone.

How we’ll interact with self-driving cars

When fully autonomous vehicles do eventually hit the road, we’ll need to figure out how pedestrians will communicate with them. Think of all of the small, but necessary interactions you have with drivers when walking to work. You look at a driver when crossing the street to see if they’re staying put, watch their head movements to see if they are paying attention to you and follow their hand motions to see if they’re yielding to you. Without a driver, though, all of those behaviors go out the window.

That’s why Virginia Tech’s Transportation Institute is working on a lighting system that alerts pedestrians and even human drivers to a self-driving car’s intentions on the road. The school made headlines about its initiative back in September when it revealed that it was driving cars around Arlington, Virginia, with the driver disguised as a seat to see if pedestrians and other drivers would be comfortable with the idea of an autonomous vehicle.

It’s an interesting concept, and one that certainly needs to be further studied, but will require pedestrians and drivers to learn an entirely new language of the road.

However, companies address these issues, they’ll need to do so soon. Many automakers say they’ll make their autonomous vehicles available for the mass market between 2020 and 2025. Here’s hoping we know how to communicate with them by then.