Waymo has two co-CEOs.
The Waymo plan is to expand its ridehailing business from Phoenix to other places. Waymo One.
They will expand Waymo driving to truck delivering services. Waymo Via.
Waymo One and Waymo via will have no driver behind the wheel.
Waymo Via has trucks going between Tucson and Texas. Class 8 trucks.
Eventually, they will get to the personal car driving revolution.
SOURCES- Bloomberg, Waymo
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Deliverator this is not.
In the meantime the Musk starts realizing what hole he has dug himself in with trying to build fully autonomous driving machines based on computer generated algorithms and computation power alone.
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-shares-painfully-obvious-idea-about-the-diffi-1846795236
also, some insurance providers ask you to download an app which will offer savings if it can monitor driving behaviour. how? onboard accelerometers? Intrusive driving monitoring can only follow…
interesting. do Tesla owners have to promise not to Self-drive or Ludicrous too often as a condition of their policy? – maybe a separate rider?
Most destinations are also not far off the highway. No reason why they couldn't pull right up to the destination in many cases.
Um, Alphabet? Alphabet would underwrite it?
I think people make insurance to be a big problem, when really big companies can underwrite this themselves. A $10m damages award is not the end of the world for a trillion dollar company.
Not convinced. As Musk once said: 'the public demands a level of safety and reliability' many orders of magnitude beyond what normal human beings can reasonably provide as drivers and pedestrians. And the insurance??? woo-hoo – be interesting to see how provider, manufacturer, and user will divvy up that Huge Outlay. Who would even underwrite such a system?
Trucks are way easier. If you automate only the highway part of the driving, that's good enough because that is the profitable part of the problem.
Person drops truck off at the highway stop, truck drives itself to the destination city stop, different person drives the last mile.