“How do we break the journey down into bite-sized pieces so as not to feel overwhelmed or overwhelmed?” said Jesse Levinson, co-founder and CEO of Zoox. “This is a huge moment, but the service is still unpaid and quite limited.” ZOOX launched in 2014 and although it has been testing its technology in San Francisco, Foster, California, headquarters and Las Vegas for many years, it will be the first time anyone is willing to download the app to ride a bike. The company is Amazon acquired in 2020 $1.2 billion reported.
May Mobility CEO Olsen said he was happy with the company’s launch process after watching others rush to put their self-driving cars on the road. “One thing we’ve seen throughout the industry is that at some point vehicles can do a great job, but then do very inappropriately in edge cases,” Olson said. He declined to say exactly when the company would remove the safety driver from its vehicles, or when it would extend its Lyft partnership to other areas or cities, but he said any action the company takes can be tested and verified with real-world and simulated data. He said the service will expand faster as time goes by.
Two U.S. self-driving vehicles have been shut down over the past decade after their robots were involved in a serious road accident. Testing self-driving cars operated by Uber Advanced Technologies Group in 2018 Killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona. Uber Sell its autonomous driving technology For competitors in 2020. In 2023, GM’s subsidiary Cruise hit a pedestrian in San Francisco after the man collided with another car and was thrown into the empty Robotaxi path. State regulators later learned Cruising dragged 20 feet When it attempted to exit traffic, it revoked the company’s operating license. General Motors Leaving the robot business a year laterciting high development costs and a desire to focus on personal vehicles.
Keep the robot
Still, Robotaxi said they still have more public deployments. Zoox said it will start hosting public riders in San Francisco later this year, and will then launch in Austin and Miami. May Mobility plans to deploy robots on Uber platform by the end of this year (this time). Waymo announced future services in several cities including Miami, Washington, DC and Dallas. Tesla is operating a cycling-only trail service in the Bay Area The driver is behind the steering wheel Using its more limited complete autonomous driving (supervised) technology requires that the person always be alert. Musk plans to move quickly: he Say this spring By the second half of next year, the company will own “million dollar vehicles.”
Developers of self-driving cars believe their technology will improve safety and ride efficiency, thus reducing prices in the long run. (Of course, these companies no longer need to pay human drivers a cut on each ride.) But even in Phoenix and San Francisco, where Waymo has been opening public robots for years, the city has not yet seen a clear glimpse of expensive development technologies that could change residents’ lives.
“It hasn’t really changed anything yet,” said Adam Millard-Ball, a professor of urban planning who directed the UCLA Transportation Institute.
Millard-Ball said the Robotaxi service may have to become bigger before it can prove its vision. Waymo owns Research released shows that its technology is safer than human drivers In many cases, but some experts still believe that given the mileage of a car, it is difficult to compare the performance of a robot with that of a human.
“Can this make the ride industry grow?” asked Jeremy Bird, executive vice president of driver experience at Lyft, who worked with May Mobility at the Atlanta launch. Bird said Lyft has looked at data that has already been deployed for self-driving cars and he believes the answer is yes. But when Robotaxis becomes a money-making career, it remains a big question mark. Obviously, however, many people are still trying to find out.
