The Telegraph published this video item, entitled “Waymo offers driverless taxis to the public for the first time” – below is their description.
Waymo, the driverless car unit of Google’s parent company Alphabet, has launched a driverless taxi service to the public for the first time. The new service will first be offered in Phoenix, Arizona, as Alphabet looks to finally transform its robot driving unit into a revenue-generating business. Waymo said it will start offering the taxis within the next few weeks to anyone who downloads their app and wants a lift within the 50 square mile area of Phoenix. The vehicle upon which the technology is built into has changed considerably over the years. In 2015, Waymo was relying on the Beetle-esque “Firefly”. Now the company uses a Chrysler Pacifica minivan to offer lifts. The company started testing a fully driverless ride service in Phoenix some three years ago. Between five and 10 percent of rides through its service so far in 2020 have been taken in fully driverless vehicles by an exclusive group of riders who signed non-disclosure agreements. “We’ve been gathering key learnings from these riders on how to optimize our driverless service experience and continuously improve it,” it said in a blog post on Thursday. “We also began to offer more people access to our public Waymo One service, with a vehicle operator monitoring the ride.” The company added that all of its vehicles would be fully driverless “in the near term”. During a conference call Waymo chief executive John Krafcik did not reveal when the company would expand beyond Phoenix, but said he would “love” to bring it to California. In December, the Alphabet-owned firm snapped up UK start-up Latent Logic as part of its plans to launch its first European research hub in Oxford. Latent, set up by Oxford academics, builds highly-realistic simulations of roads and cars that can be used to train AI software for driverless vehicles. Earlier this year, Waymo raised more than $3bn (£2.28bn), largely from outside investors. The launch of the driverless service has allowed it to get a jump on rivals, who have yet to offer the service to the public. Both Amazon and Uber have also invested heavily in automated vehicles, however the latter was hit with a set back by a fatal accident that involved a test vehicle in 2018. Subscribe to The Telegraph on YouTube ► https://bit.ly/3idrdLH
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