Speaking in a fireside chat at the National Governors Association meeting Friday, Waymo CEO John Krafcik told the gathering that the “time period will be longer than you think” for automated vehicles to be everywhere. Krafcik spent his conversation with Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval emphasizing the need for safety in developing automated driving systems and at the same time tempering some of the expectations caused by the hype around this technology.
Krafcik praised the progress that has been made on safety in recent decades including the installation of 8 to 10 airbags in every new vehicle and the adoption of a range of active safety and driver assist technologies like automatic emergency braking and stability control. He also offered some thoughts on why we actually seem to be going backwards on road safety in the last few years with an increasing number of fatalities.
“There are no autonomous systems available, zero on the road today,” said Krafcik. “Anything you can buy on the road today is a driver assist system, that means the driver is completely responsible for the car and I think there is so much confusion on that.”
What Krafcik was referring to was some of the issues caused by consumers believing that the assist systems currently on the market are more capable than they actually are, most notably Tesla’s AutoPilot. At least two fatal accidents have occured in the U.S. related to misuse of AutoPilot along with a number of other crashes that didn’t result in fatalities. However, while Tesla gets most of the attention as a result of CEO Elon Musk’s relentless promotion of AutoPilot, the problem is not unique to Tesla. Systems from Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and other manufacturers have similar limitations.
So far General Motors is the only manufacturer to sell a system, Cadillac Super Cruise with an active driver monitor system with a camera to help ensure the driver is engaged and watching the road. The GM system is also geo-fenced using high definition maps to limit its use to divided highways. Despite that, the limits of the system mean that it can be considered autonomous.
“We humans are becoming used to some of the semi-autonomous technology, and I don’t like that term that's on the road, that's driver assist technology,” added Krafcik. We still have to be completely alert and in control of the cars that were driving every minute, every second that we're on the road driving.”
Waymo’s goal is to replace that sort of technology with systems that don’t require any human supervision, something that he company decided several years ago was not a viable solution. Instead, Waymo plans to launch its automated ride hailing service commercially in the Phoenix area later this year and gradually expand to other cities as the technology continues to mature and is proven safe in those locations.
Waymo’s fleet of Chrysler Pacifica hybrids are now accumulating 25,000 miles a day on the road and have racked up more than 8 million miles across 25 cities since the project started in 2009. Waymo now has more than 20,000 different scenario tests that are regularly evaluated in simulation and on the test track as changes are made to its system with more than 5 billion simulation miles completed.
Despite the rapid accumulation of testing miles, Krafcik warned the governors not to end all of their infrastructure investments just yet. Responding to a question about the need for new parking facilities, he responded that there will be a very long period of overlap between personally owned human driven vehicles and shared automated vehicles from Waymo and others. He suggested that it might be possible to slow down on some massive parking structures but was non-committal on timelines.
With Waymo planning to launch its commercial service by the end of 2018, GM coming in 2019 and others including Zoox, Daimler and Voyage in the next 2-3 years, there will be shared automated vehicles on the road. However, these will be limited to locations where they are demonstrated to function reliably and there is a market for ride-hailing despite the optimistic projections of some investors and developers. Widespread adoption in the millions of vehicles globally is unlikely before the latter half of the 2020s.
Krafcik was equally non-committal to Sandoval’s query about when he might be able to purchase his own car with Waymo technology. While Waymo and Fiat Chrysler are in talks about utilizing this virtual driver system on cars for retail sale, Krafcik said it’s going to be some time yet. The emphasis for now is the ride-hailing service, trucking and logistics and working with transit authorities. Supplying systems for personal use cars is last on the timeline.
Krafcik is one of the smartest executives in this field and he acknowledges that the transition won’t be easy. “I think it's a recognition too that as as we roll out this technology more broadly that there are going to be speed bumps on the way.”
“I mean, it's not going to be an easy rollout, there are going to be incidents in a Waymo service and other services from from other players.”
Anyone expecting to an overnight shift from more than 270 million registered personally owned vehicles in America to everyone riding in shared automated vehicles would do well to take Krafcik’s words to heart.
