Waymo cars have been all over central San Diego for more than a year, but always with drivers at the wheel. Ready or not, that’s about to change.
The company said Wednesday that Waymo vehicles will soon begin fully autonomous operations — meaning without human drivers — in four new cities, including San Diego.
It will be a soft start, with rider-only operations initially offered solely for employees. Waymo, in a blog post, said only that it expects “to welcome the public soon.” Officials with the venture, which is majority owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said local residents can learn when Waymo goes live to the public by downloading the app for notifications.
The other new cities in Waymo’s expansion are Las Vegas, Tampa and Denver. Ten other cities and regions, including the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas and Houston already offer Waymo driverless rides.
Waymo is the leader among the handful of companies offering robotaxi services, an innovation that some have embraced enthusiastically, but others are wary of for safety and economic reasons.
Some critics fear software glitches and erratic maneuvers that could cause wrecks, while others are concerned about the impact on the fortunes of human drivers.
A San Diego councilman, Sean Elo-Rivera, in his role as a member of the regional transit board, challenged Waymo’s impending arrival, successfully persuading the board to oppose the expansion of driverless services in greater San Diego without more oversight.
The board also called on the state Legislature and regulators to intervene.
“No corporation should be allowed to quietly replace people with machines just to boost profits, especially without local communities having any say,” said Elo-Rivera, chair of the board’s Taxi Advisory Committee in a January news release.
On the safety front, though, Waymo and other driverless vehicle services have gained a potent ally — doctors armed with data.
Two months ago, 20 prominent physicians and researchers, including Dr. Eric Topol, an executive at Scripps Research in La Jolla, pointed to new numbers that indicate driverless vehicles aren’t the problem: cars with drivers are.
The group, In an open letter posted online, urged lawmakers to take action to support, not inhibit, the use of autonomous vehicles.
“We are asking that a technology demonstrating this capacity to prevent death not be stalled by regulatory inertia, unfamiliarity, or misplaced fear,” they wrote.
The data, they argued in the May 14 letter, shows a difference to public health potentially as startling as what followed the mass use of seatbelts and the pronounced shift away from smoking. Driver-less vehicles, they contend based on numbers generated by Waymo, are safer.
“In medical research, when an intervention demonstrates this magnitude of benefit, we work to change the standard of care,” they wrote.
Studies on autonomous vehicles abound, featuring research on safety and more, including one conducted by UC San Diego on public perception of the service.
The analysis, released in March, focused on economic concerns that arose from responses to a Pew Research Center survey of thousands of people.
About 85% of respondents said that if use of driverless vehicles becomes widespread, job losses in ride-hailing, ridesharing and delivery work would follow. Close to half said that the vehicles would widen income disparity.
And the trust gap falls along social and geographic divides. Tech-savvy, educated groups show strong interest in driverless technology, but lower-income groups and those who reside outside cities “remain unwilling and skeptical.”
“These findings show many Americans are evaluating automated vehicles as a broader social and economic change — not just whether the technology works, but who benefits and who bears the costs,” Behram Wali, lead author of the study and an assistant professor at the UC San Diego School of Social Sciences, said in a release.
Like Elo-Rivera and the Metropolitan Transit System board, Wali sees public policy changes as necessary to ease the transition to the use of driverless technology.
“We cannot afford a laissez-faire approach to AV regulation,” he said. “Policymakers must ensure that underrepresented groups are not left behind.”
The physicians, in their open letter, called for changes on the federal level. They acknowledged that their conclusions are dependent on Waymo’s data, and urged Congress and federal regulators to “establish enhanced federal data-reporting requirements for all autonomous vehicle operators,” ones that include crash rates per mile and geographic deployment data.
“That is precisely why we need standardized reporting,” the researchers wrote.
They also urged state and local representatives to “replace unwarranted regulatory barriers with evidence-based frameworks that encourage deployment where the data supports it.”
They specifically noted efforts to block driverless cars in New York, Massachusetts, Washington, Minnesota and Washington, D.C. But California lawmakers have launched efforts of their ownto curb the industry, including two bills vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. Other legislative efforts are pending or have stalled in committee.
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