In Chandler, just outside Phoenix, Arizona, the driverless taxi is already a reality. It is there that Waimo, a Google company valued at 105 billion dollars and which is now considered the first global player in autonomous driving, ahead of Uber, circulates most of its futuristic fleet of robot taxis. In all, there are 600 in the US, scattered in 24 other cities including Mountain View, home to the headquarters of the parent company, and Detroit, the city of the car of yesteryear, which is witnessing this revolution. A revolution that is no longer on paper.
After the fatal accident caused in 2018 by an experimental Uber car in Temple, a few kilometers from Chandler, Waimo's project - which has been testing its vehicles in real traffic conditions since 2016 - was instead a successful escalation And can now be defined as a marketed servicealbeit in a limited area. The app is called Waymo One and, says a spokeswoman interviewed as part of an investigation by the French newspaper Les Echos, “as of today it already has 1.500 regular users, who have used the service in the last 28 days”.
In Arizona, where the streets are wide and urban planning with large squares favors experiments of this type, the novelty is that in some of Google's taxi-robots there is no longer even the driver on board, as happens instead in other experiments around the world. Usually the "safety" driver was always called to intervene for some unforeseen event. Apparently this is not the case with Waymo: the technological level and the fluidity of the traffic have meant that the accidents recorded so far have been just a dozen, of which zero with deaths or serious injuries and all caused by third party vehicles.
It must be said that taxis without even the driver on board operate for the moment in a peripheral area of just 100 square km, while the service in general covers a much larger area, approximately 250 square km, equal to more than double the area of a metropolis like Paris (although in clearly easier traffic conditions). The other novelty is the relatively low cost, considering the very high level of technology offered: a 10-minute ride with Waymo costs about 7 dollars, comparable to the typical ride on Uber or Lyft.
The latest generation of what used to be called Google Car today has impressive figures - they already are 32 million kilometers traveled by the vehicle fleet on the open road, as well as fifteen billion km of tests on simulators. Every day, just around Phoenix, Waymo accumulates nearly 40.000 km of additional experience. However, there are perplexities: to clear customs at a global level, the self-driving taxi should be authorized in every single country and at the moment it is only in some of the American states.
In the rest of the world, its entry to all intents and purposes is still considered dangerous, given the different urban characteristics and above all the tendency of driverless vehicles to be even too cautious, paradoxically risking creating a crisis in the flow of traffic in large urban centres. That is why, although its evaluation is still very high, Waymo has been downgraded by Morgan Stanley: Analysts do not expect full market entry by 2030 and have nearly halved Waymo's value, from $175 billion to $105 billion.
