- All right, I'm about to go for my first ever ride
in a fully autonomous vehicle.
Whoa, no driver.
All right.
- [Electronic Voice] Good morning, Derek.
This car is all yours with no one up front.
- I really like the idea of fully autonomous vehicles,
but it's weird getting into a car with no driver
and just trusting the car.
I'm gonna report back how this ride goes
and how I feel about it.
Oh, but full disclosure, this video is sponsored by Waymo.
(car door clicking)
(seatbelt clicking)
Start ride. (car navigation chiming)
Ha ha!
- [Electronic Voice] Make sure your seatbelt is fastened.
(Derek vocalizes) For any questions,
press the Help button to speak with a rider support agent.
- Okay. Now let's see where we go.
It's looking at this car coming here. What's it gonna do?
Oh, and it pulls in very smoothly behind it.
No problems. Did not turn into traffic.
Waited until the cars went, and then it turned.
I like that.
I polled YouTube viewers about autonomous vehicles
and half of you are excited
and ready for them to be on the roads,
but over 40% said you thought the technology
was still over 10 years away.
And for those people, I have news,
which is that, well, there is no driver in this car.
I'm currently inside a fully autonomous vehicle driving
around a suburb of Phoenix, Arizona.
Now I get that in some parts of the world,
like, the roads aren't well enough maintained
and people don't stay in their lane necessarily,
and so it'd be very hard for a computer to drive there,
but at least under good conditions,
the technology is currently functional.
(downtempo music)
(bright comedic music)
- Now Waymo started out
as the Google self-driving car project
with what is possibly one of the cutest cars ever made.
I am inside the world's first fully autonomous vehicle.
Back in October 2015, this car went on a public road,
ridden by Steve Mann,
who has a disability, he is legally blind,
but he could get around in this thing,
which is affectionately known as the Firefly.
This is such a simple vehicle.
There's basically nothing in here.
There's no steering wheel, no dashboard.
This car is super basic.
There is no AC, but there is an emergency stop button.
(button cover clicks)
That's my favorite button in the car.
It reminds me of elevators.
One of the important measures that they had to put
in automatic elevators was a big red stop button.
Did you know that before the 1940s,
almost all elevators had drivers in them?
And when people started putting in driverless elevators,
well, the public was very concerned,
and they didn't wanna ride in those elevators.
There was one guy who was like,
"I don't care if I have to walk up 12 flights of stairs
for the rest of my life.
I'm not taking that elevator."
And adoption was slow.
I mean, they tried to advertise
to help people understand that it was in fact safe,
but, ultimately, there was an elevator drivers strike
in New York City, and that really annoyed people,
and it helped the adoption of automated elevators.
If you found a driver in an elevator today,
you would wonder, "Why are they there?"
Now you might think an elevator is just so simple,
I mean, it is effectively one dimensional motion,
but airplanes are also flown extensively by computers.
(tense percussive music)
I saw this particular landing
where a plane is coming in into Vienna,
and it's just so foggy
that the pilots can see almost nothing.
I mean, this is the view from the cockpit,
and yet, they make a perfect,
a textbook landing right on target.
So how do they do it?
The answer is the pilots didn't do it.
It was a CAT II autoland procedure.
The plane just came in and landed itself essentially.
Now, of course, the pilots are important
and they're monitoring all of the instruments and controls,
but it's actually the plane
and its computer getting the plane to land appropriately.
I was surprised to learn that humans are much more likely
to take manual control and land on sunny days,
like July 6th, 2013, when Asiana Airlines flight 214
was on final approach to San Francisco.
Attempting to manually land the plane,
the pilot accidentally left the throttle at zero,
and by the time they realized
and tried to abort the landing, it was too late.
The plane crashed into the runway seawall and split in two.
Three people died in the aftermath of this accident.
I think the counterintuitive thing
is that we expect the humans to be better,
particularly in tough situations,
but when it comes to airplanes, if it's bad weather,
you actually want the plane flying itself.
So the obvious next question is,
would you want the same thing for cars?
(oscillating music)
There are all these different levels of autonomy,
and everything up to four requires a human driver
to be responsible and have the wheel at all times.
In the early days of the Google self-driving car project,
they had a vehicle that was not yet level four,
so it still required a human driver.
They let Google employees borrow the cars,
but they still had to be in control of the wheel.
And the volunteers were informed
that they were responsible for the car at all times
and that they would be constantly recorded,
like video recorded, while they were in the car.
But still, within a short period of time,
the engineers observed drivers rummaging around
in their bags or checking phones, putting on makeup,
or even sleeping in the driver's seat.
All these drivers were trusting the technology too much,
which makes almost fully autonomous vehicles
potentially more dangerous than regular cars,
I mean, if the driver is distracted
or not prepared to take over.
So this is why Waymo decided
that the only safe way to proceed is with a car
that has at least level four autonomy.
This is the depot where the cars go
when they're not on the road.
And it's also where people monitor
all the rides in progress.
- Yes, so that's where my team sits.
You see three teams basically here.
One of the teams is my team of fleet dispatchers,
so basically making sure
that all the mission are assigned every day
and they are completed successfully on the road.
And then you have the Rider Support team
that takes the calls.
(electronic tone chiming)
- [Beulah] Thank you for calling the Waymo Rider Support.
This is Beulah, how can I help today?
- I just completed my ride,
but I don't wanna get out of the car.
I just wanna keep driving.
Is there a way that I can do that?
- [Beulah] Right now, I don't see a trip started.
Give me one moment here while I partner with my team, okay?
- Okay.
(chuckling) Well, I just left all my stuff in the car.
I hope it comes back.
(car humming)
- I think there's a lot of, still, resistance
in terms of trusting the vehicle.
And they ask you like,
"How does it feel to be in a car without the driver?"
I was the first person to do public roads,
fully driverless ride at night.
I always share the experience with them.
It takes about two minutes for you to completely forget
that you are in a driverless vehicle.
If the system really provides that feeling that you're safe
and you see a couple of maneuvers,
in less than two minutes,
you're talking to whoever is next to you
and not paying attention to what's happening anymore.
- Whoa, all right, it doesn't make the indicator sound,
so I just don't know when it's going to turn,
but if I was watching the map, I would know.
I think we have this bias to believe
that we're better at certain tasks than we actually are,
like thinking that people are good at driving.
Surveys show 74% of people believe
they are above average drivers.
Think about that.
In the 20th century,
60 million people were killed on the road.
That's basically an extra world war's worth of deaths.
And we really have no one to blame but ourselves.
The National Transportation and Safety Board
has identified human error as the cause of 94% of accidents.
Most of these errors are impossible for a machine to make.
Every year when people are backing out
of driveways or parking spaces,
in the U.S, up to 200 people are killed,
and it's frequently older people or children,
the children of the drivers.
It's awful.
And it comes down to the fact
that we don't have eyes in the back of our head,
and even the backup cameras still have blind spots.
But if you have a vehicle that has LiDAR
and radar and 29 cameras,
you're just not going to hit them.
Up here in the very prominent top, there is a 360 LiDAR.
So it can see all around the car.
It can see up to 300 meters away with a LiDAR.
The way the LiDAR works
is it shoots out invisible laser beams,
scanning around millions of times a second,
and then it detects the reflection,
and how long it takes to come back allows you
to determine how far it is to that object.
So what it's doing is like painting a 3D picture
of the world.
There are 29 cameras around this vehicle,
which gives you full 360 vision.
It gives you close range vision,
what is right next to the car,
and also long range vision, going out 500 meters.
This car could detect a stop sign
or a pedestrian 500 meters away.
How many of us have eyesight that is that good?
There is also a microphone up on top
to listen to what's happening in the environment,
and if there are sirens,
then the car will pull over to the side of the road.
It's gotta be able to respond to emergency vehicles.
(light percussive music)
What I wanna see here is, how does it handle a parking lot
where there's people driving in unusual ways
and possibly pedestrians walking around?
(car humming)
(tires squeak) Whoa.
That was a sudden stop.
The car made a pretty hard stop there.
I think it saw that guy with a cart coming up
on a pedestrian crosswalk.
And one of the interesting things
that the vehicle is always doing
is not only seeing where things are
and where they're going, but also making predictions
about where they're likely to go.
So this car doesn't just have one potential future.
It's constantly imagining,
"Well, he might cross at the crosswalk,"
or, "He might keep going," or, "He might turn left,"
and so it has to be prepared
for all of those different options.
And it even weights the options of like how likely it thinks
that he's gonna go on the crosswalk
versus go straight versus turn.
And you can see that with the thickness of the line
in the little simulated graphic that they have.
(seatbelt clicking) Phew.
A few years back, I think a lot of people were talking
about how autonomous vehicles have to figure out
who to hit in case of an accident,
like do the pick the orphan or the nun?
Should the car hit the motorcyclist with the helmet on
because his injuries might be less severe
or should the car hit the motorcyclist
who does not have a helmet on
because he did not properly protect himself?
If cars were programmed
to hit the motorcyclist with the helmet,
that would mean that, in a way,
it would become safer to ride without a helmet.
(whimsical music)
But the reality is that 99% of accidents aren't like that.
Every year, around 1.3 million people are killed
on the roads, almost all of them due to human error.
If autonomous cars can reduce these fatalities,
then the real moral dilemma
is not getting them on the road sooner
for fear we haven't worked out exactly how they'll react
to extremely unlikely hypothetical scenarios.
I think humans are becoming worse drivers
because we're just so prone to distraction.
(light contemplative music)
Think about the main reasons why cars crash:
because people are speeding,
they're under the influence, they're distracted.
I mean, these sorts of problems,
an autonomous vehicle would not have.
You don't get a distracted driver.
The ultimate question, right, that everyone wants to know,
that I want to know the answer to is,
as these vehicles stand, (car electronic beeping)
are they better than the average human?
Not than the best human, but just like an average human.
Like replacing some random car on the street
with one of these vehicles, does that make the road safer?
- Yes, it does.
I think we would never launch a rider-only service
if we did not meet that base safety framework.
- If that's true, it means like every vehicle
that's not on the road is kind of a worse situation,
do you know what I mean? - We are really working
really hard to launch this in larger areas
and new areas too, but we need to have the experience
to show the regulators why we believe it's safer,
and, for that, you need to be driving miles,
a number of miles that you feel comfortable with,
statistically speaking.
- These vehicles have way more experience
than any human driver because they've now accumulated data
over 20 million miles of driving on public roads.
If you were an average driver,
you'd have to drive for a thousand years
to accumulate that sort of experience.
And all of that experience can be used
to train the systems, to fix the software,
and used across all the vehicles in the fleet.
In 2019, Waymo released a study of its data,
over 6.1 million miles of automated driving
in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area.
Of the 18 total accidents that occurred during the study,
none were serious enough
to expect significant injury or death.
In Waymo's Safety Report,
they found some types of accidents
have been completely eliminated
by this autonomous driving system,
like the car doesn't go off the road
and it doesn't hit stationary objects.
Humans, humans do those things.
If you look at the eight significant accidents
that happened with Waymo vehicles
over the six million miles of driving,
all eight of them involve a human driver
of another vehicle doing something stupid,
like driving on the wrong side of the road
or running a red light
or going through a stop sign or failing to yield
or going 20 miles per hour over the speed limit.
There were three incidents involving Waymo vehicles
and pedestrians, but in all three,
the Waymo vehicle was stationary and the pedestrian
or cyclist/skateboarder ran into the vehicle.
Waymo also takes some of that real-world data
and they put it into simulations and they tweak it a bit.
So they try adding like a bicyclist going fast
or going slow, or they make the car turn faster or slower.
So they change all these parameters and variables,
and they see what the software will do.
And they've trained the software
on an additional 20 billion miles of driving,
not on the road but in the simulation,
so that's a thousand times more experience again.
The question for me is,
when is stepping inside an autonomous car
gonna feel the same as stepping inside an elevator?
Because I think that time may be coming sooner
than you think.
I like the idea of this technology,
but, honestly, getting in the car,
I wasn't quite sure how I would feel.
I was a little bit uncertain,
but once I saw it just handles so confidently...
Like driving is one of those things
that I feel like you can't hide
whether you're a good or bad driver.
It's just like, "Oh, what's gonna happen
when there's a parked car or a cyclist or a pedestrian,"
and it just sort of handles all those situations
with such confidence and ease
that I think I stopped thinking about it.
- After they pass a couple of your mental tests,
you're like, "I'm good."
I think, again, "I'll be okay." (chuckling)
- Yeah, yeah, I felt the same way.
I think a lot of people miss the bigger implications
of what is achievable
once fully autonomous driving is commonplace.
Riders with disabilities, seniors,
and the blind can get around more easily.
Transportation will get cheaper.
Think of all the wasted value in the cars
that spend over 95% of their time parked.
We can regain a bunch of time and feel happier
because commuting and being stuck in traffic sucks.
We can reduce traffic
because vehicles will have better awareness of each other.
You can imagine one day
when all the cars are fully autonomous,
they can execute a beautiful ballet driving together,
and when that time comes, we can eliminate parking lots
and add green spaces to our cities.
And, most importantly,
widespread adoption of autonomous cars
could prevent tens of thousands of fatalities
in the U.S. alone.
When do you think that this will be a reality,
but clearly it's coming,
but when? - Yeah.
If you're talking about big cities,
I'm hoping the next five years will be really game changing.
- [Derek] I'm excited to see it.
- Me too, believe me. Believe me.
I just don't want to commute to work anymore.
I would love to sit in the backseat,
do my work on the way there and on the way back. (chuckling)
- [Derek] Or do something fun, watch a movie.
- Or sleep, yeah. (chuckling)
(futuristic tones beeping)
(frequency tone whistling)