2024: The Year of the Driverless Car
Despite a decade of predictions that they were just around the corner, autonomous vehicles that can carry passengers on public roads, no human driver required, have mostly been confined to drawing-board dreams and venture capital–supported pilot programs. The oft-repeated joke is that driverless cars are five years away and they always will be.
But in 2024, driverless taxi company Waymo (owned by Google parent company Alphabet) started expanding its limited commercial operations into something that looks a lot like a full-fledged driverless taxi service in multiple cities. The company performs 100,000 rides a week.
Safety is obviously the major concern holding back driverless car operations, particularly after an autonomous Uber-operated car with a human test driver in it fatally struck a pedestrian in 2018. But reporter Timothy Lee found that most accidents involving Waymo cars were caused by the errors of human drivers in other vehicles, and that the company’s autonomous cars get into crashes at about a third of the rate of human drivers.
Here’s a list of places where dreams of driverless cars are quickly becoming reality.
San Francisco, California
Dense, hilly San Francisco, with its narrow, chaotic streets, is a challe
Article from Reason.com
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