11-6-2017, ATWATER, CA – Riding in Waymo’s fully autonomous Chrysler Pacifica minivan is amazing and boring at the same time.
Amazing because it whizzes around the test track here at an abandoned Air Force base without anyone in the front seats; boring because it does everything so effortlessly there’s nothing to get excited about.
Potential threats lurk everywhere on the test track: there are technicians posing as distracted bicyclists and pedestrians, simulated construction areas and impatient drivers entering roundabouts out of turn. It could be as scary as a Halloween funhouse, but instead the minivan calmly avoids every hazard without drama or screeching tires. A display screen in front of us shows the vehicle is seeing every potential interaction long in advance.
Most of the time it looks like a typical navigation display, but it periodically lights up like an x-ray to reveal everything the minivan actually is seeing: an intensely detailed three-dimensional real-time Lidar map of every object, person and tree branch up to three football fields away.
The extraordinary detail is fleeting “because we don’t want to overwhelm people with information,” an engineer sitting with us in the second row says.
You push a button to start the ride and you can push another if you want to stop and get out early. And there’s another button to call a Waymo advisor if there is a problem or a question. That’s about it for human controls.
Most automakers and suppliers are looking to ease into the age of self-driving vehicles with a step-by-step approach that gradually moves up the SAE scale from Level 2 (relatively minor driver assist), to Level 4. Level 3 autonomy anticipates human intervention in certain driving situations while Level 4 is considered highly automated, capable of responding in all driving situations with or without human interaction. Level 5 assumes the vehicle will handle all aspects of driving, including offroading and extreme weather.
But Waymo, formerly known as the Google self-driving car project, is going all-in. “Our goal is L4 in SAE terminology,” Waymo CEO John Krafcik tells reporters invited to the testing site here, a 3-hour drive from San Francisco.
Krafcik says the self-driving unit has been developing various types of autonomous vehicles for eight years and it developed a semi-autonomous guidance system that was “pretty good.”
But testing showed the better the system got, the more difficult handing control back to the driver becomes in an emergency. “The better you make it, the more people will check out (stop paying attention),” he says.
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