Transportation

Waymo, take the wheel: Self-driving cars go fully driverless on California roads

Comment

Self-driving startup Waymo, a Google spin-off owned by parent company Alphabet, has been granted the first permit in California to begin driverless testing on public roads. Yes, that means self-driving cars without a human behind the wheel will be cruising around California, beginning with a limited geographic area in Silicon Valley.

The company’s autonomous vehicles are a common sight on public roads in and around Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. The startup, which began as a moonshot project under X, has been testing on public roads for years now. But this permit, issued by the California Department of Motor Vehicles, allows Waymo to test these self-driving cars without a human test driver behind the wheel.

New California DMV regulations that took effect in April allow companies to apply for fully driverless testing within carefully defined limits. Waymo is the first to get approval. At least one other company is waiting in the wings.

Where you’ll find them

Waymo said its driverless test cars will initially hit the streets near its Silicon Valley headquarters, including parts of Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills and Palo Alto. See the map below for the initial driverless launch.

waymo driverless map

Perhaps anticipating wariness from the public, Waymo emphasized that it knows this area “well.”

“Mountain View is home to more than a dozen autonomous vehicle companies, and has supported safe testing for years,” the company said in its announcement.

Waymo will eventually expand its driverless testing territory. Before it moves into a new area, Waymo said it will notify the new communities where this expansion will occur, and submit a request to the DMV.

Members of the public won’t be invited into these driverless cars just yet. However, Waymo is working toward that goal. The first driverless rides will be for Waymo employees. Waymo said it will eventually “create opportunities for members of the public to experience this technology,” similar to its early ride program in Arizona.

What Waymo is allowed to do

The driverless permit allows Waymo to test its driverless vehicles during the day and night on city streets, rural roads and highways with posted speed limits of up to 65 miles per hour. Waymo is also allowed to test in fog and light rain, conditions that the company said its vehicles can handle.

If one of its driverless vehicles encounters a situation it doesn’t understand it will come to “safe stop,” Waymo said, adding that it has well-established protocols that include contacting fleet and rider support.

The company announced earlier this month that its autonomous vehicles have driven 10 million miles on public roads in the United States since it began working on self-driving technology in 2009.

California is not the first state to test true driverless vehicles on public roads. Arizona gets that distinction. Waymo began testing self-driving Chrysler Pacifica Minivans in Phoenix suburbs, notably Chandler, in 2016. The company launched an early rider program in April 2017. Later that year, Waymo removed employees and passengers from its test fleet, sending empty self-driving minivans onto the streets of greater Phoenix.

By May of this year, Waymo began allowing some early riders in Phoenix to hail a self-driving minivan without a human test driver behind the wheel.

More TechCrunch

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during its I/O 2024 by its own count. CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Everything announced so far

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google gets serious about AI-generated video at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI

A search results page based on generative AI as its ranking mechanism will have wide-reaching consequences for online publishers.

Google will soon start using GenAI to organize some search results pages

Google has built a custom Gemini model for search to combine real-time information, Google’s ranking, long context and multimodal features.

Google is adding more AI to its search results

At its Google I/O developer conference, Google on Tuesday announced the next generation of its Tensor Processing Units (TPU) AI chips.

Google’s next-gen TPUs promise a 4.7x performance boost

Google is upgrading Gemini, its AI-powered chatbot, with features aimed at making the experience more ambient and contextually useful.

Google reveals plans for upgrading AI in the real world through Gemini Live at Google I/O 2024

Veo can generate few-seconds-long 1080p video clips given a text prompt.

Google’s image-generating AI gets an upgrade

At Google I/O, Google announced upgrades to Gemini 1.5 Pro, including a bigger context window. .

Google’s generative AI can now analyze hours of video

The AI upgrade will make finding the right content more intuitive and less of a manual search process.

Google Photos introduces an AI search feature, Ask Photos

Apple released new data about anti-fraud measures related to its operation of the iOS App Store on Tuesday morning, trumpeting a claim that it stopped over $7 billion in “potentially…

Apple touts stopping $1.8B in App Store fraud last year in latest pitch to developers

Online travel agency Expedia is testing an AI assistant that bolsters features like search, itinerary building, trip planning, and real-time travel updates.

Expedia starts testing AI-powered features for search and travel planning

Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech! This week, we look at the drama around TabaPay deciding to not buy Synapse’s assets, as well as stocks dropping for a couple of fintechs, Monzo raising…

Inside TabaPay’s drama-filled decision to abandon its plans to buy Synapse’s assets

The person who claimed to have stolen the physical addresses of 49 million Dell customers appears to have taken more data from a different Dell portal, TechCrunch has learned. The…

Threat actor scraped Dell support tickets, including customer phone numbers

If you write the words “cis” or “cisgender” on X, you might be served this full-screen message: “This post contains language that may be considered a slur by X and…

On Elon’s whim, X now treats ‘cisgender’ as a slur

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch the AI reveals live

Facebook once had big ambitions to be a major player in enterprise communication and productivity, but today the social network’s parent company Meta will be closing a very significant chapter…

Meta is shutting down Workplace, its enterprise communications business

The Oversight Board has overturned Meta’s decision to take down a documentary revealing the identities of child abuse victims in Pakistan.

Meta’s Oversight Board overturns takedown decision for Pakistan child abuse documentary