\n<\/p>\n
\u201cHow do we break down the journey into bite-sized pieces, so it doesn\u2019t feel overwhelming or insurmountable?\u201d says Jesse Levinson, the cofounder and CEO of Zoox. \u201cThis moment is a huge one, but the service is still unpaid and fairly limited.\u201d Zoox launched in 2014, and though it\u2019s been testing its technology in San Francisco, at its Foster City, California, headquarters, and in Las Vegas for years, this will be the first time it\u2019s allowing anyone willing to download an app to ride. The company was acquired by Amazon in 2020 for a reported $1.2 billion.<\/p>\n
Olsen, the May Mobility CEO, says he is comfortable with the company\u2019s slower launch process after watching others rush to put self-driving cars on the road. \u201cOne of the things we\u2019ve seen across the industry is that a vehicle might perform brilliantly some of the time, but then will do wildly inappropriate things in the edge cases,\u201d Olsen says. He declines to say exactly when the firm would remove the safety drivers from its vehicles, or when it might expand its Lyft partnership to other areas or cities, but he says any moves the company makes will be tested and validated with real-world and simulated data. The service will scale more quickly as time goes on, he says.<\/p>\n
<\/span><\/p>\n May Mobility offers rides through Lyft.<\/p>\n <\/span>COURTESY OF Lyft and May Mobility<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Climb in, Lyfters.<\/p>\n <\/span>COURTESY OF Lyft and May Mobility<\/span><\/p>\n Two US self-driving vehicle firms shut down this past decade after their robotaxis were involved in serious road accidents. In 2018, a testing self-driving vehicle operated by Uber\u2019s Advanced Technologies Group struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Arizona. Uber sold off its self-driving technology to a competitor in 2020. In 2023, General Motors subsidiary Cruise struck a pedestrian in San Francisco after the person was thrown into the empty robotaxi\u2019s path by a collision with another car; state regulators later learned that the Cruise dragged the person 20 feet while it attempted to move out of traffic, and revoked the company\u2019s permit to operate. General Motors got out of the robotaxi business a year later, citing high development costs and a desire to focus on personal vehicles.<\/p>\n Still, robotaxi companies say they have plenty more public deployments on the horizon. Zoox says it will start picking up public riders in San Francisco later this year, and will then launch in Austin and Miami. May Mobility plans to deploy robotaxis in Arlington, Texas, before the end of the year, this time on the Uber platform. Waymo has announced future service in several US cities, including Miami, Washington, DC, and Dallas. Tesla is running a small, invite-only ride-hail service in the California Bay Area with drivers behind the wheel using its more limited Full Self-Driving (Supervised) tech, which requires the person up front to stay alert at all times. Musk plans to move quickly: He said this spring that the company would have \u201cmillions\u201d of vehicles operating autonomously by the second half of next year.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Vegas residents can download Zoox’s app.<\/p>\n <\/span>Chris Noltekuhlmann<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Rides are free for the time being.<\/p>\n <\/span>COURTESY OF ZOOX<\/span><\/p>\n Developers of self-driving vehicles have argued that their tech will increase safety and ride efficiency, bringing down prices in the long term. (Of course, these companies will also no longer have to pay a cut of each ride to human drivers.) But even in Phoenix and San Francisco, where Waymo has been running public robotaxis for years, cities have yet to catch a clear glimpse of how the expensive-to-develop technology might transform residents\u2019 lives.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not at the scale yet where it\u2019s really dramatically changing anything,\u201d says Adam Millard-Ball, an urban planning professor who directs the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies.<\/p>\n Robotaxi services will likely have to get much bigger, Millard-Ball says, before they can prove out their expansive visions. Waymo has released studies suggesting that its tech is safer than human drivers in many situations, but some experts still argue that it\u2019s hard to compare robots\u2019 performance to humans\u2019 given the still-limited number of miles the cars have driven.<\/p>\n \u201cCan this make the rideshare industry grow the pie?\u201d asks Jeremy Bird, Lyft\u2019s executive vice president of driver experience, who collaborated with May Mobility on the Atlanta launch. Bird says Lyft has studied data from where autonomous vehicles have already been deployed, and he thinks the answer is yes. But when robotaxis will become a moneymaking venture is still a big question mark. Clearly, though, plenty of people are still working to find out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cHow do we break down the journey into bite-sized pieces, so it doesn\u2019t feel overwhelming or insurmountable?\u201d says Jesse Levinson, the cofounder and CEO of Zoox. \u201cThis moment is a huge one, but the service is still unpaid and fairly limited.\u201d Zoox launched in 2014, and though it\u2019s been testing its technology in San Francisco,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20315,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[12498,3164,7638,552,1863,7073,10048],"class_list":{"0":"post-20314","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-driverless","9":"tag-launch","10":"tag-lyft","11":"tag-ride","12":"tag-robotaxis","13":"tag-sharing","14":"tag-zoox"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20314\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Keep On Robotaxiing<\/h2>\n