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Waymo Is Growing Faster Than Ever. So Are Its Glitches.
As Waymo deploys more driverless cars to 15 U.S. cities and counting, its vehicles keep encountering new and unexpected situations that they have no script to handle.
What Ms. Peterson experienced is what the driverless car industry calls an “edge case,” which are the unscripted situations that no one trained the robo-taxis to handle. The problem is that edge cases appear to be piling up as Waymo, the leading autonomous car service, rapidly expands.
Owned by Google’s parent Alphabet, Waymo has more than quintupled the number of autonomous cars it has on the road to nearly 4,000 today, up from about 700 early last year. Its vehicles are now in 15 metro areas, having gone fully driverless in Denver, Las Vegas, San Diego and Tampa in the past month alone. Each week, passengers pay for about half a million trips.
And here’s partly why:
More cars in more cities means more chances to meet something the technology has never seen. That’s hard to fix because the cars often do not recognize they are in trouble and so do not request help, said Philip Koopman, a Carnegie Mellon University emeritus professor who specializes in autonomous vehicles.
“This technology struggles to know when it’s in a novel situation,” Dr. Koopman said. “And when it’s in a novel situation, it’s prone to overconfidence and spectacularly stupid failure.” Waymo’s answer has not been to solve the underlying problems, he said, but to hand control of the car to a remote human operator.
