(Original title: Waymo CEO Open Letter: After 8 years of R&D, we will pay more attention to how autopilot can reshape users' lives)
On April 25, 2017, the split Google self-driving car project Waymo announced that it will launch a total of 600 autopilot trial vehicles in Phoenix, Arizona and surrounding towns. These vehicles will provide local residents with free daily commuter services, and residents can submit applications through waymo.com/apply. This article is an open letter issued by Waymo CEO John Krafcik on the opening day of trial operation.
Like many people, Ted, Candace, and their four children spend a lot of time every day on commuting—going to work, going to school, playing football, choir rehearsal, and so on. But Ted and Kanders's daily life is only a bit different from ordinary people. In the past month, they and some residents of Phoenix traveled through Waymo's self-driving cars. They are the first passengers in the world to use the Waymo automatic driving vehicle.
Phoenix residents can now apply for joining the early test-ride plan of Waymo like Ted and Candace. In this experiment, we will accept hundreds of people with different backgrounds and transportation needs to experience the Waymo self-driving car and provide ride feedback. We do not provide people with one or two fun test rides. Instead, we hope to provide them with travel services anywhere and anytime in an area twice the size of San Francisco.
We hope that as many people as possible will experience our technology, and we also hope to provide automated driving services to more communities as soon as possible. So, today we announced that we will add 500 hybrid commercial vehicles to the previous 100 Chrysler Pacifica hybrid small business vehicles. This means that our operating fleet has increased five-fold from the beginning of the year.
For the past eight years, we have focused on improving the technology behind self-driving cars: accumulating millions of miles of travel, allowing us to learn better driving skills and improve the performance of our software. Now, with a wider test-ride plan, we hope to devote more energy to how autopilot technology can benefit people like Ted, Candace and their children. We can learn where people want to go on a self-driving car, how people want to interact with our car, what information they want to see in the car, and how they want to control the car.
Our early passengers will determine how we will eventually introduce autonomous driving technology into the daily life of the world, the future of private cars, public transportation, travel services, logistics and so on. Self-driving cars have the potential to reshape every space in our cities and lives, and ultimately allow us to experience safer, more convenient and easier-to-use services.
New wisdom drive summary:
Waymo's trial operation provided this time a total of 600 vehicles and hundreds of places to participate in the test ride. There are no specific requirements for the approval of these hundreds of places. Instead, they are summarized as “people with different backgrounds but with traffic needsâ€. Applicants must be at least 18 years of age. The current test ride program is limited to residents of Phoenix and surrounding Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, and Tempe applications, and will be open to more areas later.
Why is Phoenix? Because Arizona, where Arizona is located, does not require self-driving cars like California, it must first obtain a license to test on the open road, but this step of Waymo is still quite aggressive.
Waymo provides these passengers with an all-weather, anytime, anywhere experience, and Waymo hopes to be as close as possible to the actual state of operation of the self-driving car. In addition, each time you take the Waymo self-driving car, a human driver is equipped to prevent accidents.
It can be seen that the Waymo is actually on the road to try the auto driving driving vehicle, which is very different from the round and cute test vehicle. Waymo chose 600 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans for this batch and it is likely that it will continue to be fitted to other vehicles.
In terms of operating customers, a Waymo spokesperson said that the passing test rider will be able to download a Waymo app and make a reservation for a nearby self-driving car. The vehicle will be charged at no charge, but they will be asked to answer about the ride. Car experience related issues.
Via爉edium.com
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