Years ago, rideshare services Uber and Lyft gave up on their plans to create their own driverless taxis.
As Townhall has covered, ”robotaxis” have been involved in accidents, including high-profile incidents in California. In 2023, officials in California announced that the DMV had suspended permits for General Motors’ autonomous vehicles, Cruise, operating in San Francisco, after several crashes occurred.
“Public safety remains the California DMV’s top priority, and the department’s autonomous vehicle regulations provide a framework to facilitate the safe testing and deployment of this technology on California public roads,” the agency said in a statement.
Despite this, Uber and Lyft appear to be reversing course on “robotaxis.”
Soon, Uber customers in Atlanta, Georgia, and Austin, Texas will be able to hail a Waymo driverless vehicle on the app.
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Waymo vehicles have been known to have glitches, NewsNation reported:
There have been concerns about the efficacy of these Waymo driverless vehicles, with software glitches causing repeated honking in a Waymo parking lot in San Francisco last August.
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In December, a man heading to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport posted a video to LinkedIn showing his Waymo vehicle going in circles due to a glitch.
Waymo told NewsNation the issue has since been fixed with a software update, and the man was only delayed for approximately five minutes.
“This level of nitty-gritty, it takes years to build,” Andrew Macdonald, Uber’s senior vice president of mobility, told the Wall Street Journal. “It’s not something you can do by flipping a switch.”
According to Wall Street Journal, Lyft plans to offer May Mobility’s driverless taxis in Atlanta.
In addition, Robert Mollins, an analyst at Gordon Haskett Research Advisors, told the outlet that the technology might not work in densely populated cities like New York or under some weather conditions.
“No one’s saying ‘let’s go send some of these cars to Boston in the middle of winter,’” he said. “What happens when all of these sensors get covered in snow?”
