Dmitri Dolgov of Waymo, calling autonomous vehicles “the most mature manifestation of AI in the physical world,” said the Google unit has now completed more than 500,000 fully autonomous vehicle rides as it prepares to roll out in new cities including Los Angeles and Austin. A new vehicle in partnership with Geely would be “largely about the user experience,” he said, with roomy vehicles and more convenient sliding doors.
He cited three things that made self-driving vehicles particularly challenging: they operate in the messy physical world, where people don’t follow the rules; safety is an overwhelming priority; and everything has to happen in real time, on the car itself. Waymo, he said, thinks of the project as “building the Waymo driver,” with three business pillars: ride-hailing, trucking and delivery, and personally-owned vehicles. He was, wisely, short on predictions about timelines.
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