Since yesterday, in San Francisco, California, the famous robotaxis have become available to everyone. In the sense that those who take the driverless taxis will be able to be the over 800 thousand residents plus all the tourists who flock to the US city, and not just a very limited audience of volunteer testers. Great celebration, triumphal announcements from the company offering the service (the American Waymo, owned by Google) and jubilation from the citizens. Music, rich prizes and cotillons.
What no one says, however, is how much all this cost. But the numbers are official and are in Waymo’s financial statements. Well, robotaxis have cost (to date) 15 years of work and something like eight billion dollars.
It is clear that the business that Google is counting on cannot be limited to a public transport service in the city of San Francisco. And not even in all of the United States because at the cost of a few dollars for each ride, it would take centuries to compensate for the investments before arriving.
There is much more at stake: there is the expansion of self-driving cars worldwide, the conquest of the transport sector in every corner of the planet. The domain of mobility. Also for this reason the experimentation, after starting in 2020 in Phoenix (a flat city with streets that look like landing strips) and Los Angels (few pedestrians and constant sun) was concentrated in San Francisco, a real hell for the test: metropolis squeezed between steep hills, with hectic traffic and frequent fogs. And if there has been no shortage of controversy over safety (the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened several investigations into Waymo after the reporting of 22 accidents caused by self-driving cars), they let Google know that their system “has established safety records unparalleled, with over 30 million kilometers already traveled in Silicon Valley cities.”
Of course, if the system passed this stress test in San Francisco then it will work everywhere. But are we sure? Are we sure that self-driving cars would survive the hell of cities without rules like ours or the political battles for taxi licenses that all Italian municipalities are losing? Huge doubts arise here. Maybe 15 billion is too little. Not even technology will ever win against the taxi drivers’ lobby and the perpetual chaos of our metropolises.
#Billion #Taxi #FormulaPassion.it
