Kind: captions
Language: en
all right i'm about to go for my first
ever ride in a fully autonomous vehicle
whoa no driver
[Music]
all right good morning derek this car is
all yours with no one up front
i really like the idea of fully
autonomous vehicles but
it's weird getting into a car with no
driver
and just trusting the car i'm gonna
report back
how this ride goes and how i feel about
it
oh but full disclosure this video is
sponsored by waymo
ride
[Music]
sure your seat belt is fastened for any
questions
press the help button to speak with a
writer support agent
okay now let's see where we go it's
looking at this car coming here what's
it going to do
huh and then pulls in very smoothly
behind it
no problems did not turn into traffic
waited until the cars went
and then it turned i like that
i polled youtube viewers about
autonomous vehicles and
half of you are excited and ready for
them to be on the roads but
over 40 said you thought the technology
was still
over 10 years away and for those people
i have news
which is that well there is no driver in
this car i'm
currently inside a fully autonomous
vehicle
driving around a suburb of phoenix
arizona
and now i get that in some parts of the
world like the roads aren't well enough
maintained and
you know people don't stay in their lane
necessarily and so be very hard for a
computer to drive there but
at least under good conditions the
technology is currently
functional
now waymo started out as the google
self-driving car project
with what is possibly one of the cutest
cars ever made
i am inside the world's first fully
autonomous vehicle
back in october 2015 this car
went on a public road ridden by steve
mann who
has a disability he is legally blind but
he could get around
in this thing which is affectionately
known as
the firefly this is such a simple
vehicle there's basically
nothing in here there's no steering
wheel no dashboard
this car is super basic there is no ac
but there is an emergency stop button
that's my favorite button in the car it
reminds me of elevators you know
one of the important measures that they
had to put in automatic elevators
was a big red stop button did you know
that before the 1940s almost all
elevators had drivers in them
and when people started putting in
driverless elevators
well the public was very concerned and
they didn't want to ride in those
elevators
there was one guy who was like i don't
care if i have to walk up 12 flights of
stairs for the rest of my life
i'm not taking that elevator and
adoption was slow i mean they tried to
advertise to
help people understand that it was in
fact safe but ultimately
there was an elevator drivers strike in
new york city
and that really annoyed people and it
helped the adoption of automated
elevators
if you found a driver in an elevator
today you would wonder
why are they there now you might think
an elevator is just so simple i mean it
is effectively one dimensional motion
but you know airplanes are also flown
extensively by computers
i saw this particular landing where a
plane is coming in
into vienna and it's just so foggy that
the pilots can see almost nothing i mean
this
is the view from the cockpit and yet
they make
a perfect textbook landing right on
target
so how do they do it the answer is the
pilots
didn't do it it was a cat 3 auto land
procedure the
plane just came in and landed itself
essentially now
of course the pilots are important and
they're monitoring
all of the instruments and controls but
it's actually the plane and its computer
getting the plane to land appropriately
i was surprised to learn that humans are
much more likely to take
manual control and land on sunny days
like
july 6 2013 when asiana airlines flight
214 was on final approach to san
francisco
attempting to manually land the plane
the pilot accidentally left the throttle
at zero
and by the time they realized and tried
to abort the landing
it was too late the plane
crashed into the runway sea wall and
split in two
three people died in the aftermath of
this accident
i think the counterintuitive thing is
that we expect the humans to be better
particularly in tough situations but
when it comes to airplanes
if it's bad weather you actually want
the plane flying itself
so the obvious next question is would
you want the same thing for cars
there are all these different levels of
autonomy and everything up to four
requires a human driver to be you know
responsible and at the wheel
at all times in the early days of the
google self-driving car project
they had a vehicle that was not yet
level four so it still required a human
driver
they let google employees borrow the
cars but they still had to be in control
of the wheel
and the volunteers were informed that
they were responsible for the car at all
times
and that they would be constantly
recorded like video recorded while they
were in the car
but still within a short period of time
the engineers observed
drivers rummaging around in their bags
or checking phones
putting on makeup or even sleeping
in the driver's seat all these drivers
were trusting the technology too much
which makes almost fully autonomous
vehicles potentially
more dangerous than regular cars i mean
if the driver is distracted or
not prepared to take over so this is why
ramo decided
that the only safe way to proceed is
with a car that has at least
level four autonomy
this is the depot where the cars go when
they're not on the road
and it's also where people monitor all
the rides in progress
yes that's where my team sits you see
three teams basically here one of the
teams is
my team of league dispatchers so
basically making sure that all the
missions are assigned
every day and they are completed
successfully on road and then you have
the rider support team that takes the
call
[Music]
thank you for calling the waymo rider
support this is beulah how can i help
today
i just completed my ride but like i
don't want to get out of the car i just
want to keep driving
is there a way that i can do that right
now i don't see a trip started give me
one moment here while i partner with my
team okay
okay
well i just left all my stuff in the car
i hope it comes back
i think there's a lot of still
resistance in terms of
trusting the vehicle and they ask you
like
how does it feel to be in a car without
the driver i was the first person to do
a public roads fully driverless ride
at night i always share the experience
with them it takes about
two minutes for you to completely forget
that you're in a driverless
vehicle if the system really provides
that
feeling that you're safe and you see a
couple of maneuvers
in less than two minutes you're talking
to whoever is next to you and not paying
attention to what's happening anymore
well oh it doesn't make the indicator
sound
so i just don't know when it's going to
turn
but if i was watching the map i would
know
i think we have this bias to believe
that we're better at certain tasks than
we actually are
like thinking that people are good at
driving
surveys show 74 percent of people
believe
they are above average drivers
think about that in the 20th century 60
million people were killed on the road
that's basically an extra world wars
worth of deaths
and we really have no one to blame but
ourselves the national transportation
and safety board has identified
human error as the cause of 94 of
accidents
most of these errors are impossible for
a machine to make
every year when people are backing out
of driveways or
parking spaces in the u.s up to 200
people are killed
and it's frequently older people or
children the children of the drivers
it's awful and it comes down to the fact
that we don't have eyes in the back of
our head and even the backup cameras
you know still have blind spots but if
you have a vehicle that has
you know lidar and radar and 29 cameras
you're just not going to hit them
up here in the very prominent top there
is a 360 lidar
so you can see all around the car it can
see up to 300
meters away with the lidar the way the
lidar works is it shoots out
invisible laser beams scanning around
millions of times a second and then it
detects the reflection
and how long it takes to come back
allows you to determine how far it is
to that object so what it's doing is
like
painting a 3d picture of the world there
are 29 cameras
around this vehicle which gives you full
360 vision
it gives you close range vision what is
right next to the car and also
long range vision going out 500 meters
this car could detect a stop sign or a
pedestrian
500 meters away how many of us have
eyesight
that is that good there is also a
microphone
up on top to listen to what's happening
in the environment and if there are
sirens
then the car will pull over to the side
of the road
it's got to be able to respond to
emergency vehicles
[Applause]
what i want to see here is how does it
handle a parking lot
where there's uh you know people driving
in unusual ways and
possibly pedestrians walking around
whoa that was a sudden stop
the car made a pretty hard stop there i
think it saw that guy with a cart coming
up on a pedestrian crosswalk
one of the interesting things that the
vehicle is always doing
is not only seeing where things are and
where they're going
but also making predictions about where
they're likely to go
so this car doesn't just have one
potential future
it's constantly imagining well he might
cross at the crosswalk or he might keep
going
or he might turn left and so it has to
be prepared
for all of those different options and
it it even weights the options of like
how likely he thinks
that he's going to go on the crosswalk
versus go straight versus turn
and you can see that with the thickness
of the line in the little simulated
graphic
that they have
[Music]
a few years back i think a lot of people
were talking about how
autonomous vehicles have to figure out
who to hit in case of an accident
like do they pick the orphan or the nun
should the car hit the motorcyclist with
a helmet on
because his injuries might be less
severe or should the car hit the
motorcyclist who does not have a helmet
on because he did not properly protect
himself
if cars were programmed to hit the
motorcyclist with the helmet that would
mean that in a way
it would become safer to ride without a
helmet but
the reality is that 99 of accidents
aren't like that
every year around 1.3 million people
are killed on the roads almost all of
them due to human error
if autonomous cars can reduce these
fatalities then the real moral dilemma
is not getting them on the road sooner
for fear we haven't worked out exactly
how they'll react to
extremely unlikely hypothetical
scenarios
i think humans are becoming worse
drivers
because we're just so prone to
distraction
think about the main reasons why
cars crash because people are speeding
they're under the influence they're
distracted
i mean these sorts of problems an
autonomous vehicle would not have you
don't get a distracted driver
the ultimate question right that
everyone wants to know that i want to
know the answer to is like
as these vehicles stand are they better
than the average human
not than the best human but just like an
average human like
replacing some random car on the street
with one of these vehicles
does that make the road safer yes it
does i think
we would never launch a rider only
service
if we did not meet that base safety
framework
if that's true it means like
every vehicle that's not on the road is
kind of
a worse situation do you know what i
mean we are really working really hard
to
to launch this in larger areas and new
areas too
but we need to have the experience to
show the regulators why we believe it's
safer and
for that you need to be driving miles a
number of miles that you
feel comfortable with statistically
speaking
these vehicles have way more experience
than any human driver
because they've now accumulated data
over 20
million miles of driving on public roads
if you were an average driver you'd have
to drive for a thousand years
to accumulate that sort of experience
and all of that experience
can be used to train the systems to fix
the software
and used across all the vehicles in the
fleet
2019 waymo released a study of its data
over 6.1 million miles of automated
driving in the phoenix arizona
metropolitan area
of the 18 total accidents that occurred
during the study
none were serious enough to expect
significant injury or death
in waymo's safety report they found some
types of accidents have been
completely eliminated by this autonomous
driving system
like the car doesn't go off the road and
it doesn't hit stationary objects
humans humans do those things
if you look at the eight significant
accidents that happened with waymo
vehicles over the six
million miles of driving all eight of
them
involve a human driver of another
vehicle doing something stupid like
driving on the wrong side of the road or
running a red light
or going through a stop sign or failing
to yield or going 20 miles per hour over
the speed limit
there were three incidents involving
waymo vehicles
and pedestrians but in all three
the waymo vehicle was stationary and the
pedestrian or
cyclist skateboarder ran into the
vehicle
waymo also takes some of that real world
data and
they put it into simulations and they
tweak it a bit so they try adding like a
bicyclist going fast or going slow or
they make the car turn faster or slower
so they they change all these parameters
and variables
and they see what the software will do
and they've trained the software on an
additional
20 billion miles of driving not on the
road but
in simulation so that's a thousand times
more experience
again the question for me
is when is stepping inside an autonomous
car
gonna feel the same as stepping inside
an elevator
because i think that time may be coming
sooner than you think
i like the idea of this technology but
honestly getting in the car i wasn't
quite sure
how it would feel was a little bit
uncertain but once i saw
it just handles so confidently like
driving is one of those things that i
feel like you can't hide whether you're
a good or bad driver it's just like oh
what's going to happen when
you know there's a parked car or a
cyclist or a pedestrian and
it just sort of handles all those
situations with such confidence and ease
that i think you know i stopped thinking
about it after they passed a couple of
your mental tests
you're like i'm good i think i can i'll
be okay
yeah yeah i felt the same way i think a
lot of people miss the bigger
implications of what is achievable once
fully autonomous driving is commonplace
riders with disabilities seniors and the
blind can get around more easily
transportation will get cheaper think of
all the wasted value in the cars that
spend over
95 of their time parked we can
regain a bunch of time and feel happier
because commuting and being stuck
in traffic sucks we can reduce
traffic because vehicles will have
better awareness of each other you can
imagine one day
when all the cars are fully autonomous
they can execute a beautiful
ballet driving together and when that
time comes we can eliminate parking lots
and add green spaces to our cities
and most importantly widespread adoption
of autonomous cars could prevent tens
of thousands of fatalities in the u.s
alone when do you think that this
will be a reality that clearly it's
coming but yeah
if you're talking about big cities i
hope i'm hoping the next five years will
be really game-changing like
i'm excited to see it me too believe me
believe me i just don't want to commute
to work anymore i would love to sit in
the back
seat do my work and i'm going to wait
there and right back
or do something fun watch a movie yeah
you