After years of testing, millions of kilometers travelled, robot taxis are on the way. Packed with cameras and sensors, these driverless taxis have taken up residence in many American and Chinese cities. Customers sit in the back of the cars after booking on an app and let themselves be driven to their destination.
On August 10, the public authorities authorized two robot taxi operators, Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet (parent company of Google), and Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors (GM), to operate day and night in the streets of San Francisco. A symbolic date in the history of autonomous vehicles. In China, too, these “ghost cars” have gone to the commercial stage.
Pony.ai, the Californian company created by two former Google and Baidu executives, received the green light from Chinese authorities in March to deploy its vehicles in Beijing and Guangzhou. For its part, Baidu, the Chinese internet giant, has taken the same step in Beijing, Wuhan and Chongqing by launching Apollo Go, its own autonomous taxi service. At the same time, tests are continuing in many American cities: in Los Angeles, Austin, Dallas, Atlanta… Although the regulations were relaxed last year, Europe, on the other hand, has not yet been cleared by these start-ups, even if Volkswagen is seeking to launch its autonomous collective taxis within its subsidiary Moia.
The fact that, unlike individual cars, taxis can already circulate in town without a driver (therefore being level 4 on a scale of autonomy which has five) is partly explained by a different technological approach. “These are robots, designed from the start to function absolutely alone, explains Geoffrey Bouquot, who directs the R
The robot, presented as safer than a human driver by its promoters, is however not infallible. A week after Cruise’s “go” to San Francisco, one of his self-driving taxis crashed into a fire truck on its way to an intervention and slightly injured its passenger. As a result, Cruise had to halve the fleet deployed in the Californian city while the investigation took place. The General Motors subsidiary assured that the taxi had turned green at a crossroads… But fire engines and ambulances often bypass the signs in the event of an emergency.
However, the clash will not slow down the rise of these machines in countries where the good perception of new technologies and the topography of cities encourage their circulation within a precise perimeter and sometimes within a given time range.
New technology heavyweights in the United States and Asia have committed billions of dollars to this market, which they consider promising… even if it is not yet profitable. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2022 GM took in just $102 million in revenue from Cruise but spent $3.3 billion. Alphabet and other investors have raised $5.7 billion to develop Waymo since 2020.
If Google, General Motors, Amazon, Baidu, Didi… rely on these robot taxis, it is because they are convinced of the robustness of the economic model. GM boss Mary Barra predicts her company will make $50 billion a year by the end of the decade from self-driving vehicles. What will be the winning recipe for this human-free service?
First, drive the vehicles intensively to reduce costs, while saving driver salaries. The amounts invested in the technology would be amortized after a few years. And for manufacturers like GM, these investments also make it possible to progress more quickly in the autonomy of individual cars.
