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The self-driving car company Waymo says it is here to stay in Philadelphia, and has recently started tests where human drivers do not take the wheel.
Earlier this summer, the company did tests with humans doing the driving in about a dozen vehicles, and said it had no immediate plans for an autonomous taxi service in Philadelphia. Now, it has officially announced plans to stay, as well as in other cities including Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
It will work on getting permission from PennDOT to have fully self-driving cars with no human drivers. Then, people in Philadelphia will be able to request rides, company spokesperson Ethan Teicher said. He said he cannot say how long that will take. PennDOT did not make anyone available for an interview by the time of publication.
Waymo is a subsidiary of Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
Right now, the company offers fully autonomous rides in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta.
“In every city, it is a methodical, deliberate process. And Philadelphia will be no different,” Teicher said. “When we brought vehicles to the city earlier this year, it was part of a road trip to see both how the technology performed in the city and to get started on exploring if Philadelphia was a city where we could operate.”
He said the company is confident that their technology can handle the conditions in Philadelphia after their local tests and the company’s previous experience operating in other places like Tokyo, New York and Michigan. Earlier this year, the company published a journal article showing that their driverless cars caused vastly fewer injuries and crashes compared to human drivers.
However, it remains “the world’s most complicated problem” to design fully self-driving cars that can work across all types of traffic conditions, says Paul Perrone, founder and CEO of Perrone Robotics, which ran a self-driving shuttle in the Philadelphia Navy Yard for a little more than a year.
His company has been working on self-driving car technology for more than 20 years, and will soon test an automated shuttle at Newark Liberty International Airport.