The Navy Yard shuttle ended earlier this year. Perrone said his team found that there were some intersections with older traffic lights that even human drivers had trouble seeing, so they required human drivers to take over in those spots until the traffic lights got upgraded.\n<\/p>\n
He said that while he applauds Waymo and any other company working on fully self-driving cars, there are still some tough problems to solve. For instance, what should a car do if there is a passenger inside a car caught up in a riot? This summer, in Los Angeles, protesters set some Waymo cars on fire<\/a>, though there were no passengers inside at the time.\n<\/p>\n Waymo could also face resistance from unions representing human drivers. When the company announced the tests in Philadelphia this summer, the president of the Transport Workers Union of America, AFL-CIO, which represents transit workers in New York and Philadelphia, said<\/a> \u201cWaymo and other Big Tech companies should not be permitted to launch driverless vehicles with their unproven tech in some of the busiest cities in the world.\u201d The union president also pushed back<\/a> when Perrone Robotics started the Navy Yard shuttle last year.\n<\/p>\n Until Waymo gets its permit to have its fleet go fully driverless, riders won\u2019t be able to hail one of their cars just yet. But they might see them on Philadelphia streets for more human-supervised test runs.\n <\/p>\n