I took a driverless taxi and here’s why it freaked me out

Phoenix, Arizona, is among Canada’s favourite snowbird destinations. It’s not only an ideal spot for sun lovers, but for tech nerds as well.

That’s because the city offers a rare method of transportation not seen yet in Canada or most of the US — outside of dystopian movies: Self-driving cars.

Waymo, formerly the Google self-driving car project, is operating at the moment in only two US cities: San Francisco and Phoenix, but has plans to expand to LA and Austin soon. As Daily Hive learned, it’s something that researchers, regulators, insurers, and lawyers are paying a lot of attention to. Could this technology make our roads more deadly or be a solution to our transportation terrors?

We wanted to try it out firsthand to see for ourselves.

What it’s like to ride a Waymo

Similar in a way to using Uber, you hire your ride through an app and input your pickup location and destination. For us, it was about a 20-minute ride and cost less than US$20.

We waited a short time for a car to arrive at our waiting spot outside the Arizona Diamondbacks stadium in a busy downtown area. Although we knew it would be self-driving, we weren’t sure what to expect appearance-wise, and the vehicle was mounted with a few sensors and gadgets that made it stand out on the road and made its arrival all the more exciting.

The Jaguar I-PACE, which sells for about US$70,000, rolls up quickly and parks. We unlock the door using the app, which takes a few seconds to figure out.

Once inside, the vehicle is clean and sleek, and we hear a soothing voice reminding us to wear our seatbelts. Once you press “start ride” through the touch screen on the dash, the vehicle takes off. Making turns, changing lanes, stopping at red lights, slowing down for pedestrians, and even parallel parking, all without the guidance of a driver.

Watch: The experience of riding in a Waymo

The steering wheel spins when turning, reminding me of a bumper car at a fair, and offers an almost tempting invitation to touch it. But a sign clearly states to leave it alone. In fact, they don’t want you to sit in that seat at all, and instead put your life completely in the hands of the autonomous service.

Similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s experience in a “Johnny Cab” in Total Recall, I wondered how I got myself into this.

It might have felt comfortable to put all of your trust in a computer in a sci-fi movie, but for me, it felt like I’d taken a massive soul-shaking step into the future and left the past — and my stomach — behind.

How does it know not to go down that one-way street? How can it register a toddler teetering too closely off the sidewalk? These questions kept me in a white-knuckled and stressed-out state for the longest 20 minutes in recent memory.

But a bigger question loomed in my mind as soon as we safely stopped and exited the vehicle, my feet back on the safety of solid ground: Could this be coming to Canada next? If so, are we ready?

Technology meets public sentiment

Dr. Alex Bigazzi is the head researcher in the REACT Lab in BC, which studies transportation systems. He’s also an associate professor at UBC’s Civil Engineering Department and is cautiously optimistic that we could one day see self-driving technology on the roads here.

He recently co-authored the paper: “Rules Versus Risk: Why Perceptions of Pedestrian Comfort and Safety Differ for Interactions with Self-Driving versus Human-Driven Vehicles,” which looked at how people factor into the mix when it comes to self-driving vehicles, and how, likely to no one’s surprise, the idea of it all still makes some people super uncomfortable.

It’s not just a matter of trust; he says it’s way too soon for driverless vehicles here at home in Canada.

“The technology for full automation really isn’t ready for full deployment everywhere. The reason some of those taxi companies can operate with fairly good performance in the San Francisco area is because that area is very heavily mapped. There’s a lot known about it. It’s a moderately controlled environment. Things get more complicated if you try to deploy it across an entire network, kind of wherever people want to go, right? Still, at the highest levels of automation, the technology really only allows people to operate in limited situations. There needs to be more fundamental technological development,” he said.

How do the cars “see”?

He says the companies send out mapping vehicles similar to Google Maps cars to gather the information they need.

“They drive through these environments with very high-resolution LiDAR getting 3d Cloud point images of space. It’s fairly easy for them to detect lights, the red, yellow, and green lights because those are so standardized…They’re all the same size,” he said. “They map all the routes and the spaces themselves, and the vehicles can detect lane markings, edges of roads, crosswalks, zebra striping, all the different traffic signs, and things like that.”

Adding that even with incredibly expensive technological features, there are things that the cars can’t do as well as humans.

“There are still challenges with vision or seeing in adverse weather and low light conditions. So different vehicles are using different types of technologies, radar, sonar, LiDAR, visual images, etc. They have different abilities to see in things like fog and at nighttime and things like that,” he said.

It’s not only the weather that’s a challenge, but the unpredictability of pedestrians, cyclists, or other motorists that have to be considered.

“The vehicle automation technology now is really good at interacting with and understanding traffic controls, and road infrastructure, and things like that. But there’s still more work that needs to be done to understand human behaviour in the complex ways that other humans do,” he said.

“The fact that the traffic engineers of 40 years ago thought by today we would have automated vehicles, and the fact that we haven’t gotten there shows just how complex the driving task is,” he said.

Even in the futurist cartoon, The Jetsons, the car flies, but it doesn’t drive itself.

“Some people like to say that humans are actually remarkably good at driving considering how complex it is and how much information is coming in. How much decision making and anticipation needs to happen. Humans are pretty good at anticipating what other people are going to do, such as when a pedestrian is going to come out into the street, etc.”

But that will change one day, he says.

“The technology is coming along really fast, and it will get to the point, I believe, where they will be safer than human drivers.”

Are we ready? Not even close

It’s a new technology, and everyone has a different way of defining it. For those in the industry, it’s called automated, and while it seems like the cars have minds of their own, they are still given directions about where to go and how to get there.

Your car might already be using some of this technology, such as speed control through a connective vehicle model. But with the threat (and/or promise) of expansion into fully automated vehicles, the existing worries about problems with self-driving technology feel all the larger.

In recent months, a glitch with Tesla’s Autosteer feature put the importance of a physical driver back at the forefront of the conversation.

“A driver that doesn’t pay close attention while using the Autosteer feature, or who doesn’t react quickly when Autosteer is cancelled, could have an increased risk of a crash,” Transport Canada said in the December recall notice. “Tesla advises that you must always pay attention and be ready to take control of the vehicle at any time while using the Autosteer advanced driver-assistance feature.”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found 11 people died in four months alone from collisions blamed on automated driver assist systems such as Autopilot. The majority of the deaths were in Teslas and researchers are trying to determine the safety of these features.

In all of these cases, however, the vehicles weren’t driverless.

Remove the driver, what happens then?

A Waymo vehicle in San Francisco was recently involved in a collision with a cyclist, leaving the cyclist with minor injuries according to media reports. A few days later, a crowd of people are alleged to have set an empty Waymo vehicle on fire in the city, prompting a police investigation.

It comes a few months after another self-driving vehicle operating in that city dragged a pedestrian 20 feet. The vehicle was part of General Motors Co.’s autonomous vehicle company Cruise, and following the incident the company has decreased funding to the project and vowed to improve safety within it.

According to Waymo, the technology has been tested thoroughly and is safe. It has been operating in Arizona since 2016, and launched to the public four years later through Waymo One, the world’s first autonomous ride-hailing service. The company is hoping to expand further.

“We believe fully autonomous tech is the safest way to get people and goods from point A to point B, whatever the weather, traffic conditions, or outside environment. The long story short of it is that you can’t buy a fully autonomous car today, but you can ride in one,” a Waymo spokesperson told Daily Hive.

They’ve tested technology in 10 states and claim to have a decade and 20 million miles under their belt. The company offers several safety studies to review on its website, but some advocacy groups aren’t buying it, including “Safe Street Rebel,” which might be better described as a wannabe vigilante organization.

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The group fights for “car-free spaces, transit equity, and the end of car dominance. People, community, and park space must be prioritized over polluting, dangerous, and murderous vehicles.”

They hold traffic-disrupting demonstrations primarily by bike, placing traffic cones on self-driving vehicles to prove the limits of the technology. On social media, they claim credit for Cruise’s issues in California and vow to keep up the fight for “a better world.”

Forget no-fault, this is no-person insurance

So who is responsible when a crash occurs? That’s a complicated issue when it comes to new technology like this. Waymo wasn’t specific on how their insurance works, exactly, and efforts to connect with Arizona officials to determine how their system is operating went unanswered by the deadline.

Waymo says it’s a “legal process.”

“While fault or attribution is determined by the legal process, we have the teams, systems, and protocol in place to assist riders and vehicles in these situations and respond immediately as they arise. As always, our rider support team is available at the press of a button, in car or in the app. Additionally, we have trained and worked closely with public safety officials and first responders on how to safely respond and interact with our vehicles should that be required,” the company said.

Insurance is a major roadblock everywhere, but maybe even more challenging in places without private insurers. Take BC for example, where drivers must go through ICBC, the province-wide insurance network, as its primary option, and that’s been blamed for some of the delays in allowing Uber, meal delivery, scooters, and more options to legally operate in the province.

According to the BC Ministry of Transportation, the first step isn’t insurance, but the regulators, and that’s a federal decision.

Regulators, mount up!

“Transport Canada sets the safety standards for the design, construction, and importation of motor vehicles into Canada. Currently, Transport Canada regulations do not permit the general sale and import of fully automated vehicles in Canada unless the importer has obtained a special exemption from the federal Minister of Transportation,” the ministry told Daily Hive.

Transport Canada confirmed that the Canada Motor Vehicle Safety Standards would have to be changed to accommodate these vehicles, but it could be done after that.

Frameworks surrounding automated and connected vehicles have already been released, exploring how to improve the current road woes. For one thing, Transport Canada found that, while collisions have dropped, a whopping 85% of fatal car crashes are still caused by driver error, something companies like Waymo have been repeating in their messaging: Take away the driver, and you have a safer ride. Not exactly, but regulators are apparently open to exploring it.

If that gets a go-ahead, it would then fall into the hands of the provinces and territories that are responsible for driver licensing, vehicle registration, vehicle maintenance, and insurance, as well as setting and enforcing the rules of the road, Transport Canada told Daily Hive.

“This includes rules associated with on-road testing and deployment of automated vehicles,” the federal regulator added.

But it’s not off the table. While there are currently no driverless vehicles in BC and no pilot projects to test them on public roads at this time, the province is actively monitoring the developments happening in this field — the safety elements in particular.

Watch: Bigazzi explains how the technology works

Bigazzi, like many, says one of the biggest concerns isn’t actually the safety of the technology at all, but the threat of hackers. Transport Canada agrees that it is one of the biggest points of contention.

“Transport Canada remains committed to playing a leadership role in the development of globally aligned safety and cybersecurity requirements for automated vehicles through the World Forum for the Harmonization of Vehicle Regulations (Referred to as Working Party 29).

The cybersecurity concerns led the main motor vehicle-producing countries, which includes Canada, to work together to get a Global Technical Regulation for automated driving system safety finished by 2026.

If that happens, would that remove the roadblocks for self-driving vehicles in Canada?

Not quite.

What’s the deal with road pricing?

Canada and BC are part of the Transportation Association of Canada’s Connected and Automated Vehicle Integrated Committee, which is also looking at another barrier: road pricing.

“Some funding mechanisms, particularly fuel taxes, are increasingly seen as challenged by new technologies and services including automated vehicles, electric vehicles, and transportation network companies,” the website reads in part.

Essentially, if you change the current model, how do you fund road repairs or bridge-building projects?

For Bigazzi, he says it would need to adapt in order to mitigate the negative impacts of automated vehicles.

“Already with ride-hailing taxi services, we see an enormous amount of deadheading or no occupant vehicles that’s happening, and via automation that makes that even more possible,” Bigazzi said.

What about our green and car-less future?

Are we moving toward yet another technology that will not help the planet, but could further harm it? While self-driving cars might use technology to possibly make your trip more fuel efficient, many caution that there’s a greater chance of more pollution and even more drivers on the roads.

Also known as zombie rides, if a riderless and driverless car is travelling solo, that could lead to more congestion and pollution.

“In addition, vehicle automation might increase urban sprawl by decreasing the kind of perceived costs of sitting in a car for a long time if you can do work and other things, so there’s a real risk there that needs to be proactively managed,” Bigazzi warned.

That might lead some municipalities to block the technology in the future over concerns it devalues efforts to improve public transit or to create more walkable cities.

However, that’s still light years away, and that would only be on the table if companies like Waymo try to launch in local markets.

The financially fickle future

Money will remain one of the biggest factors, but not necessarily a motivator for the companies themselves.

Bigazzi says it’s likely one company will enter the mix and try to hold out until it becomes a money-maker.

“Most new transportation technology companies lose millions if not billions of dollars for a long time before they ever become profitable. To my knowledge, only very recently has ride-hailing and E-scooter sharing and things like that become profitable, and it’s still unprofitable for a number of companies. So they’re essentially subsidized by investors for a long, long, long time,” Bigazzi said.

So is Waymo profitable? At this point, the answer is no.

“As we increasingly commercialize and scale our technology, we expect costs to come down and our capacity to serve more riders to increase. You can already see this in our growth — we’re focused on scaling trips to deliberately improve the system and how we serve riders,” Waymo said.

Bigazzi said that for these companies, it’s important to be first and innovating.

Baby steps

Unfortunately for those hoping to get a private driverless cab tomorrow, you’ll be waiting awhile.

When asked if there are plans to expand to Canada, Waymo said, “We don’t have anything to share on this at this time.”

But that’s not shocking to many, including Bigazzi, who says his research has shown that a slow and steady approach is helpful for consumer confidence.

“We expect to see a gradual increase in the penetration and the level of automation with this idea of fully automated vehicles everywhere being still several decades away,” he explained.  “One of the things that we found in our research shows that people who are more familiar with the technology tended to be more comfortable with it, and I think we’ll all… get that practice and we’ll get more comfortable with it.”

While residents themselves might be uncomfortable with the idea, some city leaders have been not-so-quietly exploring ways to bring better tech to the roads. Innovation is among the buzzwords floating around at all levels, including municipal.

Vancouver and its massively expanding neighbouring city that is Surrey are among the sites where some smaller-scale testing of this technology has been done. Not to the extent of a fully automated vehicle and not in an open test area, however.

Surrey’s slogan, “The Future Lives Here,” means it’s open to improving the ways that residents get around and has been dipping its toe in the water. We asked them if there’s hope ahead.

“The City of Surrey recognizes Automated Vehicle technology as an evolving field, with potential to incrementally improve safety features of conventional vehicles, as well as offering new form factors for personal transportation and goods movement,” the City of Surrey’s Engineering Department said in part.

Throwing back to its involvement in an Infrastructure Canada Smart Cities Challenge bid to create Canada’s first two collision-free multimodal corridors with driverless vehicles in 2019. They lost out on the $50 million but were able to give some demonstrations of a driverless shuttle which has been used in other Canadian cities as well.

“In support of research into this rapidly advancing field as part of its Urban Technology Test Lab initiative, the City has supported pilot deployments of technology such as the ELA multi-passenger LSAV (Low Speed Autonomous Vehicle) and INDRO Robotic’s ‘Roll-E’ autonomous delivery robot,” the City of Surrey added about its efforts to bring innovation to the city.

But there are more roadblocks.

“Beyond these initiatives, the regulatory framework for AV deployment is governed by the province’s Motor Vehicle Act and federal statutes, which currently prohibits manufacture sale of fully automated (driverless) vehicles. At a provincial level, the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia does not license AVs for use on public roadways,” the city said.

Bigazzi predicts that was just a preview, and that more jurisdictions could start to roll out self-driving technology through fixed-route shuttles, like micro-transit, beyond a pilot project.

So, could you someday, for example, take a driverless bus between Science World and Olympic Village at any time of the year? That might just happen.

But would you even want to? Let us know in the comments below.

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With files from Kenneth Chan