1News US Correspondent Logan Church has been hopping into driverless cars in America, and asking the tech giants if New Zealand is in their sights – and one said yes.
Head into a major American city, and you’ll likely find cars zipping through the city centre with no one driving.
And I’m not talking about Tesla’s autopilot feature, where a car can drive itself when the driver wants a break.
No – I mean there is no one in the driver's seat.
The robotaxi company planning NZ rollout - and what might stop them - Watch on TVNZ+
This month in Las Vegas, one of the big robotaxi companies, Zoox, owned by Amazon, now takes paying customers in cars with not only no driver, but no steering wheel or brake pedals.
In a recent trip to Los Angeles, I took my first-ever Waymo – driverless cars that now number in their thousands in cities from San Fransico to Atlanta.
In many ways, it works just like booking a rideshare – you select your destination, your pickup point. You watch the little car icon get closer. Then it pulls up.
With no driver.
The trip to the mall in Beverly Hills was quick, quiet and safe – but also freaky as anything. Seeing the steering wheel move by itself will take some getting used to.
But it’s this tech that some of the biggest companies on the planet are making multi-billion-dollar bets on.
Tesla is racing ahead with development of the Cybercab, Alphabet is boosting Waymo numbers, and Amazon has Zoox.
One tech giant, Nuro, has signed a mega deal with Uber, which is also getting into the robotaxi game.
Nuro co-founder Dave Furgusson (who also happens to be a Kiwi from Wellington) told me his company is effectively developing the ‘brains’ behind the vehicle.
“The idea is we can take any car, and we can put on some pretty low-cost sensors, add some additional compute, and then we provide the driver that can very, very safely and effectively drive that vehicle on any road,” he said.
“About a year and a half ago, we signed a pretty major partnership with Uber, where we and Uber and Lucid, which is an electric vehicle company in the US, are building a custom robotaxi.”
They plan to deploy tens of thousands across the US starting from later this year.
“Waymo has obviously already begun to scale. I think they're in over 10 cities now across the US, have thousands of vehicles. We intend to scale pretty rapidly with Uber.”
He saw a day soon when people would not only privately own an autonomous vehicle, but when they weren’t using it, it could turn into a robotaxi and join a network like Uber.
“You will be able to own a vehicle that when you get in it, or your family gets in it, or you want to send it for errands, it can operate fully autonomously,” he said. “We also are very convinced that a significant number of owners of those vehicles will choose to let them go operate in a network like Uber. And so, they will be able to have their vehicle go earn money for them.”
The biggest impediment to that vision being achieved was no longer technology, he said.
“What we're launching is already at the point where we believe it is superhuman performance,” he said. “I think the big challenge is how do you scale? How do you go from a couple hundred vehicles to a couple thousand to hundreds of thousands to millions worldwide?”
How safe are cars with no drivers?
As I was driven around Los Angeles by a Waymo in my first trip, I couldn’t help but stare at every oncoming car in the other lane or passing cyclist and pray.
There have been well-documented instances of cars making weird decisions – like driving en masse like a herd down a cul-de-sac in Atlanta in May (Waymo said it was a ‘routing problem’ and apologised to residents), to a car driving over a firework set off on the street during this year’s July 4 celebrations in San Fransico.
Prakash Ranjitkar is a civil and environmental engineering expert at the University of Auckland, and he says there are clear safety benefits from having autonomous vehicles on the roads.
“If we look at accidents, in the US and other countries, people have analysed the data and what they found in most of the cases is that accidents are caused due to the human factor – more than 90%. What autonomous vehicles do is they take the human out of the equation. As a human we get distracted, we speed, we get tired and sometimes make poor decisions,” he said.
“Autonomous vehicles don’t get tired, don't get distracted, and are constantly monitoring what is happening around them. The biggest factor for accidents is taken out of the equation. We can reduce the number of crashes.”
The technology wasn’t perfect, he said.
“Especially under a complex situation when they are driving under mixed traffic conditions, when they have to deal with other human drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. That is more challenging – and that is where we are doing research.
“Autonomous vehicles are not a silver bullet, but if we introduce this technology carefully, alongside safer roads, better infrastructure, better regulation, this technology has the real potential to bring down the number of accidents,” he said.
NZ-specific challenges
There were challenges that New Zealand would need to overcome to see these types of vehicles deployed on Kiwi roads – regulation is one of the big ones.
While some autonomous functions are allowed in vehicles in New Zealand – for example Tesla’s autopilot – it is still a legal requirement to have a driver in the driver seat.
“Currently we don't have clear rules if something goes wrong, who is liable," said Prakash Ranjtkar. “We don't have a safety standard. How we deal with cybersecurity and how these vehicles can operate on the public roads.”
Transport Minister Chris Bishop told 1News that while he knew there was some desire to change some of the rules, it was not an “immediate priority”.
“I'm aware there is a bit of interest, it's a fast-moving field as we know, so I'm prepared to have a look at it, but I can't do everything at once.”
Nevertheless, Dave Fergusson at Nuro said that New Zealand was in their deployment plans – even if he wouldn’t be drawn on a date.
“I would say it's definitely years, but hopefully not too many years,” he said.
He was confident regulation change was possible.
I think one thing that we found really encouraging over many, many years is New Zealand has continued to be a really thoughtful regulatory partner for both self-driving, but in general, it's why we have even rockets there. We have a lot of drones,” he said.
“I can't wait to have my parents ride in one of our vehicles in the next couple of years in Wellington.”
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