Google's Waymo Self-Driving Car Gets into Trouble Again in Phoenix

TapTechNews July 7th news, Google's Waymo self-driving car has had a continuous string of accidents for a long time, and recently it got into trouble again in Phoenix - driving the wrong way in a construction zone.

It is known that on June 19 local time, a Google Waymo self-driving car entered the opposite lane while driving in the construction area and was intercepted by the police after driving the wrong way for two minutes. Waymo officials responded that the reason for their car's wrong-way driving was because of inconsistent construction signs, and was prevented from returning to the correct lane.

TapTechNews noticed that Waymo's driverless technology mainly relies on high-precision maps. For construction areas, there is a lack of high-precision information for related scenarios and can only rely on real-time perception by sensors. The data of sensors are passed sequentially among different sub-models, and information loss is difficult to completely avoid. Considering that many construction areas in reality even lack guiding signs, when facing such scenarios, self-driving cars will have serious problems.

Waymo was established in 2016 and spun off from Google's self-driving car division; in October 2017, it officially announced the start of testing self-driving car technology; in 2018, it launched a self-driving taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona; in 2019, it was officially approved to transport passengers in California. In 2020, Waymo became the first company to provide the public with a fully self-driving taxi service, and in 2021 it was officially approved to carry out unmanned commercial business in California.

Despite continuous reports of various accidents, Waymo officials still claimed: New data shows that the WaymoDriver continues to make the roads safer. As of the end of March, the WaymoDriver has driven more than 14.8 million miles. In terms of avoiding collisions that cause injuries to people, its performance is 3.5 times higher than that of human drivers in San Francisco and Phoenix, and in terms of avoiding collisions reported by the police, its performance is 2 times higher than that of human drivers.