TECHnalysis Research Blog Extra

April 28, 2017
Google’s Waymo Starts Driving Passengers

By Bob O'Donnell

In a week that featured several news stories about autonomous driving—from ongoing developments in the Uber-Waymo lawsuit to the first “spotting” of Apple’s autonomous test vehicles—the most important one was the announcement that Google’s Waymo was going to start tests with real passengers.

Using Phoenix, AZ as a test bed, the Google “Other Bet” company debuted a free service to residents of the city who were willing to sign up and try it. Initially, Waymo will offer 100 of their specially enhanced Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans, but the plan is to expand to 600 vehicles over a few months. This is a significantly larger and more public test than anything announced or tried by other vendors who are eager to enter the autonomous driving market, so Google is placing a particularly large bet.

Waymo’s stated goal is to provide ongoing access to the vehicle service to as wide a range of potential consumers as possible. The idea is to test it for everything from the hectic school-aged children after-school lesson and practice schedules that many families face, to normal drive-to-work, or going out for a social events types of situations. All of this is being done to gauge what kinds of capabilities, services and requirements there may be across all of these different commuting and driving scenarios.

Though the cars will be self-driving, each will still be staffed with a Waymo employee in the driver’s seat on each ride, both to ensure safety and collect additional information.

Given the size of the test, the results will likely be much more closely monitored, and widely reported, than other smaller efforts (such as the Uber trials in Pittsburgh). As a result, the success or failure here could have a disproportionately large impact on how quickly, or not, autonomous vehicles reach the market.

There’s clearly a lot of both excitement and trepidation about the timelines and overall future for autonomous vehicles. To that end, there has been a great deal of private testing done by a wide range of auto companies and tech vendors to help advance the technology forward. But most of those efforts are, frankly, little more than lab experiments. Kudos to Waymo for kicking off the kind of large-scale, public tests that will inevitably be required before any of these technologies can go mainstream. Let’s hope they go well.

Here's a link to the column: https://techpinions.com/friday-roundup/unpacked-this-weeks-news-april-28th-2017

Bob O’Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a market research firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech.