The Daily: Ready or Not, Driverless Cars Are Here

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From The New York Times, I'm Michael Balbaro.

This is The Daily.

Today, after a closely watched vote, driverless cars, once a Silicon Valley fantasy, have become

a 24-hour-a-day reality in San Francisco.

My colleague, Cade Metz, describes the unique challenges of coexisting with cars that drive

themselves.

It's Wednesday, August 23rd.

Cade, we have invited you into our studio here in New York to tell us about what's happening

in San Francisco, which doesn't sound very efficient, but either as it may, San Francisco

has become the capital of this grand experiment of driverless cars.

And I want you to just describe what it's like to live in San Francisco in that new

reality.

As you walk through the streets, there are hundreds of these cars driving around almost

constantly in most of the city.

Once you get out of the downtown area, the financial district, you cannot walk a block

without seeing one of these cars.

And if you're a first-timer in San Francisco or you've arrived for the first time in years,

you cannot believe what you're seeing.

Hundreds of cars driving around with no one in the driver's seat.

These cars are not hard to spot.

They're outfitted with all sorts of sensors designed to detect everything that's going

on in the world around them.

These are big, sometimes trash-can-sized sensors that spin, and you can't...

I'm getting an image of some hybrid between a police car and a kid with braces.

An analogy I like to make is the Ghostbusters car, the car from the original Ghostbusters

1984, which has all this stuff all over it.

Okay, so you've been in these cars.

I want you to just describe the whole experience of getting in the car and how you even get

one of these driverless cars, because obviously it's not just a regular old hail system.

Let's go to my most recent drive, which was last Wednesday.

I pulled open my Waymo app, where I can hail a car, much as you would an Uber.

The difference was, it wouldn't pick me up exactly where I wanted it to pick me up.

It gave me a spot in an alleyway, about a block and a half away, where there's less

traffic.

And eventually, my car pulls up.

I pull the app out again, and there's a little button on the app that says Unlock.

Good to see you, Cade.

As I step into a car, a disembodied voice comes over the speaker that welcomes me by

name.

Hello, Cade.

As we get going, just give us one minute to cover a few riding tips.

It also gives me a short safety briefing.

We'll do all the driving, so please don't touch the steering wheel or pedals during

your ride.

Then the wheel starts to turn on its own.

The car starts to move.

It's like being in the car with my daughter, just after she had turned 16 and was learning

to drive.

On edge.

Yes and no.

I'm on edge because my daughter is a new driver, but also I have a daughter who is wonderfully

conscientious.

She is so careful when she drives.

She would stop several feet before she got to the intersection, but that's what these

driverless cars are like.

They drive at the pace and with a care of a particularly conscientious 16-year-old driver.

As the drive continues, up and down the hills of San Francisco, it is taking much longer

than it would have taken in an Uber because of that overly cautious nature of the car.

So overall, how do you rate this ride?

This ghostly driverless, cautious version of a taxi ride.

It got me to where I wanted to go, but it took an awful long time, relatively speaking,

to get me there.

Now, the flip side, it's also like a ride at Disney World, where it's a real novelty.

It's something that you don't necessarily experience every day.

And you take this ride with your senses heightened, aware of this strange thing that you're doing.

And like a lot of novelties injected into the real world like this, it is the subject

of extreme debate, particularly in San Francisco, where these cars have been causing accidents.

In some cases, those accidents cause injuries.

They run into emergency vehicles.

They do things that they are not supposed to do.

And increasingly, that is a concern for many of the residents of San Francisco who don't

want their city to be a petri dish for these types of cars that may cause serious problems

with daily life.

Right.

I'm thinking back to what you just said.

It's like a ride at Disney World, but San Francisco is not Disney World.

It's a city with public streets and pedestrians.

And so that makes me want to understand how we have gotten to this moment where an experiment

on the scale that you are describing is even possible.

So tell us the story of how we arrive at this moment where San Francisco is filled with

these ghostly driverless vehicles.

Scientists and researchers have been trying to build autonomous vehicles since the 60s.

The aim, and it is largely driven by labs funded by the Defense Department, is to build

autonomous vehicles for the military.

It's better to have a vehicle, a tank that does not have a driver behind the wheel, so

to speak.

In case it gets shot at, destroyed.

Exactly.

That's the rough goal.

But as time goes on, people start to realize that you can do this for civilians as well,

that you can use the same technology and use it to drive an ordinary car and potentially

change our lives as well.

Potentially build a car that is safer than a human being.

Technology does not get tired.

Technology does not drink whiskey and get behind the wheel.

There are all sorts of advantages to having technology drive as opposed to humans if you

can get technology to the level where it can drive as well as we require.

When does that start to happen?

It starts to happen around 2005.

DARPA, which is the research arm of the Defense Department, organizes a contest.

The idea is to get all sorts of research teams to build a driverless vehicle and then compete

with each other to see who's is most proficient.

The two guys notice that this is happening.

They happen to be the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

One of the leaders of one of the research teams, a guy named Sebastian Thrun, tells

the story of Larry Page showing up at one of these competitions in disguise, a hat,

sunglasses so he won't be recognized.

What ends up happening is that Page hires Thrun to run a new lab at Google called Google

X.

The idea is to go after what Page and his colleagues call moonshots, extremely ambitious

technical projects.

The first thing they decide to go after is a driverless car.

The ultimate moonshot.

The ultimate moonshot.

Larry Page wants to put one of these in your driveway to put you in a car on a daily basis

that can drive by itself, get you to where you want to go while you're doing something

else.

Taking a nap, reading to your kid.

Absolutely.

That's something that excites a lot of people.

There's an interesting difference of opinion between Thrun and Page that explains the next

10 years of development with this technology.

Larry Page running a company like Google wants to see this happen.

Sebastian Thrun, the man he's hired to run this lab and to run this project, he realizes

how difficult this will be.

He realizes how far they will have to go and he doesn't necessarily know how to get there.

And why is it such a challenge?

Why in Thrun's mind is it going to be so hard to realize Larry Page's vision of a driverless

car in every driveway?

Getting a car to make a left turn at an intersection is not difficult.

A right turn is not difficult.

Accelerating, braking, those things are not difficult.

What's difficult is dealing with all the chaos that we encounter every time we get into a

car.

Unexpected is likely to happen at any given second.

You have to have a machine that completely, first of all, recognize what is going on around

it.

You need to know that that is a pedestrian and not a bicycle.

Then once you are clear on everything that is around you, you need to predict what's

going to happen with each of those things.

And then once you predict what's going to happen, you need to develop a way of responding

to all that.

And that requires reason.

It requires a quality that machines still don't have and certainly didn't have in the

early 2000s.

Right.

Driving a car isn't just about steering the wheel as you go down the road.

It's about responding to all the possible things that could go wrong.

Dog runs out into the road, bike swerves into your path.

We as humans learn to respond instinctively to those, it's harder to teach a robot to

do that.

That's right.

But despite how challenging teaching a robot all of that is, we know that this driverless

car technology does move forward.

So tell us how that happened.

Larry Page, the founder of Google, says go after this and Thrun goes after it.

Right.

Jump.

How high?

Thrun and his colleagues at the new Google X lab start building a driverless car.

And by 2010, they quietly start testing this technology on the public roads of California.

A secret driverless car project that puts those driverless cars on the road.

Until the New York Times and my predecessor here, John Markoff, got wind of the project.

And in the fall of 2010, let the world know that it was happening.

And what is the response?

Well, it sets off a tech arms race.

Not only among dedicated technology companies like Google, but among a new type of company

which is doing ride hailing, Uber and Lyft, and the traditional car companies who now

see a threat to their way of doing things.

They jump in and start competing as well.

And as companies like Google and Uber started to talk about this technology publicly, Sebastian

Thrun helped start Google's self-driving car program.

They talked about it as if it was around the corner.

Will they be functional in two to three years or available in two to three years?

They are functional today and they'd be available in two to three years.

If you were reading the tech press, if you were reading the mainstream press around that

time, ready or not, they're coming.

You assumed that by the following year, those driverless cars we've been hearing so much

about could soon be hitting the road, cruising right alongside us in the next few years.

You would have a driverless car in your driveway if you wanted.

Nissan plans to sell a driverless car in just five years.

Nissan hopes to bring the self-driving cars to the market by 2020.

Ford hopes to have a fully autonomous vehicle available by 2021.

Your driveway could disappear and so could parking lots and garages.

Freight and packages could all move at night.

And that was never the case.

There was some hype.

There's always hype in Silicon Valley.

In this case, the hype was particularly strong.

Okay, so now that all these big players are pumping this extraordinary amount of money

into this unproven technology, what becomes of it?

On the surface, the types of cars being built were perfect.

Reporters would get into a car in Mountain View, California.

It would take them around the block with an area mistake.

But the reality below the surface was that building this technology was extremely difficult.

And that continued for years, where the hype did not reflect the reality.

But then that changed in 2018.

Which is when?

There was a crash in Arizona involving an Uber test car.

A 49-year-old woman at night was crossing a multi-lane road with her bicycle.

She was struck and killed.

There was a safety driver behind the wheel who was supposed to take over if something

went wrong, but they did not.

The bottom line is someone was killed by a self-driving car and that almost immediately

set the industry back.

Yes, people behind the wheel are involved in accidents every day.

People die because of those accidents.

But if a new technology kills someone, that is far more concerning to the general public,

to regulators.

They start to wonder if this is going to work.

After the crash, Uber immediately pauses its efforts to test these vehicles not only in

Arizona but in California and in Pittsburgh, Toyota follows suit.

And slowly, all these companies start to admit that this is harder than they had let on.

Even Google starts to change the way it's doing things.

Its self-driving car operation is spun out into a new company called Waymo.

And its ambitions start to morph away from that idea of a car in your driveway towards

the type of robo-taxi service that Uber and Lyft were building.

Rather than having a car in your driveway that can potentially drive anywhere, what

these companies decide to do is let's limit a self-driving car service to a particular

geographic area.

Narrow the variables.

That's the way it works.

If you put a ring around San Francisco, you limit your cars to that one city.

You can build a digital map, a literal 3D visual map of the city.

And you can give that map to the car.

And then you test over and over and over again in that constrained environment.

You limit the chaos.

You limit the unexpected moments.

It's going to be easier and that's what the industry starts to go after.

And that's how we get to the point where San Francisco, the second most dense city in

America, becomes a testing ground for these driverless vehicles with hundreds of cars

driving around the city.

This goes on for years where multiple companies are testing these vehicles to ensure that

they are safe.

But as they test, it's the latest problem for autonomous vehicles.

A group of cruises, driverless cars, cause some major traffic congestion.

It becomes more and more clear to the people riding the cars and the other citizens in

the city that they are flawed.

A 21st century problem for San Francisco police now going viral.

What happens when you pull over a driverless car in a traffic stop?

That they do make mistakes.

More driverless cars came to an abrupt and extended stop all within the same hour last

night.

They're kind of crazy.

They backed up traffic.

That they can gum up traffic.

It's a driverless cruise car inexplicably straddling two lanes, mid-merge, stopping just inches

away from the side.

That they can cause accidents.

The company's a cruise car stopped unexpectedly near the site of a mass shooting in San Francisco's

mission district.

That they can cause injuries.

In May, one driverless car even hit and killed a dog.

All of this comes to a head with a public hearing earlier this month in California where the

future of these companies in this city will be decided.

The question on the table is, can they operate in the city like an Uber or a Lyft only without

drivers behind the wheel?

This decision is even bigger than that.

If these companies don't get approval in San Francisco, a flagship of their operations,

what happens in other cities across the country?

In a sense, this is a meeting where the future of the driverless car is at stake.

Absolutely.

We'll be right back.

Okay, set the scene for us at this meeting in San Francisco, at which nothing short

of the future of the driverless car may be on the line.

This is a meeting where four state regulators are going to decide the future of two different

companies, cruise, which is owned by General Motors, and Waymo, which is owned by Google.

San Francisco is a particularly interesting place for this type of vote.

San Francisco's activism is very much a part of this city and has been for decades.

You're going to get people who do not hesitate to voice their opinions, their concerns over

this technology, but at the same time, this is the center of technological innovation in

the country and maybe the world.

You're going to get people who are equally adamant that this should happen and should

happen now.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the California Public Utilities Commission.

I'm calling this meeting.

Those two sides of San Francisco come together on August the 10th at this public hearing.

At today's meeting, the public will have the opportunity to make public comments either

in person or by telephone, where regulators are going to decide the future of this.

My name is Sage Kettemore, and I live in the Sunset District.

I'm here today to encourage the commission to approve Waymo's application.

My top concern is safety.

You get a group who are all for Waymo and Cruz starting paid rides immediately.

I'm keenly aware that my biggest risk when biking is that I may be taken out by a distracted

human driver.

This ranges from bicyclers.

This is pumpkin.

She is a guide dog.

She guides me.

I am totally blind.

To people with disabilities, medical professionals.

I lost a family member to a traffic accident that was caught by a person who just fell asleep

in a car.

And all sorts of other reasons for why these cars should be allowed on the roads immediately.

Every single day without self-driving cars, 10 Californians are killed, about 100 Americans.

Another 200 Californians, 2,000 Americans, are injured.

And there are literally millions who cannot drive and are unnecessarily prevented from

going where they need to go to live their best life.

Every day matters.

Please approve the expansion of self-driving cars without delay.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's not like above all, they're making an argument around safety.

Safety is the prime argument, but there are other arguments.

My name is Sean Durkin.

I am a rider in driverless vehicles.

As a gender non-conforming person, I experienced ride-shared drivers who have left me on the

side of the street, refused to open their vehicle.

This technology does not discriminate against people in the way that a human driver would.

A taxi driver might pass someone up on the street.

An electric autonomous vehicle ride ensures that I don't have to worry about comments,

harassment, or worse, physical assault regarding my ethnicity, gender presentation, or sexuality

from human drivers.

And then there are people who stood up and just gave the classic Silicon Valley justification.

One can build a future by prioritizing safety above everything else.

Technological progress has to happen.

We can always add regulation later, but we can't make up for the lost time.

If we hold these companies back now, this technology will be built somewhere else.

Please vote yes.

Thank you.

Your poodle be damned.

Right.

Exactly.

Thank you, commissioners.

My name is Michael Smith, and I'm the technical co-founder of a successful startup here in

San Francisco, and I strongly support tech when it's useful, safe, and actually works.

And of course, there are just as many arguments on the other side.

The robotaxis, I want to point out though, the curtain do not meet that criteria and

should not be expanded at this time.

People who argue that this is not as safe as human drivers.

They have caused over 600 incidences and interfered with emergency services.

That it's going to prevent fire trucks and police cars from getting to where they need

to go.

Hello.

Good afternoon, commissioners.

My name is Rosine Busini.

I am an Uber and a Lyft driver for over seven years.

People also argued, as they often argue, as new technology is rising up.

This self-driving taxi is going to take away jobs away from families.

This will take away existing jobs.

It's going to take a job away from people like me.

I'm a single mom.

Uber drivers who now earn their living driving around the city will be replaced by driverless

cars.

Sometimes I wonder, do you all just hate people?

But we're people.

We're supposed to be taking care of other people.

And these are jobs.

And you know what?

It's going to be your jobs next.

So take that into consideration.

And you get all sorts of people showing up.

Jesus Christ.

Here we are again, in San Francisco, about to have four people make a decision on whether

or not the city is going to be pimped out by yet another couple of large tech companies

who are just angry at the technology industry.

This process reminds me of an old Twilight Zone episode where you have this normal, happy

little town, everybody going out and bound their business and wholesome and all.

And then the camera pulls back and you see it's like a giant ant farm.

That anger has been building for many years in San Francisco.

And there's some big hulking spider-like being behind it sort of chuckling and saying, I think

they're almost ready to eat now.

As tech workers take over the city, really change the fabric of the city and the cost

of the city.

And the cost of the city.

And some people are just fed up and this is an outlet for them to voice their anger.

A car has to have a driver in it.

It's insane not to have a driver in a car.

I don't know why anybody can say that that's okay.

Right.

Because what could better embody the kind of disembodied power of tech and its money

and all that perhaps people don't like about that than literally a driverless car?

Sometimes it's hard to pin down technology and the changes it is making.

This is a physical technology in a physical place that is causing real chaos in the city.

Okay.

So all of these people testify, but ultimately, as you said, just four people are actually

going to vote.

So how does that vote actually go?

In a vote of three to one, the commission votes in favor of Waymo and Cruz to allow

paid driverless rides across San Francisco immediately.

And this is a sign that these companies can also move ahead across the country with their

ambitions.

And in that sense, they're opening the driverless Pandora's box.

So what happens after this vote?

We see inside this Pandora's box almost immediately.

Within a week, there are two accidents involving Cruz that really open people's eyes.

One of these Cruz cars does not properly recognize a construction zone and drives into wet cement.

Talk about a moment that can be easily shared over and over again on social media.

And I assume it was.

It was indeed.

Now, there have been incidents like this for years in the city involving these cars,

but amidst this vote, there's added scrutiny to the technology and people start to notice

what is going on.

Right.

Or what's going wrong?

Right.

After the cement incident, there's an accident involving a fire truck in San Francisco where

a passenger in a Cruz vehicle is injured.

The very next day, the California DMV asked Cruz to cut its driverless car fleet in half.

Wow.

So they drop it from about 400 cars down to 200.

Well, that's interesting.

So the state commission votes to allow this technology to expand and then the DMV turns

around what, a couple of days a week or so later and says, pare it back.

What do you make of that?

Well, it shows what has been obvious for a long time is that these cars are flawed and

it's all about how much tolerance we as a society have for those flaws.

In this path towards this utopia where technology can do everything on its own and make the

world safer, how much chaos, how many accidents, how many injuries are okay as we reach for

that goal?

Well, I guess that's a good question.

How much tolerance should there be when it comes to driverless cars?

Because the incidents you just mentioned, the car going into the wet cement, surely

that's embarrassing.

But does it fundamentally change our understanding of the safety of these cars?

And isn't this kind of glitchiness the natural course of technological advancement?

There's a period of transition.

It's rough until eventually there's widespread adoption.

Or is the case of the driverless car special?

Is there something about taking a human being out of a two ton moving piece of metal that

means our tolerance is just going to be lower?

How do you think about that?

How should we think about it?

Our tolerance is absolutely going to be lower.

That's the way our minds are wired.

We as human beings trust human skill and ingenuity and we trust our own judgment to make the

right decision when lives are at stake.

Do we trust this technology, which in so many ways is not as adept as we are, that cannot

reason like we can, does not have the common sense that you and I really depend on and

depend on others to have.

It does not have that.

It has many other things that we do not.

It has more sensors.

It can process data faster in some ways, but it doesn't have that thing that makes us human.

Do we trust that thing that is so different from us to replace us?

That is a hard question for anyone to answer and that's what we're trying to answer here.

I think that raises the question that goes all the way back to the beginning of our conversation

into that moonshot that Google's co-founder Larry Page introduced.

The question being, is this a moonshot, the driverless car that any of us really need?

That is still an open question.

We don't know whether we really need this.

Even if we are sure of that, it's unclear whether the technology can satisfy that need.

We don't know yet if it's safer than a human driver.

We don't yet know if it's cheaper than a human driver, which it also needs to be.

What's going on in San Francisco is an opportunity to answer that question and to see whether

or not the need is there and whether or not the technology can satisfy that need.

And when are we going to know the answer?

I won't hold you to it.

It took 13 years to get to this point.

It's going to take years to get to that point where we can really answer that question.

Okay, thank you very much.

Thank you.

We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today.

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The central goal of the counter-offensive is to cut off Russian supply lines in Ukraine's

south, but U.S. military leaders say that Ukrainian commanders had divided troops and

firepower between Ukraine's south and east, effectively spreading them too thin.

And eight candidates have qualified for tonight's first Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee,

which will not feature the race's front-runner Donald Trump, who has refused to participate.

The candidates include Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, Trump's former Vice President

Mike Pence, former governors Chris Christie and Nikki Haley, Senator Tim Scott of South

Carolina, and the conservative businessman Vivek Ramoswamy.

The debate will begin at 9 p.m. Eastern.

Today's episode was produced by Ricky Nevetsky, Olivia Natt and Luke Vanderpuk, with help

from Shannon Lin and Jessica Chung.

It was edited by Devin Taylor, with help from Michael Benoit, Paige Cowatt, and Lisa Chow.

Contains original music by Marion Lazano, Rowan Yamisto, and Dan Powell, and was engineered

by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wunderle.

That's it for the Daily.

I'm Michael Babarro.

See you tomorrow.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.