Google/Alphabet-owned Waymo has announced it has recently begun autonomous driving operations in London with trained specialists behind the wheel. This follows a period of manual driving that began in December.
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Waymo says this is the next step towards Waymo’s fully autonomous operations and fully autonomous passenger service later this year, pending government approval. This phase is part of the same rigorous, safety-first approach that has allowed Waymo to scale to 11 major cities in the US, where it provides over 500,000 fully autonomous rides every week.
Wamo says a team of trained, local professionals have driven the vehicles across tens of thousands of miles on London roads. The early mileage provides a baseline of context for the Waymo Driver, and has ‘enabled our team to train the Driver in a simulated London environment’.
This methodical approach ensures the Waymo Driver safely generalises to new environments, the company says.
It claims the data from 170 million fully autonomous miles driven in the US shows the Waymo Driver was involved in 92% fewer crashes that cause serious or fatal injuries compared to human drivers where we operate. Waymo claims: ‘At our current scale of over 4 million fully autonomous miles driven every week, our analysis suggests the Waymo Driver is preventing approximately one serious-injury crash every 8 days.’
