Waymo CEO John Krafcik, right, discusses the company's strategy at Forbes 30 Under 30 at the DetroitAlphabet Inc.
“From our perspective at Waymo, a Level 4 vehicle is a vehicle in which you can put a rider who doesn't have a driver’s license or vision and they could move from point A to point B,” Krafcik said. “If you need a driver’s license, you can’t call it self-driving.” He declined to identify specific companies for blurring the definition, but his comments come days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk made references to how soon the electric-car maker would roll out its long-touted Full Self Driving system that were both. Musk said during Tesla’s results call on October 23 that a “feature complete” version of the system could be ready as early as this year and that Tesla might have vehicles operating at that level in 2020, pending government regulations.
The SAE spectrum goes from Levels 0 to 5, from no automation to full automation, in which a human never needs to operate the vehicle and it can drive virtually anywhere. Waymo and other companies developing robotaxi and automated trucking systems target Level 4, in which the vehicle operates autonomously within a well-mapped, geofenced area. For Waymo, that area is limited to suburban Phoenix for now—with most of its Pacifica Hybrid minivans still showing up with a human safety driver.
Krafcik isn’t ready to say when will Waymo finally be able to offer rider-only all the time and scale up its commercial service.
Um...isn't that kind of the point of self-driving cars?
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Source: Forbes - 🏆 394. / 53 Read more »