Ready or Not, Driverless Cars Are Here

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 23 August 2023

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

After a closely watched vote, driverless cars, once a Silicon Valley fantasy, have become a 24-hour-a-day reality in San Francisco. Are autonomous vehicles an interesting and safe transportation alternative? Or are they a nuisance and a traffic-blocking disaster waiting to happen? Cade Metz, who covers technology for The Times, describes the unique challenges of coexisting with cars that drive themselves. Guest: Cade Metz, a technology correspondent for The New York Times.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times, I'm Mike Mabarro. This is the Daily.
0:11.0	Today, after a closely watched vote, driverless cars, once a Silicon Valley fantasy, have become
0:18.7	a 24-hour-a-day reality in San Francisco.
0:23.2	My colleague, Cade Mets, describes the unique challenges of co-existing with cars that drive themselves.
0:37.2	It's Wednesday, August 23rd.
0:44.2	Cade, we have invited you and our studio here in New York to tell us about what's happening in San Francisco,
0:49.2	which doesn't sound very efficient, but either as it may, San Francisco has become the capital of this grand experiment of driverless cars.
1:00.2	And I want you to just describe what it's like to live in San Francisco in that new reality.
1:06.2	As you walk through the streets, there are hundreds of these cars driving around almost constantly in most of the city.
1:15.2	Once you get out of the downtown area, the financial district, you cannot walk a block without seeing one of these cars.
1:23.2	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.
1:31.2	Hundreds of cars driving around with no one in the driver's seat. These cars are not hard to spot.
1:37.2	They're outfitted with all sorts of sensors designed to detect everything that's going on in the world around them.
1:45.2	These are big, sometimes trash can-sized sensors that spin.
1:51.2	And you can't get an image of some hybrid between a police car and a kid with braces.
1:57.2	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.
2:06.2	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, like, hail system.
2:19.2	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 on Uber.
2:31.2	The difference was it wouldn't pick me up exactly where I wanted it to pick me up.
2:37.2	It gave me a spot in an alleyway about a block and a half away where there's less traffic.
2:43.2	And eventually my car pulls up, I pull the app out again, and there's a little button on the app that says unlock.
2:52.2	Good to see you, Kate.
	...

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