The Good, Bad and Annoying as Autonomous Vehicle Services Expand

KQED's Forum

KQED

News, Politics, News Commentary

4.2 • 726 Ratings

🗓️ 6 June 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s been almost a year since robotaxi companies Waymo and Cruise expanded their operations to offer fully driverless ride services in San Francisco. Testing human-free vehicles in urban environments has proven challenging, with incidents ranging from gaffs like a driverless car stumped by parade traffic to deep safety concerns that led GM to suspend Cruise’s autonomous operations last fall. After a wave of driverless hype, and criticism – where does the industry stand today? We’ll speak with a research engineer who has been studying the promise of autonomous vehicles for half a century, and an investigative reporter tracking the data and the blindspots of these robots on our roads. Guests: Bigad Shaban, senior investigative reporter, NBC Bay Area Steven Shladover, research engineer, Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California-Berkeley Philip Reinckens, senior vice president of commercialization and operations, Gatik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:44.6	From KQED.
1:00.8	From KQED. From KKWD in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
1:05.3	We're in a weird spot in the driverless car technology hype cycle.
1:12.9	I think I wrote my first story about this technology in 2012 when it began to make rapid strides alongside other forms of artificial intelligence. So by now, just about everyone is familiar with the idea of the technology,
1:19.1	and increasingly with the realities of these cars, which I see just about every day I come into
1:24.3	the station. So what have we learned about this particular vision of the
1:29.5	future? We'll talk about it right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.
1:51.2	There was a basic pitch for driverless cars back in the day, long before the technology was out of the shop and on the road.
1:58.0	And it went like this. Human drivers are fallible, prone to wandering attention
2:02.9	and limited by our perceptual systems, which is to say our eyes and ears. In theory, cars driven
2:10.1	by computers would never get tired, never lose focus, never check their text messages while
2:16.0	driving on the Bay Bridge, to this way of thinking
	...

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