捷豹 I-Pace 电动 SUV 是出租车，但无人坐在驾驶座上。
洛杉矶——Alphabet 旗下自动驾驶汽车部门 Waymo 于今年早些时候首次在旧金山街头提供自动驾驶拼车服务。目前，该公司正在扩张，最近在洛杉矶推出了这项服务。
Waymo 的捷豹 I-Pace 电动 SUV 可以像出租车一样行驶，只不过驾驶座上没有人。如果一切按计划进行，它就会使用摄像头、传感器甚至麦克风将乘客送至目的地，就像人类司机一样。
Waymo 商业化、规模化和基础设施高级总监安德鲁·查塔姆 (Andrew Chatham) 表示：“驾驶座后面根本没有人——事实上，汽车里通常根本没有人，它是开车去接人。”他在洛杉矶接受了 ABC Audio 的采访，该节目在著名的彼得森汽车博物馆举办了一场新展览，重点介绍了 Waymo 的故事。
“所以我们在车上使用了各种传感器。有摄像头、雷达和激光雷达——一种激光测距系统。我们收集所有这些信息，每秒多次 360 度环视周围，然后驾驶，”查塔姆说。
“很明显，它已经准备好上路了——我们从统计数据中看到，它比人类司机更安全，所以如果你对这些感到满意，那么你应该对 Waymo 也相当满意，”查塔姆说。“甚至更满意。”
但并非所有人都感到舒服。
“我们听说这些汽车在失去手机信号时会熄火，交通堵塞，它们不知道如何在更曲折的道路上行驶。阻碍了紧急车辆。此外，还会导致失业，”洛杉矶市议员雨果·索托·马丁内斯 (Hugo Soto-Martinez) 表示。
“所以据我所知，有些事情我们必须坚持到底，这件事就是其中之一，”他说。
今年夏天，凤凰城（该公司的运营所在地）的警察拦下了一辆 Waymo 汽车，原因是它在试图绕过施工区域时撞上了迎面而来的车辆。议员索托-马丁内斯表示，他不希望 Waymo 汽车出现在自己的街道上。
索托-马丁内斯说：“我们当选是为了给居民提供安全保障、解决交通问题和许多其他事情，这就是我们被选举的原因。”
Waymo 表示，凤凰城的事故是由于“施工标志不一致”造成的。
但无论喜欢与否，南加州大学电气与计算机工程专业教授、谷歌员工拉胡尔·贾恩 (Rahul Jain) 表示，自动驾驶汽车代表着未来。
“这是不可避免的，它会发生，”Jain 说，但他补充说，大规模采用自动驾驶技术可能还有很长的路要走。
他说：“二十年可能是正确的时间跨度，到那时，我们将看到这项技术的成本足够降低，并且也足够先进，以至于它将被用于人们可以购买的乘用车。”
即便如此，Jain 表示，这项技术目前对乘客来说是安全的，因此自动驾驶汽车公司的下一步可能是拆除汽车的方向盘。
“随着这项技术的发展，肯定会出现一些转变，你知道，人们需要一段时间才能适应，然后我们才能安心地接受没有方向盘的汽车。但我认为我们还没有到达那个地步，”贾恩说。
“当然，在地图上，车道是在这边，但根据其他人的驾驶方式以及雪地上的草皮位置，车道看起来确实在这边，”查塔姆说。“这就是汽车开始推理的事情，有了人工智能，汽车就会变得更加智能，知道我们到底想在哪里驾驶，才能像人类一样。”
但议员索托·马丁内斯还有另一个问题：无人驾驶出租车可能意味着人类失业。
“它现在肯定抢走了工作。我的意思是，自动驾驶汽车载着人们四处奔波，这会带来很多问题，”他说。“在我的社区，这些工作通常是由刚到这个国家的人做的。……如果这些工作要外包给一辆会带来所有这些安全问题的自动驾驶汽车，我对此有很大的疑虑。”
贾恩说，历史表明，技术总是会取代就业，而且就业岗位会随着时间而改变。
“最终劳动力市场会出现一些调整。人们会找到其他类型的工作，并开始从事比我猜想的开车更有趣的工作，”贾恩说。
查塔姆表示，虽然没有人驾驶汽车，但是有很多人在 Waymo 工作。
“Waymo 提供了很多工作岗位。我们确实雇佣了一些人来运营这项服务，有人负责运营仓库，有人负责办公室工作。我受雇于 Waymo，”查塔姆说。
“我认为，人们也很容易忘记，他们花了很多时间堵在路上，坐在方向盘前。而他们可以腾出这些时间，让人们更有效率。这就是人们生活中的时间。”他补充道。
2024 年 8 月 1 日，一辆 Waymo 的捷豹 I-Pace 自动驾驶汽车在洛杉矶停靠接载乘客。亚历克斯·斯通/ABC新闻
Waymo 已经开始研究他们的下一辆汽车的外观，这是一款由中国公司 Zeekr 设计的定制厢式汽车。
“基础车辆实际上是一个多功能平台。这是一款真正为高吞吐量出租车服务而打造的车辆。它非常舒适，”Chatham 说道。
请收听这个故事以及 ABC Audio 的新特别节目《On The Move》中的更多内容：
Waymo takes to the streets in more cities
The electric Jaguar I-Pace SUVs are taxis, but nobody's in the driver’s seat.
LOS ANGELES -- Waymo, the self-driving car division of Alphabet, first began offering its autonomous rideshare service on the streets of San Francisco earlier this year. Now the company is expanding, recently launching in Los Angeles.
Waymo’s electric Jaguar I-Pace SUVs operate as taxis, except there's nobody in the driver’s seat. Using cameras, sensors and even microphones, it ferries riders to their destinations – if all goes according to plan – just as a human driver would.
“There is nobody behind the driver’s seat at all -- in fact, often there’s nobody in the car at all, and it’s driving to pick somebody up,” says Andrew Chatham, senior director of commercialization, scale, and infrastructure at Waymo. He spoke with ABC Audio in LA for a new exhibit at the famed Petersen Automotive Museum highlighting the story of Waymo.
“So we use a variety of sensors on the car. There’s cameras, there’s radars and lidar -- which is a laser range finding system. We take all that information, we look 360 degrees around us, multiple times a second, and we drive,” says Chatham.
And Waymo claims driving in one of their cars with the computers doing the work – accelerating, braking, stopping, and changing lanes – is actually safer than driving with a human behind the wheel.
“It’s very clear that it is ready for the streets -- we’ve seen from statistics that it is safer than human drivers, so if you’re comfortable with those, you should be pretty comfortable with Waymo,” says Chatham. “Even more comfortable.”
But not everyone is comfortable.
“We’ve heard of these cars shutting down when they lose cell service, traffic being backed up, they don’t know how to maneuver through more, you know, winding roads. Blocking emergency vehicles. And also there’s an aspect of jobs being lost,” says Los Angeles City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez.
“So as far as I can tell, there’s some things where we just have to put our foot down and this is one of them,” he says.
This summer, police in Phoenix, where the company also operates, pulled over a Waymo vehicle for driving into oncoming traffic while trying to navigate around a construction area. That maneuver is why Councilmember Soto-Martinez says he doesn’t want them on his streets.
“We are elected to provide safety, to deal with transportation issues, and so many other things for our residents, that’s what we are voted for,” says Soto-Martinez.
Waymo said the incident in Phoenix happened due to "inconsistent construction signage."
But like it or not, self-driving cars are the future, according to Rahul Jain, a professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in electrical and computer engineering and works with Google.
“This is really inevitable, it’s going to happen,” says Jain, though he adds that wide-scale adoption of self-driving technology is likely a long way off.
“Twenty years might be the right timespan, when we see this technology reduce in cost enough, and also advanced sufficiently that it will be in passenger vehicles that people can buy,” he says.
Even still, Jain says the technology is currently safe for passengers, so much so that the next step for autonomous vehicle companies could be removing the vehicle’s steering wheel.
“There’s definitely going to be some transition as this technology evolves, you know, then it will be awhile before people become comfortable, and then we can feel comfortable with the steering wheel also missing. But I don’t think we’re there yet,” says Jain.
Chatham says, in general, his company’s technology is always learning. Already, the cars know to pull over when they detect the sound of a siren or flashing emergency lights. Next, he says, Waymo is tackling how autonomous vehicles behave in inclement weather conditions.
“Sure, on the map the lane is over here, but according to how everybody else is driving and where the divots are in the snow, it looks like the lane is really over here,” says Chatham. “And that’s something that the car starts to reason about and it’s getting more intelligent with AI about exactly where we want to drive to be like a human.”
But Councilmember Soto-Martinez has another issue: driverless taxis could mean a human is out of a job.
“It’s definitely taking jobs right now. I mean, there are autonomous vehicles driving folks around with the many issues,” he says. “In my community, those jobs are often done by people who just arrived in this country. … If that’s going to be outsourced to an autonomous vehicle that is gonna cause all these safety concerns, I have big issues with that.”
Jain says history would show technology always takes jobs, and that jobs change over time.
“Eventually there is some adjustment in the labor market. People find other kinds of jobs, and start to do more interesting jobs than I guess, driving cars around,” says Jain.
Chatham says while nobody is driving the cars, plenty of people are working at Waymo.
“Waymo’s provided a lot of jobs. We’ve do use several human beings to run the service, we have people operating the depots, we have people working in desk-based jobs. I’m employed by Waymo,” says Chatham.
“And I think it’s also easy to forget that people spend a lot of their time just sitting in traffic, beholden to the steering wheel that they’re sitting behind. And they can free up that time, and make people productive. That is time back in people’s lives,” he adds.
Waymo is already looking at what their next vehicle will look like, a custom built van-like vehicle designed by a Chinese firm called Zeekr.
“The base vehicle is really built as a versatile platform. This is really a vehicle that’s built to be a high thru-put taxi service. It’s very comfortable,” says Chatham.
Listen to this story and more on ABC Audio's new special, On The Move:
