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STATES CHRONICLE – Alphabet’s Waymo will celebrate one year of activity this December. The project used all available resources to test and improve its driverless technology with each passing day. However, the company is not ready yet to incorporate their fleet of vehicles into the daily traffic of humans.
Waymo Uses a Former Air Force Base as Testing Ground for Driverless Technology
Around 100 miles away from Waymo’s Mountain View headquarters is located an old Air Force base. The company employs the free tracks of this territory dubbed as Castle to test its driverless minivans on a daily basis.
At the moment, the technology is comprehensive enough to allow the car to properly function on the streets of a real city. However, it is now entirely up to the technology to learn how to react in numerous different situations.
In real life, the traffic is subjected to an endless series of human errors. For instance, a cyclist can pop a wheelie at any given point in front of a car. A man miscalculates that he has enough time to cross streets irregularly.
A driverless car should be capable of same reaction human drivers have when noticing a mistake on the road. At the moment, Alphabet is investing large funds into teaching its Waymo’s self-driving car technology how to overcome these cases of unpredictability.
Waymo Opened Its Gates to Media Representatives for the First Time
Therefore, the company takes full advantage of the Castle with its 91-acre area of streets and junctions before it is ready to face the real world. Waymo teams incorporated around 20,000 various traffic scenarios through which their driverless cars have to pass successfully.
As of recently, Alphabet organized the very first media event where it presented its driverless technology in action. This way, outsiders found out that there is a lot of progress Waymo has yet to achieve. Alphabet reassured the small crowd that it is going to allow its fleet to leave Castle only when they learn how to react in any kind of fortuit cases.
Waymo CEO John Krafcik disclosed no date after which consumers would get used to seeing cars on their streets without a driver. Instead, he mentioned that the company is working with unspecified cities to develop viable programs for their traffic where his technology plays main role.
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