Robo cars hit new speed bump amid pandemic

The latest challenge for the autonomous vehicle industry: How to assure passengers that the car they are getting in is virus free, even if it doesn’t have a driver.

Widespread use of autonomous vehicles already had been delayed by a March 2018 fatal crash involving an Uber test vehicle in Tempe, Arizona, forcing the industry to pause to make sure its vehicles are safe.

Now it has to deal — just like other ride-hailing companies and traditional taxis — with passenger anxiety over getting into tight spaces with people who may have the virus, or after infected people who rode in the vehicles before them.

An executive with self-driving car company Waymo said Wednesday that the pandemic forced it to put its limited ride service in the Phoenix area on hold to make sure human backup drivers and passengers were safe.

The passenger-carrying service hasn’t resumed yet, but testing restarted on May 8. Some of the rides were shifted toward delivery, Patrick Cadariu, Waymo’s head of supply chain operations, said on a webinar.

Waymo, a unit of Google parent Alphabet Inc., has been running the service with selected riders since 2018, sometimes without human backup drivers. Waymo and outside supply companies are now focused on putting technologies in place to clean vehicles between rides, Cadariu said.

The technologies, which he did not identify, have been ready for the last few years, he said.

Waymo is looking at what to do between rides when there isn’t time to return to a depot for a full cleaning, Cadariu said.

“Those are the sort of questions that people are thinking through both at Waymo and outside of Waymo right now given how the pandemic has affected us and also our anxieties around germs,” he said.