TAKIN’ IT TO THE STREETS
HOP IN. YOUR DRIVERLESS CAR IS ALREADY HERE, THANKS TO THE VISIONARY ENGINEERS BEHIND A BOLD EXPERIMENT
The duo’s self-driving cars hit the road
ASOUR CHRYSLER PACIFICA minivan readies to make a left turn through a four-way intersection in Mountain View, California, it suddenly pauses. Across the intersection, a pickup truck creeps forward with ambiguous intent. Will it proceed? Make a right turn? Is the driver lost? Finally the truck drifts toward the curb, then comes to a stop. The hazard lights begin to blink. The Pacifica makes the turn.
Our Pacifica drives deliberately, cautiously, following the law to the letter. It drives the way you yourself probably did during your driver’s license exam. In the back seat, Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo’s chief technology officer and VP of engineering, an intense man of 40 whose speech bears a faint trace of his native Russia, looks perfectly calm. Waymo’s self-driving cars, after all, have now navigated some ten million miles in 25 cities. Which is extraordinary, considering how murky the world of traffic can be.
Dolgov, whose own Waymo car ferried him to work today, as it does most days, has been with the company from the beginning, back when it was known as Google’s self-driving car project. Two years ago, Google spun Waymo out into an independent company dedicated to developing and commercializing self-driving technology, though it hasn’t strayed far from its roots; it still shares its Mountain View headquarters with X, Google’s “moonshot factory.” And it has been the industry leader ever since it grew out of Stanford University’s experimental vehicle, nicknamed “Junior,” which took second place in DARPA’s 2007 Urban Challenge. That race was legendary for how disastrously the primitive autonomous vehicles of the country’s leading roboticists traversed the Mojave Desert. Back then, simple “geometric reasoning”—being able to stay in a lane—was a massive achievement. (Dolgov, then a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, was a member of Junior’s team.)
In the time since, Waymo’s cars have benefited from huge increases in onboard computing power and a sophisticated proprietary suite of sensors—radar, multiple cameras, three types of custom-designed lidar—most of which Waymo, now a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, builds itself. This comprehensive vision and sensing system allows Waymo “to see 360 degrees at all times,” Dolgov says—one area, he points out, twisting his neck over his shoulder, where Waymo cars have a clear advantage over humans. Last year Waymo added a high-resolution, long-range sensor that, it is said, can pick out a football helmet two football fields away, plus a short-range vision system to allow for uninterrupted surround viewing—“down, behind, and next to the vehicle”—at all times. And rather than simply outfitting old-fashioned cars with a hardware stack, as Waymo used to do, the technology is increasingly integrated on the assembly line with its host vehicles— mostly Chrysler Pacifica minivans and, soon, tens of thousands of Jaguar I-PACE electric SUVs that will be added to the company’s fleet in the coming years.
But the software side is where the biggest gains have been made, as Google’s advances in so-called “deep learning” have allowed self-driving technology to take a huge leap. Instead of trying to algorithmically encode every single instance of what might happen in the driving