Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Are Near: Meet the Teen Who Rides One Every Day
Alphabet is experimenting with prices and finalizing its business model before unleashing its autonomous fleet in Phoenix this year.
For the past year, Kyla Jackson has been one of the only teenagers in the world who gets a ride to high school from a robot.
When she’s ready to start her day, Kyla summons a self-driving car using the Waymo app on her phone. Five minutes later a Chrysler Pacifica run by the autonomous vehicle arm of Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., stops at her home in Chandler, Arizona. She slides open the door, fastens her seat belt, and hits a blue button above her head to set the car in motion. It’s a minivan covered in goofy-looking sensors, but it’s the coolest ride at her school.
The Jackson family, along with some 400 neighbors in their Phoenix suburb, are volunteers in an ongoing test of Waymo’s autonomous ride-hailing business, which is expected to launch for paying passengers in the area by the end of the year. The Jacksons, who Waymo made available for this story, have largely ditched their own cars and now use self-driving vehicles to go almost everywhere within the 100 square-mile operating area: track practice, grocery shopping, movies, the train station.
Kyla acts like a diva with a private chauffeur, laughs her mom, Samantha Jackson, in an interview in Chandler last week. Access to robotaxis has even managed to convince this 17-year-old to put off an American rite of passage: getting her driver’s license. As Kyla puts it, “What’s the point?”
All rides are free for volunteers, but the Waymo app recently started to show hypothetical prices. A view of the app by Bloomberg News offers the first indication of Waymo’s early experiments with pricing. A ride to Kyla’s nearby school shows up as $5, for example, while a longer 11.3-mile trip lists a cost of $19.15. That’s similar to the cost of a ride from Uber Technologies Inc. or Lyft Inc., and cheaper than a local taxi.
A Waymo spokesperson says the placeholder price is a way to solicit feedback from volunteers and “does not reflect the various pricing models under consideration.” It’s certainly got the Jackson family wondering how the service they’ve come to rely on will soon fit into their lives.
“People were like, ‘I don't know how you get in that. I couldn't trust a machine like that.’ It's so opposite to how I've come to think about it,” Samantha says of friends’ reaction to her family’s trust in driverless cars. “I can't think of a time that we've ever been honked at.”
continues at bloomberg.com |
