In the largest metropolitan market for autonomous driving outside China, Waymo has announced plans to introduce its self-driving vehicles to Tokyo in earlier 2025, beating Chinese manufacturers to the limit and taking Tesla’s robot ad.
This past week the Alphabet ( Google ) subsidiary revealed a partnership with Nihon Kotsu, the top taxi and limousine service company in Tokyo, and GO, Japan’s most popular taxi app. The maintenance and maintenance of Waymo cars will be handled by Nihon Kotsu. GO provides easy-to-understand guidance in English.
Second, Nihon Kotsu owners will run Waymo’s cars mechanically to chart the key areas of the city – the heavily traveled and often visited districts of Shinjuku-ku, Shibuya-ku, Minato-ku, Chiyoda-ku, Shinagawa-ku and Koto-ku.
The automatic Jaguar I-PACE autonomous cars will then take their first street excursion outside the US.
Waymo boasts. The business goes on to explains:” The Waymo vehicle is our autonomous driving tech that always gets crazy, tired or distracted”, Waymo boasts. ” We prioritize health and are wary of our footprints every time we test the Waymo Driver in locations far from where we usually operate.” The business describes its process as follows:
First, we transport a little fleet of vehicles carrying the Waymo Driver to a new town. Testing warships are limited and are not accessible to the general public. The vehicles can start driving independently after the Waymo Driver has an understanding of the landscape. People specialists give our executive teams feedback on the driving experience during these trips and highlight novelnuances that may arise from operating in new areas.
Together, our engineering team can analyze the Waymo Driver’s efficiency in a virtual replica of the new location to determine how it generalizes. Our teams continue improving the Waymo Driver’s abilities and support experience using the new insights and learnings gained during this time.
Driving in dozens of different locations over the years has helped shape the capabilities and design of our detecting technology, enhance Waymo Driver’s efficiency in the cities where we now operate, and safely transfer our technologies to new locations.
Enjoy a picture of a Waymo vehicle moving through traffic here.  ,
Tokyo’s road map is quite complex and, like the British, the Chinese pull on the left-hand side of the road. This may require some adjusting. However, Waymo would be able to qualify its knowledge from Tokyo to London and other major cities, such as Delhi and Mumbai, where they drive left.
Waymo has a somewhat low injury rate, with about one incident resulting in harm per million miles of travelling, as noted by computer professor Timothy Lee.
In Waymo’s estimation, compared with the average human driver over 25 million miles of driving in Phoenix and San Francisco, the Waymo Driver had 81 % fewer airbag deployment crashes, 72 % fewer injury causing crashes and 57 % fewer police-reported crashes. So far, no fatalities have been reported.
But Waymo Driver does make mistakes. Last June, while on the way to pick up a passenger in Phoenix, a Waymo self-driving taxi crashed into a telephone pole. The company recalled all 672 autonomous vehicles it was using at the time for a software update, but no one was hurt. Additionally, 444 vehicles were earlier this year and 2 vehicles were recalled in December 2023 for software updates.
Waymo vehicles were involved in 17 crashes and five other instances of potential violations of traffic safety in the six months leading up to 2024. There were no injuries reported.
According to an analysis of US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ( NHTSA ) data made by Craft Law Firm, a total of , 3, 979 accidents , involving autonomous vehicles were reported between 2019 and June 17, 2024. After more than doubling to 1, 450 in 2022, the number dropped to 1, 353 in 2023 and was down to 473 in the first half of 2024, demonstrating that safety has improved while the number of autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles on the road, and the number of miles driven, has greatly increased.
In October 2024, Waymo reported that its self-driving taxis were providing more than 150, 000 paid rides per week– up from about 100, 000 in August and 50, 000 last May – over a total distance of more than one million miles.
Of the 3, 979 accidents reported to the NHTSA, Tesla accounted for 2, 146, Waymo for 415, GM for 219, Cruise for 187, Honda for 155, and Subaru, Toyota, Ford, BMW, Kia, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and some 40 other companies for the remainder. Cruise was sold to GM in 2016 and discontinued in December 2024. This was also a setback for Honda, which had collaborated with GM to create self-driving vehicles and had invested in Cruise.
According to a report from the iSeeCars website, Tesla has the highest fatal accident rate among US automakers, according to a study by the iSeeCars website. There is even a tesladeaths .com website, which says it “is a record of Tesla accidents that involved a driver, occupant, cyclist, motorcyclist, or pedestrian death, whether or not the Tesla or its driver were at fault”, with” as much related crash data as possible”. The website, which was updated on October 20, notes 51 fatalities related to Tesla Autopilot and two related to FSD ( Full Self-Driving ).
This is important because, as The Wall Street Journal reported in August,” Since 2021, Tesla has reported over 1, 200 crashes related to its driver assistance system called Autopilot to federal regulators”, and the NHTSA has “tied at least 14 fatalities to the tech]nology ]. However, because NHTSA’s reports are heavily redacted, it’s been difficult for the public to comprehend the significance of Autopilot in crashes. Important details like the crash narrative and even the precise date are omitted from public reports because Tesla views information about Autopilot as proprietary.
In the US, Waymo’s self-driving taxis are currently operating in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with commercial service in Austin, Atlanta and Miami scheduled to start in 2025. In Austin, a limited test service began in October.
Tesla’s much-hyped robotaxi, which it also calls Cybercab, probably won’t be on the road until late 2026 at the earliest. Elon Musk, CEO, announced the product’s release date in October, saying it would be “before 2027.” Cybercab has been driving Tesla’s stock price higher, but not much else. Furthermore, Tesla has been in Japan since 2014, but there are very few of its vehicles on the road.
A Japanese company called Turing is also developing autonomous driving software that is “equipped with human-like knowledge and decision-making capabilities” and uses neural networks to convert camera images directly into driving commands to enable a self-driving vehicle to travel anywhere and under any circumstances.
Turing is working on generative AI that “directly issues driving instructions from camera images… without using many sensors or high-precision maps.” He believes that “what is necessary for autonomous driving is not good eyes but a good brain. Its current biggest challenge appears to be catching up with and keeping up with Waymo.
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