cruise vs waymo

Waymo vs. Cruise: Which handles San Francisco streets better?

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Much ado has been made of San Francisco’s major autonomous vehicle companies, Google-owned Waymo and General Motors-backed Cruise. But as regulators prepare to vote on the unlimited expansion of robotaxis in San Francisco, only a fairly limited subset of residents can say they’ve actually taken a ride in a self-driving car. 

The Standard wanted to know how these two Bay Area-based autonomous vehicle companies fared against each other in a ride from the city’s southern neighborhoods up to the tip of Pacific Heights. From car design to the feel of the ride to the names of the vehicles themselves, the two self-driving rides couldn’t be any more different.

The Slowest Race on Earth

It’s one thing for a robotaxi to get through an empty street; it’s another to ask it to navigate construction, pedestrians, bicyclists and Muni trains. We wanted to test the robotaxis' ability to drive through multiple types of terrains and ordered routes from a Safeway in the Sunset—where construction has closed off lanes along Taraval Street—to Alta Plaza Park up in Pacific Heights. 

Cruise and Waymo offered very different routing options, with the Waymo choosing a more direct route along busier roadways and Cruise opting for a more circuitous route. 

The Standard’s ride with Cruise involved actually going in the opposite direction for a spell. It also started with a short walk. Instead of arriving at the Safeway, the Cruise app directed us to a pickup spot a couple blocks away on 19th Avenue. It pulled over on the busy street, leading to a few honks and dirty looks from frustrated drivers as we got situated in the vehicle. 

Instead of driving straight through Golden Gate Park, Cruise decided to go east on Lincoln Way before taking a strange southward sojourn on Stanyan Street, turning around in Cole Valley and heading back north. The full drive time from pickup to drop-off? Thirty-four minutes, nearly twice the time it would have taken in a personal vehicle. 

A Cruise spokesperson said vehicles attempt to “optimize for the safest route” based on factors like traffic, real-time feedback from the fleet, roadblocks and closures.

Riding in a Waymo felt almost like taking a normal Uber, awkward rideshare driver talk not included. It arrived right in front of the Safeway, took us on a slow and careful ride—not unlike driving with your grandmother—and felt surprisingly smooth for a robotaxi. The car made only one jerky turn and successfully passed a delivery truck stalled on Masonic Avenue. 

Waymo took The Standard on what appeared to be the most efficient driving route through congested roads such as 19th Avenue and Fulton Street along Golden Gate Park. 

"We are constantly evaluating and adjusting our dynamic routing to help riders safely and conveniently get where they’re going by balancing for road and traffic conditions," Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli said in a statement. 

All told, from pickup to drop-off, the Waymo took roughly 27 minutes to drive from Taraval Street to Alta Plaza Park—roughly seven minutes slower than an average car or Uber driver, but certainly faster than public transit. 

But if you’re truly in a pinch, right now Cruise might offer a faster overall experience. Waymo’s cars feel like they drive faster and along a more direct route, but there appear to be far fewer of them circulating in the city, meaning wait times can stretch well past a half hour. 

Cruise’s relative ubiquity throughout San Francisco means most riders can get a ride within 10 minutes. Waymo, by comparison, took 20 minutes to arrive at the Safeway on Taraval Street.

Cars, Apps, Hardware and Games 

At first glance, Cruise cars are most readily identifiable, with their blood orange stripes and clunky rooftop robotaxi gear. They also all have cutesy names, often related to food. This time, we were riding in Banana. 

That fun aesthetic also filters into the actual riding experience: On the back of the seats are tablets that offer options to change the music and the mood, and riders are offered a number of trivia games about the music, movies, sports and sights of San Francisco. So if you’re trying to answer a question about Mrs. Doubtfire while in a self-driving car, you only really have one option. 

Waymo cars offer a slightly sleeker experience: Set in a mid-sized Jaguar SUV, the all-white car—sans cutesy name—blends in slightly better with other cars on the road and relies on minimal branding. The inside experience is less tailored toward games and trivia, but riders can use one of two middle consoles to control music, routing options and customer service. The free face masks, hand sanitizer and safety pamphlet were a nice touch. 

Waymo also feels less like a fish bowl: Their car’s windows appear slightly more tinted than Cruise windshields—a welcome reprieve from all the glares and honking coming from AV-opposed San Franciscans. 

The robotaxis’ design feels like a reflection of their divergent marketing strategies: Waymo looks and feels like a luxury car; Cruise, with its more light-hearted naming strategy and entertainment options, appears to be marketed towards a younger clientele. 

All car transit options—Ubers, taxis, Waymos and Cruises—charge roughly the same price for a ride. But public transportation via BART or Muni will always provide a cheaper route. Better yet, walking on foot is free. 

What’s Next? 

Autonomous vehicles are quite possibly San Francisco’s most controversial new technology. In recent months, robotaxis have prompted public outrage by interrupting public emergencies, rolling over a fire hose during a house blaze and, in another instance, narrowly missing a light-rail car. Another killed a small dog . A cohort of anti-autonomous vehicle activists in San Francisco has even taken to placing traffic cones on the hoods of Cruise and Waymo robotaxis to literally stop their progress.

READ MORE: We Spoke to One of the Activists ‘Coning’ Cruise and Waymo Robotaxis in San Francisco

It’s not uncommon to see drivers trying to speed past cautious Cruise cars and slow-going Waymos; many will honk at AVs that stall on the roads, and one of our reporters narrowly avoided getting hit by an angry driver during a Cruise ride this week. 

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) has twice delayed a scheduled vote for unlimited expansion of Cruise and Waymo robotaxis in San Francisco amid growing opposition from local public officials and a rash of protests. The vote is currently slated for Aug. 10.

Editor's note: The description of the types of names Cruise gives to its cars has been clarified.

Kevin Truong can be reached at [email protected]

Filed Under

California regulators to decide the future of Cruise and Waymo

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is scheduled Thursday to make a high-stakes vote that will determine the commercial future for autonomous vehicle technology companies Cruise and Waymo — not to mention any other AV company with aspirations to launch commercial robotaxi services in the state.

Cruise and Waymo already offer limited commercial services in San Francisco.  If the CPUC grants Cruise and Waymo its final permits, the two companies will be able to charge for all rides, expand hourly operations and service area, and add an unlimited number of robotaxis to their fleets. 

California is a paradox for the AV industry. The state is a hub of tech activity with large concentrations of AV engineers located in and near the Bay Area, making it a natural place for development and testing. It gets tricky, however, once a company wants to deploy commercial operations in California, a state with some of the strictest autonomous vehicle regulation in the country.

A “no” vote would certainly delay, if not completely derail, Cruise’s and Waymo’s plan to launch commercial operations in the state. That could accelerate plans to expand in other cities like Phoenix, where Waymo has long operated and where Cruise is starting to push into .

The CPUC’s decision Thursday could also influence how other cities choose to regulate the growth of AVs.

Developing, testing and deploying AV tech isn’t cheap, and the only way to reach positive unit economics is to scale . Waymo has already had to pull back on operations this year after Alphabet issued a slew of layoffs in the first quarter. In July, the company shut down its self-driving trucks program to shift all its available resources to ride-hailing.

Back in May, the CPUC had all but granted the expansion permits , then delayed the final vote twice amid mounting opposition from city agencies and residents. Since AVs hit the streets of San Francisco, there have been numerous instances of vehicles malfunctioning and stopping in the middle of the street — referred to as “bricking” — blocking the flow of traffic, public transit and emergency responders. 

“This technology is still in development and is simply not ready to operate 24/7 in the city,” reads a statement from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). “Several minutes of driverless AV stalled on Muni rail tracks can cause several hours of disrupted transit service.”

Opponents to the expansion are urging caution and incremental growth. They’re also calling for more transparent data sharing from the AV companies. Today, AV companies are only required to report collisions and not the many incidents of bricking.

Cruise and Waymo argue that SF’s streets are unsafe and that AV technology can save lives. Cruise has said that, in simulation, its AVs were involved in 92% fewer collisions as the primary contributor and 54% fewer collisions overall when benchmarked against human drivers in comparable driving environments.

Getting into the data

Screenshot from CPUC meeting displaying AV incidents reported. Image Credits: SFFD, SFPD, SFMTA

During a meeting with the CPUC on Monday to discuss how AVs interact with first responders, Waymo said it has about 100 vehicles on the road at any given time, and about 250 on its equipment list. Cruise said it has roughly 300 vehicles operating at night and 100 during the daytime in San Francisco. 

The companies also shared data on instances in which someone from their team had to go and physically move a bricked AV, which they referred to as a “vehicle retrieval event” or VRE.

According to Cruise’s data, from January 1 to July 18, 2023, there were 177 VREs, and of those, 26 occurred when a passenger was in a vehicle. Only two VREs involved first responders, and the average resolution time was clocked at 14 minutes.

Waymo had a slightly better go of it, but that could be because the company has fewer vehicles on San Francisco’s roads. From January 1 to June 30, Waymo recorded 58 retrieval events and said it averages 10 minutes to retrieve bricked vehicles. 

City officials have said that VREs only make up a subset of the total number of unexpected stops but that it’s difficult to know exactly how many of such stops there have been because Cruise and Waymo don’t share their data, and any data they do share is redacted. 

“Given that we do not have actual data, what we have is information from reports that have been made by members of the public, by city employees, by firefighters, by transit operators,” said Julia Friedlander, senior manager of automated driving policy at the SFMTA, at Monday’s meeting with the CPUC. “And what we have seen is that things are not getting better. The monthly rate of incidents has been growing significantly over the course of 2023. You’ll see that June was the month with the highest number of incidents of all kinds.”

Between April 2022 and April 2023, the SFMTA collected a total of 261 incidents involving a Cruise vehicle and 85 incidents involving a Waymo vehicle. Those incidents include multiple types of driving behavior, including unexpected stops, erratic driving, issues with pickup and drop-off, and collisions. 

According to the San Francisco Police Department, between June 2022 and June 2023, Cruise vehicles were involved in 30 collisions, six of which resulted in injuries. Waymo vehicles had two collisions, one of which resulted in an injury. 

San Francisco Fire Department (SFFD) chief Jeanine Nicholson said Monday that the SFFD has recorded 55 reports of interference in 2023. Nicholson said these include things like unexpected stops in front of fire stations that prohibit emergency vehicles from responding to incidents in a timely manner and vehicles coming into scenes in an “unsafe and unpredictable manner.”

Blocking first responders and other risks

Screenshot from CPUC meeting displaying two instances when AVs did not respond to first responders. Image Credits: SFFD, SFPD, SFMTA

The SFFD has reported incidents of AVs’ rooftop sensors getting entangled with electrical wires after the cars ignored warning signs and yellow emergency tape; blocking firehouse driveways; sitting motionless on one-way streets and causing emergency vehicles to back up while responding to incidents; pulling up behind fire trucks with emergency lights on and interfering with firefighters unloading ladders; and entering an active fire scene and parking on top of a fire hose. 

During Monday’s meeting, Nicholson said that the SFFD and other city agencies had been told by Waymo and Cruise that if an AV bricks in an active emergency zone, first responders can get in touch with their customer service and AV field support teams, or they can get in and take over the vehicle to move it. 

“It is not the responsibility of my people to get in one of your vehicles and take it over,” Nicholson said. “It is the responsibility of the autonomous vehicle companies to not have them impact us in the first place . . . our folks cannot be paying attention to an autonomous vehicle when we’ve got ladders to throw.”

Cruise is working to get regulatory approval to deploy its purpose-built Origins, which are built without steering wheels or pedals. Those would be impossible for a first responder to move without towing them away.

“If we are blocked by an autonomous vehicle, a fire can double in size in a minute that could lead to more harm to the people in that building and to the housing overall, and my first responders will be going into a more advanced fire,” Nicholson continued. “It can also lead to worse outcomes on a medical level.”

Jarvis Murray, for-hire transportation administrator for the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT), pointed out Monday a range of other risks. Waymo has begun testing its AVs in Los Angeles but will require an additional permit from the CPUC to start a commercial service there.

In addition to blocking traffic and first responders, Murray said that LA agencies were concerned about technical failures like software glitches or sensor malfunctions leading to accidents or unexpected behavior, as well as cybersecurity threats. 

SF agencies ask CPUC to halt on 24/7 permit for now

City agencies have complained that they do not receive enough data from AV companies regarding unexpected stops. Image Credits: SFFD, SFPD, SFMTA

Most of the city agencies that spoke during Monday’s meeting with the CPUC agree that AV technology has the potential to save lives, improve traffic and reduce greenhouse gas emissions — just not quite yet. 

Before issuing any permits, the SFMTA argued that the CPUC should collect better and new AV data (including unexpected stops and duration of the stops) and create a performance evaluation framework and methods for analysis of the data. The CPUC could then authorize the incremental expansion of AV services using that framework and the data collected.

“In our view, two-way data information sharing would allow cities to note areas where these unexpected stops continuously occur, and this would allow us to evaluate the street design in that area,” said Murray of LADOT. “But without this type of data and information, cities are frankly powerless to assist the companies and the communities and alleviate these concerns.”

In the self-driving car competition, it's a 2-horse race between Cruise and Waymo — but the companies have differing objectives

• In the development of autonomous-mobility businesses, Cruise and Waymo are staking out clear leadership positions.
• Waymo announced a $2.25-billion funding round this week , and Cruise is already valued at nearly $20 billion.
• Cruise is also showing dramatic progress with the testing of its ride-sharing service in San Francisco, ahead of a commercial launch in the city.
• Cruise and Waymo are definitely in something of a two-horse race, but they have somewhat different business models and objectives.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories .

When California's Department of Motor Vehicles releases its yearly report of disengagements among the various permitted companies testing self-driving cars on roadways in the state, the general public often pays almost no attention, but the participants are often deeply invested with pointing out that it's unfair to use the data to compare efforts.

They're correct. Dozen of companies are testing autonomous technologies on California roadways, but some are racking up lots of miles, while some are barely doing anything at all. And different companies are pursuing different self-driving systems with multiple business models.

But two companies stand out quite clearly and, in the four years that California has required the players to record instances when autonomous vehicles had to disengage and be driven by a human, those companies have racked up miles that are outpacing everyone else.

The two clear leaders

Cruise is an independent company, based in San Francisco, that was acquired by General Motors in 2016 for about $1 billion all-in and is now, after several investment rounds, worth nearly $20 billion. GM is spending $1 billion annually to support it.

The former startup is on pace to have 2,000 employees and to commercialize a ride-sharing service in the coming years. The goal is to launch in San Francisco and optimize for the complicated, urban streetscape, on the reasonable assumption that any service should be where the riders are and that scaling Cruise to new markets should be focused on similarly dense cities.

In January, Cruise unveiled its Origin shuttle , a completely driverless vehicle on which it collaborated with GM and Honda. The Origin should follow a fleet of Cruise vehicles that will use autonomous Chevy Bolt EVs when the ride-hailing service launches.

Waymo is part of Alphabet and has been semi-independent since 2016. But for nearly a decade prior, it was known as the Google Car project and widely seen as the leader in the autonomous-mobility race. It's never been entire clear how much money Alphabet is spending on Waymo, but around $1 billion a year seems to be the price to play in the space. And this week, Waymo announced a $2.25-billion initial funding round , its first-ever outside investment. In 2018, Waymo launched a service, Waymo One, in Arizona.

Related stories

Cruise is being run by CEO Dan Ammann, who used to be President of GM, alongside CTO and cofounder Kyle Vogt. Waymo is also being piloted by an experienced automotive hand, John Krafcik, who ran Hyundai's North American business until 2013 and before that was a noted advocate of so-called "lean" manufacturing, now the dominant way that automobiles are built worldwide.

For 2019, Waymo amassed 1.45 autonomous miles in California , with a disengagement about every 13,000 miles. Cruise drove fewer miles — more than 831,000, nearly doubling its 2018 total — and in the second half of 2019, Cruise recorded roughly one disengagement every 20,000 miles , as  it increased the total miles it operated during the year.

In a series of tweets , Waymo noted that its California data is less important to the company than its Arizona results, as well as its progress in other places, such as Detroit. 

A Cruise source, meanwhile, pointed out the company's remarkable improvement in the California stats. This is critical, as Cruise intends to launch in San Francisco and has concentrated on dealing with the unique challenges of the urban setting.

Different business models

What's clear is that Waymo and Cruise are together showing the best progress. But don't forget that they have somewhat different business models. Cruise is all-in for shared, urban mobility, and Ammann has taken the bold step, for a former Detroit Big Three executive, of arguing that it's time to end the era of personal car ownership .

This week, Krafcik upped the ante on his position that Waymo is actually developing a versatile robot replacement for humans that could operate a variety of vehicle types, in numerous environments, delivering services ranging from ride-hailing to cargo transport.

"We're not a self-driving car company," he said. "We're building drivers."

Cruise and Waymo aren't alone. Tesla also insists that its Autopilot semi-self-driving system could enable full autonomy in the future. And companies such as ArgoAI, with investment from Ford and the VW Group, and Mobileye, now part of Intel, are looking to carve out businesses in deliveries, consumer applications, data management, and regulatory strategy.

But for now, all eyes are on Cruise and Waymo.

Watch: The world's largest cruise ship just landed in Miami — here's what it's like on board

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Autonomous vehicles —

Who will win the self-driving race here are eight possibilities, the state of the self-driving industry, from argo to zoox..

Timothy B. Lee - Apr 19, 2021 11:00 am UTC

The self-driving technology industry is in a strange state right now. A number of companies have been pouring millions of dollars into self-driving technology for years, and many of them have prototype self-driving vehicles that seem to work.

Yet I know of only one company—Waymo—that has launched a fully driverless commercial taxi service. And I only know of one company—Nuro—that's running a driverless commercial delivery service on public roads. You'd expect these companies to be capitalizing on their early leads by expanding rapidly, but neither seems to be doing that.

Meanwhile, several other players, including Cruise and Mobileye, say they're planning to launch large-scale commercial services by 2023. But plenty of self-driving companies have blown past self-imposed launch deadlines in the past, so it's not clear if that will actually happen.

In short, predicting what the next couple of years will bring is a challenge. So rather than offering a single prediction, here are eight: I've broken down the future into eight possible scenarios, each with a rough probability. Hopefully, breaking things down this way offers a good overview of the many different strategies being pursued by self-driving companies today. A decade from now, we'll be able to look back and say which companies or approaches were on the right track. For now, we can only guess.

1. Waymo wins (20 percent)

Waymo has been viewed as the self-driving industry's technology leader ever since it started as the Google self-driving car program more than a decade ago.

Further Reading

In the optimistic scenario, Waymo will maintain and expand its current lead. It will grow its current taxi service from one corner of the Phoenix metro area to all of Greater Phoenix, then steadily expand to other metro areas. Running the largest driverless taxi service could give Waymo access to more real-world driving data and operational experience than any other company has, which could allow it to further improve its software and maintain its lead.

So why do I only give Waymo a 20 percent chance? While Waymo still seems to be the technology leader, it hasn't capitalized on its lead as well as many people—apparently including Waymo's own leadership—expected a few years ago.

In 2018, Waymo announced deals to purchase "up to" 82,000 vehicles for use in its taxi fleet, suggesting the company thought it was on the verge of large-scale commercial launch. Yet today its fleet still numbers in the hundreds of vehicles.

I don't know why Waymo is moving slowly. Maybe its software has become excessively optimized for suburban Phoenix. Maybe its hardware or back-end support costs are too high to operate profitably. Maybe there are lingering safety or reliability concerns that Waymo wants to squash before expanding in a big way.

But whatever the issue, it may not go away any time soon. Which could leave an opening for other companies.

2. Another robotaxi company wins (25 percent)

Plenty of other companies are pursuing the same basic strategy as Waymo—building and operating a robotaxi fleet. These include:

• Cruise (owned by GM, Honda, and others)
• Argo (owned by Ford and Volkswagen)
• Motional (owned by Hyundai and auto-parts supplier Aptiv)
• Zoox (a startup that was recently acquired by Amazon)
• Aurora (a startup that recently acquired Uber's self-driving program)

If Waymo falters, I think it's most likely to be on business execution: Waymo continues to have industry-leading technology but fails to expand rapidly enough to take full advantage of it. Running a taxi service with a few hundred vehicles in one metro area (as Waymo is doing now) is a very different proposition from running a taxi service with hundreds of thousands of vehicles in dozens of cities.

Automaker-backed companies like Cruise, Argo, and Motional might have a greater ability to rapidly scale up production of self-driving vehicles. Amazon obviously has a lot of experience with large-scale logistical problems. And Aurora has a close relationship with Uber, which might provide Aurora with preferential access to its ride-hailing network.

3. Tesla (and Comma.ai) wins (5 percent)

This will make Tesla fans mad, but I think it's true: Tesla is a long shot.

The bullish case for Tesla is that it has access to a vast trove of real-world driving data harvested from customers' vehicles. If you think limited training data is a major bottleneck for improving self-driving algorithms, then this might be a significant advantage. Tesla CEO Elon Musk also has a bigger appetite for risk than most of the other companies working on self-driving technology. Musk's willingness to put unproven technology on public roads may accelerate Tesla's progress even as it creates a greater risk of fatal accidents.

On the other hand, Tesla has significant disadvantages. The company's business model—selling cars to end users—puts lidar sensors and high-density maps financially out of reach. Elon Musk has tried to spin this as a positive, calling lidar a "crutch." But the fact remains that almost every other company is using lidar and HD maps because it believes they are helpful.

More fundamentally, it's hard to watch videos of Tesla's software in action and conclude that Tesla is in a leading position—or even that it is catching up to the leaders. Tesla's unfortunately named "full self-driving beta" software routinely flubs scenarios  that Waymo's cars have been able to handle for years.

If I'm wrong and Tesla's strategy does succeed, that would be very good news for Comma.ai, a self-driving startup founded by legendary hacker George Hotz . Comma is building an open source self-driving system designed to run on a smartphone. Comma's strategy is to enable early adopters to modify their own cars to take steering inputs from Comma's smartphone-based software—and then use the data harvested from those early customers to further improve the software in much the same way as Tesla. Like Tesla, Comma has eschewed lidar, arguing that it can achieve adequate performance with smartphone-grade cameras.

Hotz's ultimate goal is for Comma to be the Android to Tesla's Apple. That is, if Tesla emerges as a clear leader in self-driving technology, other automakers will need to license their own self-driving technology to compete with Tesla. Hotz hopes that Comma's software will become an industry standard among automakers, much as Android is an industry standard for smartphones not made by Apple.

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Self-Driving Taxis Are Causing All Kinds of Trouble in San Francisco

They’ve blocked traffic, driven on the sidewalk, sped away from cops—and the city is powerless to stop them..

When transit systems experience delays, the reason usually isn’t very interesting: congested streets, medical emergencies, mechanical problems. But the cause of a recent holdup on San Francisco’s MUNI system at least had the virtue of being novel.

On Sept. 30 at around 11 p.m., an N Line streetcar ground to a halt at the intersection of Carl Street and Cole Street because an autonomous vehicle from Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, had halted on the streetcar tracks and wouldn’t budge. According to the city’s transportation department, the 140 passengers riding the N line that evening were stuck in place for seven minutes before a Cruise employee arrived and moved the driverless conveyance. (Cruise did not respond to questions about what happened that night.)

This incident, which was not reported in the media at the time, is one of many in which autonomous vehicles roaming San Francisco’s streets have disrupted the city’s transportation network. In April, a Cruise vehicle blocked a travel lane needed by a siren-blaring fire engine, delaying its arrival at a three-alarm fire. Last fall, dozens of self-driving cars from Google’s Waymo subsidiary drove daily into a quiet cul-de-sac before turning around, much to the frustration of nearby residents.

Because of California’s insufficient and outdated AV reporting requirements, many incidents like these have escaped both public attention and regulatory consequences. Facing minimal scrutiny, AV companies have little incentive to avoid mucking up the public right of way—or even keep city officials informed about what’s happening on their streets.

With Silicon Valley a few miles away, San Francisco has become the top urban location for AV testing and deployment. With California officials granting their first AV deployment permits allowing passenger service this year , the city now offers a preview of what’s to come in other places where self-driving companies are now fanning out, with expansions announced for Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Austin.

Based on San Francisco’s experience, residents and officials in those cities should brace for strange, disruptive, and dangerous happenings on their streets. And they should demand that state officials offer the protection that California is failing to provide.

After a decade of testing and hype, it suddenly felt this year as if self-driving cars were everywhere in San Francisco. While individuals—in California or anywhere else—can’t buy these vehicles for themselves, companies are competing to improve the technology and roll out taxi services that resemble ride hail. In San Francisco, Cruise and Waymo allow residents to request a ride on their app, summoning a driverless vehicle that brings them to their destination. (Waymo transports passengers using safety drivers who can intervene if something goes wrong; Cruise does not.) Joining Cruise and Waymo robotaxis on San Francisco streets are testing vehicles from a number of other AV companies.

Two California agencies decide which autonomous companies have permission to operate within the state. The Department of Motor Vehicles issues permits for the vehicle itself ( dozens of companies have obtained one), while the California Public Utilities Commission provides permits for passenger service. Earlier this year the CPUC issued Cruise and Waymo the state’s first robotaxi permits to transport paying passengers.

California requires that companies conducting AV testing submit information about collisions as well as “disengagements,” or moments when the autonomous system is forced to transfer driving responsibility to a human. The DMV publishes this information, along with each company’s total number of miles of autonomous driving on state roads. But AV executives —joined by some outside observers —have criticized disengagements as a deceptive metric, since it does not take into account the higher degree of difficulty navigating urban streets compared with interstates. Companies could also tinker with their disengagement data to seem safer than they are, something that the Chinese company AutoX has been accused of doing.

“It’s an open question whether or not disengagement data gives you anything useful,” said Billy Riggs, a professor at the University of San Francisco’s School of Management who has followed the state’s AV deployments closely. Even so, California’s regulatory focus on disengagements has powerfully shaped national media coverage of AV safety.

Strange as it may seem, California stops requiring that AV companies share disengagement data and collision locations as soon as they begin collecting passenger fares, as Waymo and Cruise now do. From that point forward, if an AV vehicle jeopardizes safety on the street—for instance, by causing a crash or blocking a transit line—the public won’t know unless the AV company chooses to publicize it (unlikely) or if a passerby reports the incident to 911 or posts about it on social media (unreliable).

Relaxing oversight for AVs with paying passengers might have seemed appropriate during the industry’s age of optimism several years ago, when policymakers could assume that companies would have “solved” autonomous driving before they started charging people for trips. If so, San Francisco’s experience shows that the reality is something else entirely.

Cities, for their part, play no defined role in the state’s AV regulatory structure, leaving them struggling to obtain information about AV-induced roadway blockages or even a list of companies deploying testing vehicles on their streets. Asked by email under what specific conditions Cruise notifies local leaders about an incident, spokesperson Hannah Lindow replied only that the company “maintains an open line of communication and meets regularly with city officials.”

Urban leaders anticipated these problems and tried to forestall them. In 2020 officials from Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego asked the CPUC “not [to] create a deployment program that would give participants blanket authority to operate a fared service anywhere in the State.” The CPUC rejected that request, which has hobbled cities’ ability to manage their streets.

There is an ominous precedent for this situation. When ride hail emerged a decade ago, Uber and Lyft lobbied, mostly successfully, for states rather than cities to oversee them. That preemption left urban leaders with few tools to control (or even monitor) ride hail, which researchers have found increases traffic congestion and reduces transit ridership . Early evidence suggests that an influx of AVs could create similar problems, but on a much larger scale.

It’s been less than a year since California granted its first AV deployment permits, but robotaxis have already caused a slew of problems in San Francisco. In April, a Cruise vehicle stopped by city police pulled over to the side of the street—and then promptly drove away from an officer who tried to look inside. (“Are you serious? How does that happen?” a baffled onlooker exclaimed.) In June, a phalanx of at least a dozen Cruise vehicles obstructed a city arterial . (“Oh no, they’re plotting,” someone quipped on Reddit.) According to city officials, 28 incidents involving Cruise were reported to 911 between May 29 and Sept. 5, including instances of vehicles driving on the sidewalk.

Cruise and other AV companies maintain a ”Critical Response Line” dedicated to handling emergencies, but no public data measure their responsiveness. Cruise does not include information about right-of-way blockages or response times in its self-written, 175-page “ safety report .” Asked how quickly Cruise responds to an emergency involving one of its vehicles, Lindow, the company spokesperson, said Cruise is “striving to do so in 10 minutes or less.” She did not reply when asked how often it achieves that benchmark.

Cruise seems to cause the lion’s share of San Francisco’s AV headaches, but other companies have created problems too, such as the Waymo vehicles that constantly drove into the dead-end terminus of 15 th Avenue, waking up the neighborhood.

Despite all the issues in San Francisco, California’s regulatory agencies have shown no signs of tightening or revising their oversight. Mark Rosekind, the former head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, who now helms the nonprofit California Mobility Center, said authorities “should evolve their regulatory approach to reflect the current state of technology. What data are needed to effectively identify safety issues? That’s a conversation state officials should be having with AV companies and other stakeholders.”

In September, two San Francisco transportation departments took the unusual step of bringing their concerns about AV deployments—and Cruise in particular—directly to the federal government in a 39-page letter submitted to the NHTSA. The letter was prompted by General Motors’ request that NHTSA exempt Cruise’s new AV vehicle, the Origin, from federal vehicle safety rules. Although the city officials stated they neither “support nor oppose” GM’s request, recent experiences have clearly given them pause. The letter highlighted Cruise’s patchy response to emergencies: “On one occasion on August 4, 2022, a City dispatcher placed four calls over six minutes [to Cruise’s emergency response line]; none of these calls were picked up.” Lindow did not respond when asked for comment on that allegation.

The National Association of City Transportation Officials, representing municipal transportation departments across North America, submitted its own letter to the NHTSA that flatly opposed GM’s request that the Cruise Origin receive an exemption from vehicle safety rules. (NHTSA has not yet made a decision.) Kate Fillin-Yeh, NACTO’s director of strategy, said urban transportation leaders nationwide are watching events unfold in San Francisco with growing concern. “I know that AV companies can make more money in cities because there is a density of people there,” she said, “but they’re unhelpful to the many people who rely on transit or walk.”

Indeed, beyond the wow factor of stepping inside a self-driving car, it’s unclear how exactly the introduction of robotaxis improves an urban transportation network. But the risks—including disruptions on public roadways, increased congestion, and reduced transit use—are very real.

Fillin-Yeh said her top request for federal and state policymakers is that they empower local leaders to monitor and manage AVs using their streets. “Cities need to be a part of these conversations about permitting and regulating AVs,” she said. “That isn’t always happening.”

In their letter to NHTSA, San Francisco officials proposed several ways to improve AV oversight. They suggested that NHTSA treat “travel lane failures that block roadways” as a key measure of AV readiness, adding that NHTSA should also quantify and publicize AV companies’ response times to vehicle emergencies.

Riggs, the University of San Francisco professor, agreed on the need to evaluate AV companies’ emergency response times, adding that governments must be especially careful to protect so-called vulnerable road users. “We should be collecting autonomous vehicles’ near-misses with pedestrians and cyclists,” he said.

In an interview, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency director Jeffrey Tumlin insisted that his city’s goals do not conflict with those of AV companies. “It’s in the interest of both the city and the AV industry to minimize impacts to transit and emergency response time,” he said. “But the AV industry doesn’t work if all the vehicles are stuck in traffic congestion. And the industry doesn’t work if they lose all political support because they’re blocking transit and fire departments.”

Meanwhile, AV companies are turning their attention far beyond the Bay Area. Recent press releases have announced new AV deployments in cities across the West and Southwest. Waymo recently declared that it will begin operating in Los Angeles, and a Lyft/Motional partnership plans to launch there as well. (It already operate s in Las Vegas.) Cruise, meanwhile, has opened a waitlist for new service in Austin, Texas, and Phoenix, and chief operating officer Gil West told Reuters , “You’ll likely see us expand the number of markets in a large number [in 2023].” (Southwestern states like Nevada, Texas, and Arizona generally have more laissez-faire approaches toward AV regulation than California does.)

Problems resembling those in San Francisco are already surfacing elsewhere. In November Waymo announced that its robotaxi service was available in downtown Phoenix; less than 10 days later, a passenger tweeted that her autonomous ride there “was smooth sailing until it got stuck in the middle of an intersection.”

With the demise of Argo.ai , an AV company that had received billions in investment, remaining companies face growing pressure to showcase their deployment capabilities to antsy investors. Such competition can be healthy—if it doesn’t sacrifice societal goals around safety, equity, and a balanced transportation network.

But the experience of San Francisco suggests that it very well could, which would undermine support for AVs writ large. After all, it’s difficult to see why Americans should embrace robotaxi services that block intersections, delay transit service, and slow emergency response times. And it’s even harder to understand why any state would repeat California’s mistake of allowing AV companies to provide robotaxi service without collecting and sharing information about all crashes, roadway obstructions, and incident response times. At the federal level, Congress’ interest in restricting states’ few AV management tools would be a step in precisely the wrong direction.

Unfortunately, that now seems to be where autonomous-vehicle regulation is: stuck in an intersection, like that Waymo car in Phoenix, with no one in the driver’s seat.

Lucas Peilert provided research assistance.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate , New America , and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.

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Waymo vs. Cruise: More Robotaxi Data

Egil’s eye.

The California DMV requires AV companies to file reports when an AV is involved in a collision, and this includes everything — even a slight bumper incident. The data is available at the California DMV’s website .

Each collision report is a downloadable three–page PDF file. Each report includes a lot of data such as date, time, location, weather, lighting, and road conditions. A section on injuries/death and property damage is included. Details on the collision include movement before the collision, type of collision (head–on, sideswipe, etc.), roadway characteristics, AV damage, and information on other parties involved in the collision.

A one or two paragraph description of the collision history and outcome was the most useful part of each collision report.

The next table is a summary of the yearly collision data for 2015 through 2021 and a sum for the seven–year time period. Total collisions for all companies are included in the table along with Waymo’s and Cruise’s data. Waymo and Cruise’s share of total collisions are listed. The yearly AV miles driven adds perspectives on the yearly collision trends.

Waymo’s collision trends show improvements by year. As Waymo began testing in San Francisco in 2021, the number of collisions increased along with much higher AV miles travelled. The Cruise collision trend versus AV miles travelled also show improvements starting in 2018.

The number of collisions per million miles can be calculated from this data, but since most of the collisions are caused by other vehicles it may not be very useful.

The reports do not list who caused the collision, but there is enough data to make an assessment in the vast majority of incidents. It takes a lot of effort to compile and analyze the data, however.

To obtain some perspective, I looked at Waymo and Cruise collision reports for 2019, 2020, and 2021. The California DMV website has collision data for 2022 through early May 2022, which was also included. The next table is a summary based on my assessment of the collision faults from analyzing the collision reports — about 260 between Waymo and Cruise.

The table shows that the vast majority of the collisions are caused by other vehicles and road users. For Waymo, 79% of the AV collisions were the fault of other road users. It was even higher for Cruise with 87% of collisions caused by other road users.

Waymo had two collisions that looked like they were caused by the AV system—both were bumping into parked cars in a multi-point turnaround. Cruise had one collision that looked like it was the AV’s fault.

The AV safety drivers were at fault in 27 collisions for Waymo, which is 19% of Waymo collision reports. Cruise safety drivers were at fault in 14 cases, or 13% of Cruise collisions.

It is speculative to make any conclusions from this collision data — there simply is not enough data yet. For perspectives we can look at U.S. crash rates using 2019 data since it was a “normal” year for crash statistics. The U.S. crash rates increased in 2020 and 2021 due to aggressive and speedy drivers.

The NHTSA Traffic Safety Fact publication for 2019 shows the data below. NHTSA also calculated crash rates per 100 million vehicle miles travelled (VMT).

• 2019 VMT: 3.262 billion
• 2019 Total police reported crashes: 6,756 ⇒ Crashes per 100M VMT=208
• 2019 Fatality crashes: 32,244 (36,096 total fatalities) ⇒ Fatalities per 100M VMT=1.10
• 2019 Injury crashes: 1,916 (2,740K total injuries) ⇒ Injuries per 100M VMT=84
• 2019 Property–only crashes: 4,806 ⇒ Property crashes per 100M VMT=147

In 2020 and 2021, the U.S. fatality rate grew to 1.34 and 1.33 per 100M VMT, respectively.

California PUC Data

The characteristics of the AV miles in the quarterly data collected by the California PUC is the key for getting the permits for robotaxi service in California. Cruise and Waymo are the leaders and are likely to be the first to deploy such services in California, with San Francisco as the first area.

A previous column has California PUC data through November 2021 for other companies.

Eight companies have received drivered AV permits from PUC: Argo.ai, AutoX, Cruise, DeepRoute.ai, Pony.ai, Voyage Auto, Waymo, and Zoox. The permits for Pony.ai and Voyage have been suspended. Cruise is the only company that has received a driverless permit from the California PUC.

The California PUC is collecting AV usage data to track the use of electric vehicles and the efficiency of AV operations in terms distance before passenger pickup and the vehicle’s waiting time for passengers. The next table summarizes Waymo and Cruise data and the total for all companies. The 2022 data is only for January and February. The California PUC will report March–May data in early July 2022.

The California PUC data shows that Waymo has used the most AVs and reached 301 drivered AVs in February. Cruise peaked at 69 drivered AVs in 2021 and is switching to driverless AVs in 2022 with 19 in February 2022. It is likely that Waymo will receive a driverless AV permit in the near future.

Total AVs used by all permit holders were 104 in 2019 and 107 in 2020. This grew to 337 in 2021. Total AVs in 2022 was 320 in February 2022 but is likely to grow as other companies restart their testing after the pandemic.

Total miles driven

Regarding total AV miles, Waymo is again the overwhelming leader with over 2.7 million drivered miles from 2019 through February 2022. This gives Waymo over 95% of the drivered miles in the California PUC data. In 2019 and 2020, Waymo was driving in Palo Alto-Mountain View areas. In 2021, Waymo’s driving shifted to San Francisco.

Cruise has been driving in San Francisco starting in 2020. Its drivered milage is only 915 miles as it shifted to a driverless permit in November 2021. Total driverless AV miles were 3.8 thousand at end of February. Cruise is the only company with a driverless permit from the California PUC.

Since California is the U.S. leader in EV use, it is no surprise they want to have statistics on robotaxi EV usage. For all companies from 2019 to 2022, EV miles accounted for 70.1% or over 2.01 million miles. Waymo did not use EVs in 2019 and 2020 but was at 99% in 2021 and 2022. Cruise only used EVs in all of AV testing — drivered and driverless.

Idling time

All robotaxi companies want minimal idling time since it is one parameter that improves operational efficiency. Waymo accounted for 87.9% of all idling time or over 79 thousand hours.

The California PUC data has no measure for total hours of robotaxi operation. This makes it difficult to assess idling time. If we assume that the average speed of Waymo’s AVs was 15 mph, the driving time for Waymo’s 2.7 million miles would be 180 thousand hours. This gives an idling time plus driving time of nearly 260 thousand hours. With this average speed guess, idling time for Waymo is then 30% of total operational time, which seems on the high side.

AV miles to passenger pickup

This is another important robotaxi operational parameter. For all AV companies, the AV miles before passenger pickup was 133,540 miles, which is 4.7% of total miles. Waymo had 131,411 miles before passenger pickup or 4.86% of Waymo’s total miles from 2019 through February 2022.

AV passengers

Total passenger transport for all AV companies was nearly 85,476 from 2019 to February 2022. Waymo was dominant with 68,480 passengers or 80% of total.

Cruise carried 1,844 passengers including passengers from both drivered and driverless AVs. The driverless AVs accounted for over 75% of Cruise’s total passengers.

This column compares Waymo and Cruise’s AV testing in California as they are leading the parade to future robotaxi services with San Francisco being the likely first city to realize such services.

The California DMV requires reports of any collisions where AVs are involved. From 2015 through 2021, a total of 393 collision reports were filed for all companies that tested AVs in these seven years. Waymo reported 149 collisions while Cruise reported 167. The vast majority of these collision reports are caused by other vehicles or road users — not by the AVs.

A more detailed analysis of 260+ collision reports for 2019-2021 and part of 2022 was completed for Waymo and Cruise. By reading and analyzing these reports, the fault was assessed for each collision. Based on this analysis, it looked like the AVs could be blamed to have caused the collision in three of the 161 collision reports. A Waymo AV operating in AV mode accounted for two of the collisions while Cruise was at fault in one collision.

The AV safety drivers were at fault in 41 collisions — 27 for Waymo and 14 for Cruise. The remaining 217 collisions were caused by other vehicles and road users, which is 83% of total incidents.

It is difficult to draw conclusions from the collision data and easier to pose questions. What does it mean that Waymo and Cruise were at fault in an estimated 3 of 261 collision report? Can we calculate meaningful collision data per 100 million miles for Waymo and Cruise’s total AV miles? We need more data to answer these and other questions.

Waymo has been the dominant participant in the California PUC AV testing in terms of AVs used, miles driven, EV miles, and passengers. Waymo accounted for over 95% of AV miles driven, nearly 94% of EV miles, and over 80% of passengers transported. The next step for Waymo is to receive a driverless permit from the California PUC.

Cruise is the leader in driverless AV testing since it is the only company with a PUC driverless license. The next step for Cruise was to receive a PUC permit to charge customers for robotaxi services, which occurred on June 2, 2022.

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Egil Juliussen has 40 years of experience in high-tech and automotive industries. He joined VSI Labs in late 2022 as principal analyst. VSI offers a portal on ADAS-AV tech, companies and product ecosystems. VSI provides applied research via multiple vehicles with lidars, radars, cameras and software for testing, data acquisition and demonstrations. He co-founded TRG, as well as Future Computing. At IHS Markit, he focused on AVs and MaaS. He worked at Texas Instruments as a strategic and product planner for microprocessors and PCs. He received B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in EE from Purdue University. He is an IEEE life member.

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Robotaxis shift up a gear as Waymo starts new autonomous rides – and Tesla is close behind

Autonomous ride-hailing services are coming thick and fast

Although the notion of highly autonomous robotaxis has been around for a number of years now, the space is accelerating at a rapid rate – and now Alphabet subsidiary Waymo has revealed that it will offer paid rides in Los Angeles later this month.

Until now, Waymo has been offering free trips to users as it tests its completely driver-less systems, but last month it received regulatory approval for a paid service, according to NBC News . 

The company says it has accumulated over 50,000 users that occupy a waitlist to use the service. However, it also confirmed that it would begin with a fleet of just 50 cars running in a 63-square-mile area for Santa Monica to downtown L.A. 

Still, it's another big moment for robotaxis, with their move towards the mainstream being further bolstered by the news that Cruise, a GM subsidiary that was banned from testing in San Francisco when one of its vehicles ran over a pedestrian, is rekindling its operations.

Cruise laid off almost a quarter of its workforce following several negative incidents, but says that it plans to reboot human-supervised autonomous testing in Phoenix to allow its machine learning systems to improve and get safer with time.

Hyundai has also been operating highly autonomous versions of its popular Ioniq 5 model in Las Vegas for a number of years, even going so far as building a cutting-edge facility in Singapore to mass produce the technologically complex model.

Its work with autonomous specialist Motional has recently culminated in its Ioniq 5 passing a Class C License Exam in Las Vegas with flying colors. However, the test was simulated in a controlled environment, so the vehicle didn’t come away with a full license, but it added further credentials to the service as a whole.

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Currently partnering with Uber in Las Vegas, customers can hail a highly autonomous Hyundai Ioniq 5 and cruise the strip, but a human driver is sat in a safety seat to take over when required.

Tesla wants in on the autonomous taxi action

Earlier this week, Elon Musk announced that he will be unveiling the Tesla Robotaxi on August 8 , adding no further details to the simple post made on X (formerly Twitter).

The announcement followed rumors circulated by news outlet Reuters that Tesla had ditched plans for its more affordable Model 2 EV in favor of pursuing the Robotaxi project. This was quickly dismissed by Musk, but he took the opportunity to jump on the hype by confirming those Robotaxi rumors.

Tesla has long said that it sees a future where high levels of autonomy would allow its customers to create revenue from their vehicles when not in use, which is 96 per cent of the time if research from the RAC Foundation is to be believed.

This utopian vision might be some way off, but Musk revealed on his social media platform X that Tesla is on track to spend more than $10 billion on computing, storage, and networking solutions used to train the model for Tesla's Full Self-Driving software. That’s no chump change.

What’s more, Musk has suggested that Tesla is able to develop and produce its own silicon chips , rather than relying on Tier 1 suppliers, if it needed to.

Everything points towards the fact that Tesla is pushing its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems to the next level, despite its numerous setbacks , further fueling reports that the Californian company is not content with conquering the EV market, but is now hell-bent on shaking up the ride-hailing industry, too.

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Months after a high profile accident, Cruise returns to Phoenix, but only for mapping

If you're in the Phoenix area, you might start noticing Cruise vehicles again. Starting as early as today, Cruise plans to begin mapping the streets and gathering road information again, just six months after an accident halted the fleet. For now though, someone will be behind the wheel: Cruise is disengaging its cars' self-driving systems and letting humans drive. The company announced  its return to the roads today, but didn't specify when driverless operations would begin.

In October 2023, a vehicle from General Motors company Cruise hit and dragged a pedestrian who was crossing the street in San Francisco. When California lawmakers decided Cruise didn't behave honestly during the initial investigation, they suspended the company's license in the state. Cruise voluntarily announced a recall for the vehicle's software, shut down the rest of the company's operations, accepted the resignation of co-founder Kyle Vogt, dismissed nine other executives, and hired a new chief safety officer.

Also: For the first time, Waymo self-driving cars are delivering Uber Eats orders

Before the accident, Cruise had driverless cars in San Francisco, Houston, Phoenix, Austin, Dallas, and Miami.

Cruise wasn't cruising without issue though. The company was also under investigation, since December 2022 , for repeated hard braking, which resulted in a collision, and for instances where Cruise vehicles would become immobilized on the road.

In addition to Phoenix, Cruise has been in talks with more than 20 major metropolitan areas, Bloomberg reported today . Phoenix was the obvious place to start though, given the company had already run vehicles there, it's home to a number of Cruise employees, and city officials were open to the idea of the cars coming back.

"Looking to the next chapter," today's announcement reads, "our goal is to resume driverless operations. As we continue working to rebuild trust and determine the city where we will scale driverless, we also remain focused on continuing to improve our performance and overall safety approach."

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Waymo will launch paid robotaxi service in Los Angeles on Wednesday

Tech startup Waymo said Tuesday that it would begin offering paid robotaxi rides in Los Angeles beginning Wednesday, as the nation’s experiment with self-driving car technology picks up steam. 

Waymo, a spinoff of Google, had announced details for its service in Los Angeles in January as it sought state regulatory approval and local support. Within the last year, Waymo has offered free "tour" rides in Los Angeles, and last month, it received regulatory approval to expand to a paid service, despite pushback from the Teamsters union and the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. Waymo previewed the project in a blog post in 2022.

Waymo said Tuesday that more than 50,000 people were on its waitlist to use the service. The company did not say how many users it would allow to fully use the app starting Wednesday. Last month, the company said it was starting with a Los Angeles fleet of fewer than 50 cars covering a 63-square-mile area from Santa Monica to downtown L.A. Los Angeles County has a population of 9.7 million people. 

The service works similarly to other ride-hailing smartphone apps such as Flywheel, Lyft and Uber, except that Waymo’s vehicles have no human drivers present. Riders follow instructions on the app and through the vehicle’s sound system, though Waymo workers can assist remotely. 

Robotaxis are getting more buzz as the technology advances in fits and starts. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Friday that Tesla would reveal a robotaxi product in August, though he gave no details. Cruise, a General Motors subsidiary that paused its robotaxi service last year after one of its vehicles failed to detect a pedestrian underneath it, said Tuesday that it would reintroduce human-driven vehicles in select cities, including Phoenix, as a step back toward driverless operations. 

Various China-based tech startups are also testing self-driving cars on California roads, drawing scrutiny from lawmakers. 

But for now, Waymo’s only competition is traditional, human-driven car services. 

Waymo’s expansion to Los Angeles will bring autonomous for-profit taxis to the nation’s second-largest city — and to a city long synonymous with car travel. Waymo already operates commercial robotaxi services in San Francisco and Phoenix. 

Chris Ludwick, Waymo’s product management director, called the Los Angeles move a milestone. 

“The reception from Angelenos so far has been exceptional, and we look forward to welcoming more riders into our service over time,” he said in a statement. 

Waymo said it informed its test riders about the change Monday in an email, which someone also posted to Reddit. 

Robotaxis have faced criticism on multiple fronts, from the threat they pose to drivers’ jobs to the mistakes they’ve made blocking city buses or emergency vehicles. Under California law, driverless cars can’t be given traffic tickets, and they could make traffic congestion worse . 

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation said the Waymo expansion was happening too soon, without enough local oversight of autonomous vehicle operations, but in an order last month state officials said that those concerns were unfounded. 

Supporters of robotaxis have countered that human drivers have a terrible safety record , with traffic deaths topping 40,000 a year in the U.S. Waymo has not reported a death or serious injury from its technology, and Waymo vehicles appear to be generally more observant of traffic laws than human drivers are, according to journalists who have ridden in them. 

In San Francisco, the futuristic nature of driverless vehicles has become a tourist attraction. 

Opponents of autonomous taxi expansions, including the Teamsters, have vowed to slow down the growth of companies such as Waymo. A bill pending in the California Senate would give cities and counties authority over robotaxi services — a power that currently resides with state government agencies. A hearing on that bill is scheduled for next week. 

David Ingram covers tech for NBC News.

Tesla's bet on robotaxis is a long way from paying off

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Mike Spector is a correspondent at Reuters covering corporate crises that span bankruptcy, mass tort litigation and government investigations. He was the first to expose Johnson and Johnson’s plan to offload into bankruptcy lawsuits alleging its iconic Baby Powder caused cancer. He later revealed in an investigative series how J&J and other businesses and nonprofits use the bankruptcy system to escape liability for lawsuits over deadly products and sexual abuse while avoiding filing for Chapter 11 themselves. Mike has also contributed to an award-winning Reuters series on pervasive secrecy in American courts that covers up evidence of deadly products. Mike previously worked at The Wall Street Journal, where he covered bankruptcy and private equity on the paper’s mergers and acquisitions team, and also the automotive industry. He has been part of award-winning teams that covered the government-brokered rescue and bankruptcy of General Motors; insider trading and related bankruptcy debt-trading issues; and emerging concerns with Tesla’s self-driving car technology. He has a master’s degree from Columbia University’s journalism school and an undergraduate degree from Johns Hopkins University.

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Whether you want a weekend getaway or to max out your vacation days, there’s a cruise for that.

Cruise lines offer itineraries ranging from a few days to monthslong . But there are more differences between short and long sailings than just the amount of time guests spend on board. The length of a cruise can help dictate the types of ports passengers visit, the kind of ship they’re sailing on and even the general vibe on board.

“It's important to walk our guests through and for cruisers to think about, what's the experience that they're trying to have,” said Jamie Margolis, owner of Moms at Sea Travel, a Dream Vacations franchise. “So, we try to tease out that information, like, ‘What's your vacation style?’ ”

What can guests expect from short cruises?

Cruises can be divided into those shorter or longer than a week, according to Jared Feldman, owner of travel agency Jafeldma Travel. “So, anything less than that is really considered a short cruise,” he said.

Those around three nights long are often aimed at new-to-cruise guests “who aren’t really ready to commit to seven days but really want to quote-unquote test the waters, let's say – to see if cruising is right for them,” he added.

Those sailings typically feature just one port and a sea day and often visit tried-and-true cruise destinations. Travelers sailing from South Florida ports like Miami and Fort Lauderdale will likely visit Nassau in the Bahamas or one of many cruise line private islands , for example. While those sailing from Galveston, Texas, can expect to stop in Cozumel.

Margolis called three-and-four-night voyages a “great intro to cruising,” albeit with more limited itinerary choices. “Is their dream to go to Saint Kitts? They're probably not going to find that on a short sailing,” she said.

Shorter cruises may also lend themselves more to a party atmosphere and be less kid-friendly. But Margolis noted that’s not unique to cruising. “I mean, it's the nature of travel that short weekends can be celebratory,” she said.

And with diverse onboard offerings – from ship-within-a-ship concepts to kids clubs – passengers can often carve out their own experience.

Cruise lines have new offerings in that shorter category. Celebrity Cruises is launching its first regular weekend itineraries in the Caribbean this month, and Royal Caribbean International’s Utopia of the Seas will offer three-and-four-night sailings when it debuts in July.

What can guests expect from long cruises?

Feldman said any sailing over seven days could be considered a “longer cruise.” Those can range from around 10 days to more than six months. Royal Caribbean is operating a nine-month world cruise to more than 60 countries.

While short cruises “can feel like a bit of a whirlwind,” according to Margolis, longer itineraries offer more time to explore a greater variety of ports. They may feature less-visited destinations such as Aruba and Curaçao and often take place on smaller, older vessels (though ships are refurbished regularly).

That’s partly due to the limitations in places they stop. “Some of the ports … cannot really accommodate this large ship hardware,” Feldman said. “So, you need a smaller-size ship to navigate in and out of these ports.”

The onboard demographic also tends to skew older on those cruises since retired passengers typically have more free time, and travelers with kids are often beholden to school schedules.

If you want a middle ground, though, Margolis said a seven-night cruise “really takes you through what I think is, like, the whole cruise cycle.”

"You get on, you get acclimated, you find all the different amenities, and then you're able to … truly relax, disconnect, unwind,” she said. ‘And then you know, midweek, you start getting your luggage tags, and you go through that mental process of accepting that you're going to have to get off in a couple of days and go back to work.”

At that length, it's also easier to tack on a bit of extra time on the front or back end of the sailing to explore on their own, Feldman added.

Are short or long sailings cheaper?

Because short sailings frequently take place on larger ships, they are “very attractively priced” to help fill the cabins. But that doesn’t mean they’ll always be cheaper than a longer cruise.

A cruise with more stops will have higher port fees, but passengers may book longer itineraries further out and get better fares.

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“Most times, you're not going to book a three-to-four-night sailing 12 to 18 months in advance,” said Feldman. “You're going to book that much closer in.”

The ship’s age also plays a role in how it’s priced, with shiny new vessels commanding higher rates . “So, there's a lot of different variables in play that kind of dictate where you're going to come out ahead or how much your cruise is ultimately going to cost based on those factors,” said Feldman.

Nathan Diller is a consumer travel reporter for USA TODAY based in Nashville. You can reach him at [email protected].

Posted Apr 10, 2024

At 8:55 PM UTC

The Google-spinoff has started charging for rides in its autonomous vehicles in Los Angeles , marking its third such city to do so (after Phoenix and San Francisco). The usual caveats apply about limited number of vehicles, waiting lists, and a service area that doesn’t cover the entire city. Will these driverless cars make a difference in a city notorious for its traffic?

[ NBC News ]

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