You may have seen them driving the streets of D.C., complete with odd looking spinning towers on top and sensors on all four corners of the white electric Jaguar.
While these Waymo cars are testing their capabilities and mapping the city, data from the company shows some riders, especially women, are hoping they soon can hop aboard.
Waymo is a fully autonomous ride hailing service that you can call from an app on your phone. If the service is approved by D.C. officials, riders would be able to travel anywhere within the city using Waymo.
“The way that we get you there is without a human driver, and it is … we believe, the safest driver in the world right now,” said Megan Neese, the head of product and consumer research for Waymo.
According to data published by Waymo, its vehicles see 10 times fewer serious injury crashes, five times fewer crashes with air bag deployments and five times fewer injury related crashes.
The reported safety benefit is an advantage the driverless company is touting, and Neese said women, in particular, are responding.
“We’ve seen this both in qualitative research and in survey research, that women feel that Waymo improves their sense of personal safety and getting around,” Neese said. “We see a very significant difference between men and women in the way that they respond to this question.”
Neese said while Waymo has stellar crash safety numbers, most others such as Lyft and Uber are also very safe with low crash data.
She said Waymo offers a less stressful experience for women that may have had bad drivers in the past, drivers who made them feel uncomfortable or even those who assaulted them.
Cori Latham, an inventor and aerospace engineer who lives in Montgomery County, Maryland, told WTOP that she has heard many horror stories about ride hailing drivers and women, asking them to join the driver in the front seat and groping them while in the vehicle.
Latham recalled her college-aged daughter told her, “It’s been normalized.”
Though they are rare and new safety features have been launched, numerous sexual assaults incidents have been reported over the last few years during rides on these hailing apps.
What’s it like riding in a car with no driver?
Latham went viral on LinkedIn after posting about her recent experience with a Waymo while on a trip in Phoenix. She took the driverless car back to the airport, out of curiosity, and detailed her experience.
“I didn’t feel unsafe, but I was just noticing it definitely drove differently than I did,” Latham said.
She said the car did not brake when approaching a vehicle that was turning, like most drivers would, but it still did not come close to hitting the other car.
“Whatever the calculation was, it never had to brake,” she said.
She also detailed that large flattened cardboard boxes flew out of a recycling truck and into the car’s path along the way.
“If I had been driving, I know I would have slammed on the brakes … my heart rate would have gone up,” Latham said. “The Waymo did a very nice little smooth slow down move into the other lane, ran over some of the boxes, a few of the boxes hit us on the side, and then it just kind of slowly kept moving over to the side until it stopped completely.”
Latham said she was never stressed during the incident and felt completely safe. Afterward the car stood still for one minute and continued on its way.
Latham said when Waymo begins operating in D.C. she would begin using the service and would even be happy to pay a few extra dollars if it meant a safer ride.
But there are still things that giver her pause, such as if the car breaks down in the middle of the street and she is left alone in an unknown location.
She admitted that D.C. was a tough environment to drive in.
“I almost trust a Waymo better to react to the crazy drivers around us and the dynamic situation,” Latham said. “I mean, that’s what technology does better than humans. It has a faster reaction time. It has sensors that are processing at the same time.”
Waymo data shows support with female riders
Neese said Latham’s experience and comfort around the autonomous vehicle lines up with the company’s research. Men are early adopters to the new technology when they are lunched within a city, but once established women tend to trust the driverless vehicle.
“What we see is that 58% of women say that Waymo has improved their sense of personal safety and getting around, and 34% of men feel that Waymo has improved their safety of getting around,” Neese said.
Currently the District Department of Transportation is permitting testing of Waymo with a person inside ready to take the wheel as needed.
Ward 6 Council member Charles Allen said in a statement, “DDOT is well past a deadline for a report on what laws need to be updated to anticipate driverless vehicles, informed by the data from the ongoing testing. The Council will base our laws on that report’s technical expertise.”
The department’s director has said congressional budget are behind the delay.
“I don’t think D.C. residents want to see them rushed onto our streets until we have the right laws in place and know, not hope, that the technology will deliver the safety and opportunity we are hoping for,” Allen wrote.
Waymo is confident that the service will launch for riders sometime this year.
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