“When machines begin to understand, reason and act in the real world… the ChatGPT moment for physical AI is here.” So said Jensen Huang in his at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. Robotaxis will be one of the first clear beneficiaries of this development, according to NVIDIA’s Chief Executive. As their numbers grow, expect the robotaxi war to intensify.
Travel to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix or a handful of other selected US cities and it is easy to hail a Waymo. is very pleasant too, as your author concluded when in California last September. Similarly, visitors to Shanghai and other urban centres in China can hop into a Baidu operated autonomous vehicle and travel easily to their destination. Both Waymo and Baidu plan to launch in London this year. It will be the first time to the two companies go head-to-head. US AI will be pitted against its Chinese counterpart.
London represents a new and exciting challenge for autonomous vehicles. Its streets are older, narrower and more crowded than those in America and China. Zebra crossings, which rarely crop up in San Francisco or Shanghai, represent another novel challenge. Many still need convincing about the safety of unmanned vehicles.
However, Waymo that its vehicles have now driven more than 127m miles cumulatively without human assistance. In this period, there were 90% fewer injury-causing crashes compared with a human driver over the same distance. Another suggests that while two-thirds of San Francisco residents opposed robotaxis when they launched in 2023, today, the same proportion of locals are in favour.
Expect to see more Waymos out and about in London (your author spotted his first on a test drive in Shepherd’s Bush at the weekend). They will be joined not just by Baidu’s Apollo Go fleet but by others too. Uber and Lyft both hope to launch services with (undisclosed) partners in London. Local start-up also plans to licence its autonomous vehicle technology. The foot is truly on the accelerator for the robotaxi industry. With their emergence, cities may gradually become reshaped too.