Robotaxi

 

 

For years I’ve been wanting to take a ride in a robotaxi.  Fully autonomous.  That would be so cool.  I had an opportunity a couple years ago in Phoenix when I needed to take an uber from where I was, back to Matt’s house.  I got all the way to push the “go” button (on the phone app), and it refused the ride.  Matt’s house was just a little out of the test zone for robotaxis in the Phoenix area.  Soo close.

 

Fast forward to last weekend.  We downloaded Full Self Driving (Supervised) for the Tesla.  (Supervised means that the driver has to pay attention.).  We told it where we wanted to go and turned it loose.  It’s not fully autonomous driving, but stops, starts, turns, complicated intersections and traffic; it drove us door to door.  We navigated to another place.  Nice.  We told it to take us home.  It drove to the freeway onramp, merged, kept up with traffic, changed lanes whenever it needed to.  Not a left lane driver, always got back into the middle lane when it could.  That was amazing.  It wasn’t flawless.  It twitched and slowed down once when it didn’t really need to (or I wouldn’t have).  Minor.  Nothing dangerous.  And overall, a very smooth ride.

 

There are headlines any time there is a failure of autonomous driving, but there are also statistics demonstrating that a supervised self-driving car is right now less likely to get in an accident than a regular car with a human driver.  With that as a starting point, and me behind the wheel in case we need to override anything, I’ll take that.  Our own private Robotaxi.  (And it’s as easy to turn off as it is to turn on.  Any time we want to drive, we can.  And any time we want a robotaxi ride, it’s one click away.)