The autonomous taxi operator Waymo appears to be aiming for the Canadian market, possibly eyeing Toronto as a new testing ground for its self-driving fleet.
But the California-based company may find it continues to face political and technological roadblocks — including the harsh reality of Canadian winters — as it seeks to expand north.
“I think there are several challenges, if you want to do this in Canada,” Krzysztof Czarnecki, a professor in the electric computer engineering department of the University of Waterloo, told CBC News.
“I can see this being tested, and I think it’s a good thing, it’s good to get this experience,” he said. “But it’s not something that, next year, in two years, you’re going to have robotaxis everywhere.”
While Waymo, owned by Google parent company Alphabet, did not respond to questions from CBC News, the Toronto mayor’s office confirms a recent visit.
According to Braman Thillainathan, a spokesperson for Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow, representatives from the robotaxi company came into their office recently to indicate they will be applying to the Ontario program that allows autonomous vehicles to conduct testing and demonstrations.
The move comes months after Waymo joined Toronto’s lobbyist registry.
Waymo’s fleet of all-electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles is already in 10 major U.S. metropolitan markets. The service operates much like Uber or Lyft, minus the driver. A user would download the app, create an account and enter a destination to be dropped off.
Waymo has also been lobbying the B.C. government to change regulations to allow it into the province. (Currently, that province prohibits the use of fully automated self-driving vehicles.)
The company has previously acknowledged that it has been “engaging with officials across Canada to advocate for legal frameworks that would allow it to bring their fully autonomous ride-hailing service to Canada.”
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A couple of weeks ago, Canadian autonomous trucking company, Waabi, raised $1 billion to expand its fleet of self-driving trucks and launch a robotaxi partnership with Uber. It’s one of the largest venture capital financings in Canadian history and Steven Waslander, the Director of the Robotics and AI Laboratory at the University of Toronto, says it’s a sign of things to come as driverless cars move closer to reality in Canada.
When driverless cars are allowed in Ontario
Ontario’s Ministry of Transportation would not confirm Waymo’s intentions to CBC News, saying only that the ministry meets with interested applicants and stakeholders “to clarify the program’s rules and conditions and to discuss potential testing opportunities in the province.”
The autonomous vehicle testing program was launched ten years ago. Initially, the program required a driver in the seat but in 2019 it changed the requirements to allow for driverless vehicles, under certain conditions.
Those conditions include that the company behind the driverless vehicle must be able to monitor and control the vehicle if required, be able to bring the automated vehicle to a safe stop if necessary and explain how a safe stop will be done.
There must also be signs on the automated vehicle clearly showing that the vehicle is a driverless automated vehicle being tested.
Czarnecki said that Waymo’s inclusion in the program “would probably take some time to put in place and would need a bit of a political process.”
Toronto has been the test site of automated vehicles before. Last summer, Magna International tested its self-driving delivery trucks in some Toronto neighbourhoods.
But the cars were “incapable of making right turns at red lights,” would have “frequent, abrupt stops,” malfunctioning turn signals, and would even shut down to reboot in the middle of traffic, according to a letter city staff sent to the province in October.
But perhaps a more significant challenge facing that fleet would be the weather-related issues of coming into Toronto, Czarnecki said.
That would include visibility issues with snowfall, slippery roads, and the impact such weather would have on dirtying its sensors, he said.
“Although they are testing and working on the winter problem, I think that’s still far out.”
How safe are robotaxis?
Waymo boasts that its technology never gets drunk, tired, or distracted and has a better safety record than human drivers. It claims that compared to an average human driver over the same distance in their operating cities, their data shows that Waymo had 92 per cent fewer serious injury or worse crashes.
“Well, they’re not perfect,” said Carmi Levy, a technology analyst and journalist based in London, Ont.
“Anyone who expects automated vehicles to have a zero accident rate, I think their expectations are a little bit unrealistic. We still see headlines where they get into accidents. There have still been injuries, there have still been fatalities.”
However, when comparing that data to human drivers, the self-driving vehicles do get into fewer accidents, and are safer, he said.
“They don’t remove the problems completely. However, the data shows they’re moving us very much in the right direction,” he said.
Czarnecki said he doesn’t believe Waymo has accumulated enough kilometres to say it actually saves lives. As well, some of the data collected comes from U.S. cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, and may not be applicable to Canadian streets.
He also noted that the company currently has about 3,000 robotaxis in the U.S compared to hundreds of millions of vehicles with human drivers in North America.
“So that’s a small number. That’s also why it’s really difficult to talk about big impacts on safety yet because it’s a small number,” he said.
But in the long term, he said, “this technology will be safer than humans.”
Concerns about taking jobs
However, beyond technical and weather hurdles, Waymo could also face political pushback because of the threat to jobs the new technology may pose.
Thillainathan, the press secretary for Chow, said the Toronto mayor’s priority is protecting jobs in the city and that any move toward autonomous vehicles must not put people out of work or undermine workers’ livelihoods.
“The mayor will not support Waymo if it costs jobs, drives down wages for other workers, or contributes to precarious work in our city,” he said in an email to CBC News. “Waymo must demonstrate this will not happen.”
Levy noted that going driverless would be a cost to employment for those working as taxi, Uber or other kind of drivers in the transportation industry.
“It is going to upend norms of employment, the way business gets done,” he said.
The saving grace, he said is that this is not a short term transition.
The cargo, trucking, taxi and rideshare industries have a very long runway to figure out what they are going to do as technology gradually encroaches on them, he said.
“We are not going to be autonomous tomorrow. We’re talking about pilot programs here. Not every vehicle is going to be replaced for decades to come.”
