Néstor Fantini used to tell his wife Cecilia that he would never get into a driverless vehicle, but he soon had to back down when his son surprisingly made him board a Wyamo robot taxi.
“Never! “Never!”, I told my wife.
“My son Jonathan and I were in Santa Monica when suddenly he told me, come on, let’s go have a coffee nearby.”
The arrival of the driverless robot taxi distracted him.
“I saw a car arrive, with my son’s initials JF on it, and I heard my son say to me, ‘Let’s go, Dad!’”
Suddenly, Néstor found himself inside the vehicle without a driver, in the back seat while a computer screen welcomed them aboard, and asked them for directions to begin the trip.
“It was a surprise. I didn’t have time to think. The car started, but I didn’t feel any insecurity.”
Néstor says everything happened so quickly that there was no room for nerves or fear.
“It was incredible. The car naturally moved forward, turned, and avoided any obstacle. “It was like a 15-block trip.”
The driverless vehicle parked to drop Néstor and his son Jonathan off at the cafeteria they were going to.
“When we finished, my son asked for another taxi without a driver, and again I didn’t feel any fear again.”
Nestor says that while his son was filming the experience, he informed him that there were cameras inside the car, which recorded images of everything that happened inside, but not the audio.
“The experience was wonderful; and in these moments of sadness, it is nice to see progress, and to see that we are in a world of transition.”
Néstor, 71, who emigrated as a political refugee from Argentina to Canada in the 1980s and later settled in Los Angeles, remembers traveling from Toronto to New York to buy his first computer.
“I was afraid of hitting a key the wrong way because I thought I would ruin the computer.”
He believes that it is normal to feel intimidated by the new technology that a driverless car represents, but he says that we have to overcome fear like he did when he least expected it.
“The possibility of an accident exists both in a vehicle with or without a driver. They can hit any of them. A few years ago, a driver who fell asleep hit me from behind when I was driving on Highway 210. I was miraculously saved.”
Néstor says that we have to dare to experiment with new technologies.
“A single robotaxi ride cost my son $14,” he says.
All you have to do is download the app Waymo One on the phone, and see if the service works where they live.
This month, Waymo opened its robotaxis service in Los Angeles, covering about 80 miles.
15 months ago, Waymo received approval from California regulators to start charging for rides. They initially launched operations in Phoenix in 2020, later in San Francisco and now in Los Angeles.
According to Waymo, they make 150,000 trips a week in their robotaxis.
Waymo robotaxis have traveled more than 20 million kilometers fully autonomously and have provided more than 2 million trips to passengers without suffering any serious accident that has caused their operations to stop.
“Now is an exciting time to welcome everyone in Los Angeles along for the ride,” Tekedra Mawakana, co-president of Waymo, said in an official statement.
“Our service has matured rapidly and our users are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving”
At the moment, Waymo vehicles are capable of traveling almost 80 square miles of Los Angeles County, between Santa Monica and downtown Los Angeles, only on streets, since they do not enter freeways, but it is expected that That geographic scope will expand even further in the near future.
Each vehicle is equipped with a set of cameras and radar sensors that together allow it to see approximately the length of three football fields in 360 degrees.