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Waymo, the leader in autonomous driving technology, has created the world’s smartest unmanned vehicle.

It is also considered to be Alphabet the biggest financial opportunity outside of Google, part < A href="http://www.donews.com/news/detail/1/3057765.html">Wall Street analysts even gave a future valuation of more than $200 billion.

But Waymo may underestimate the role of “people.”

Waymo at the main test site in Phoenix, Arizona Severe manual shortages, exposed to officials, Waymo staff, and the general public.

According to CNBC Field Visit, Arizona officials said that although the city has specifically remodeled some streets, parking lots, and police Emergency vehicle warnings were set up in the fire department, but the public still raised a lot of angry protests against the unmanned vehicles.

To be on the safe side, the Waymo unmanned car limits speed and is much slower than a human driver. However, the public pointed out that these vehicles seriously hindered traffic.

So they forced the vehicle off the road and threw stones at the drone. Writer Dan Albert talks about Waymo on the road:

It behaves like a 15-year-old child who wants to test a driver’s license, not a mature “driver.”

In addition, the relevant legal agreements are incomplete, and the various jurisdictions are not uniform. The employees of the jurisdictions cannot handle many situations, and officials need to formulate more detailed provisions.

In addition, Waymo itself needs more staff.

The company has only 950 employees based on the exposed Waymo organizational structure in January this year. And 2/3 of them are engineers and technicians.

So Waymo has continued to expand the temporary team in order to equip every unmanned vehicle with a safe driver. Recently, a new position has been added: the temporary labor director is responsible for artificial control when the accident occurs.

After a while, a safety driver, Chris Ingle, was in the car, and the police thought that the vehicle was in violation of the rules but could not intercept the unmanned vehicle. The commanded unmanned vehicle cannot be identified in time and can only be stopped by the safety driver.

The original autonomous driving companies all hope to reduce the labor cost of manpower transportation through unmanned vehicles, but in fact, not only maintenance, car washing, oil change and other businesses need to be recruited, all-day back-office operations also need to recruit people because Waymo It has also been found that people still need a shopping experience brought by people rather than machines:

The interaction between people is an important part of transportation services, and customers need a complete end-to-end user experience when riding an unmanned vehicle.

Finally, it is the most fundamental passenger problem: Waymo needs more users to help them train unmanned vehicles.

The company has used the interaction of people and the feedback from Waymo One drivers to train the driving experience of self-driving cars. However, despite the built-in advanced driving simulator, more field driving experience is needed in more severe weather conditions such as rain, fog, and air pollution.The autonomous system may under these circumstances.

And after the autonomous car crash in Uber last March, people still couldn’t fully trust the unmanned car.

Arizona State University students are still protesting about self-driving cars on campus. A local young man said:

You just get into this “robot car” and it will be very strange. Because you never know what will happen next.

In addition, Waymo CEO Krafsik said in an interview:

Waymo takes about 10 years to become ubiquitous, in part because humans can’t give up their own cars.

So, getting more people’s support is also a major impediment to Waymo’s development.

In recent years, companies such as Uber, Tesla, and General Motors have poured into the battlefield of autonomous driving, analysts believe 2026 The market value of self-driving cars will reach $556.67 billion.

The dilemma of Waymo is now more of a frictional process.

After all, autonomous driving is not a fantasy-like future story, but a real future trend.

This is why Waymo has positioned self-driving cars as “a public utility that reduces security threats” because it can save the most The world’s 1.25 million people who died in traffic accidents.

The title map is from: Fast Company