The key to robotaxis is collecting a ton of data. Artificial intelligence (AI) needs images, videos, audio, text and other forms of data to train machine learning models. Robotaxis start with human drivers and once they have collected sufficient data, AI uses that training data to teach them to drive around by themselves.
For nearly three months now, San Francisco has been a testing ground for robotaxis — driverless ride-hailing vehicles that take you from one part of the city to another, the way cars operated by Grab or Gojek in Southeast Asia do with human drivers. While Phoenix, Arizona, has had robotaxis for almost a year, the arrival of driverless cabs in the tech capital of the world was seen as the ultimate test for the robots that drive you around town. So far, though, the experiment has turned out to be a hot mess.
Robotaxis have been talked about for years. Tesla Inc CEO Elon Musk first mentioned “converting” a huge fleet of his pioneering electric cars to full self-driving (FSD) capability “soon” way back in 2016. Ironically, rivals Alphabet’s subsidiary Waymo and General Motors subsidiary Cruise beat him to it.
