Is that a self-driving car you just spotted on a Kansas City street? Sort of
An odd new type of car has been spotted around Kansas City streets lately, looking like a white Toyota Prius with R2D2 bolted to the top.
Are these the latest version of the Street View cars that photograph cityscapes for Google Maps? Or have the self-driving vehicles that debuted over the past few years on the West Coast migrated further inland to KC?
It’s something between the two: a fleet of cars from Nuro, a Silicon Valley robotics company that develops autonomous vehicles for delivering food, groceries and packages.
Although the goal is to eventually bring self-driving cars to cities like Kansas City, these ones have human beings in the driver’s seat.
“The vehicles are for data collection and training, not autonomous transport,” a Nuro spokesperson said.
They’re part of the Nuro National Data Collection Initiative, which seeks to “build an AI model to power safe, autonomous driving across the US.” The three-month project has dispatched cars to the 54 largest metro areas in the U.S. in an effort to collect information about streets and highways and to fine-tune its behavior prediction algorithms.
Nuro does have delivery vehicles that operate autonomously in Texas (Houston) and California (Palo Alto and Mountain View).
“But in any state outside of Texas and California, a safety driver is needed to react if the car needs the driver to take over driving operation,” the spokesperson said.
A city official said that Kansas City has not been involved in the Nuro project. Though they are currently researching the technology, the city does not currently have an official stance on self-driving vehicles.
Another autonomous vehicle company, Waymo, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, is now active in Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco, where it functions as a ride-hailing service akin to Uber. Passengers can download the Waymo One app, order a car, and be ferried to their destination in one of the company’s “robotaxis.”
Robotaxi usage has been growing quickly in those cities in recent months. In May, Waymo reported 50,000 paid weekly rides. By August, it was 100,000. In October the company said it was logging 150,000 robotaxi rides per week.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety anticipates that there will be 4.5 million self-driving vehicles on U.S. roads by 2030.
