ISSUE 50 • ANDROID ADVISOR 11GOOGLE I/O 2018Waymo’s self-driving cars
will take passengers for real
Google’s Waymo self-driving car company sought to
show its safer side at the keynote. No doubt its rival
Uber’s self-driving technology failure, which led to
the death of a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, in March,
was top of mind.
CEO John Krafcik said Waymo has used Google’s
deep neural networks to reduce its pedestrian
detection error rate by 100X. That sounds great,
though by digging into the numbers, that error rate
started at 1 in 4, and therefore improved to about 1 in- We’ll see how those numbers work out in real life
when the company starts a driverless transportation
service in another Arizona city, Phoenix, later this year.
Waymo