Have you ever wondered what it might feel like to be a self-driving car? To essentially put your fate into the hands of a computer a bunch of sensors? Turns out if you live in Phoenix, Arizona, you’ll be able to try that out for yourself because Alphabet’s Waymo has announced their plans to deploy 500 self-driving minivans in the city.
This will come in the form of a Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivan where it seems that not only will these minivans be used to gather self-driving data, but it will also be used to offer up rides to the public. According to John Krafcik, CEO of Waymo, “Over the course of this trial, we’ll be accepting hundreds of people with diverse backgrounds and transportation needs who want to ride in and give feedback about Waymo’s self-driving cars.”
“Rather than offering people one or two rides, the goal of this program is to give participants access to our fleet every day, at any time, to go anywhere within an area that’s about twice the size of San Francisco.” If you are interested in taking part in this trial, you’ll be able to do so by heading on over to Waymo’s website and signing up.
It will be an interesting experience and it should also help the company gather more feedback from the public in the future, which in turn will help further the development of the technology which last we checked, still has yet to become a mainstream feature as the kinks are still being worked out.
Filed in . Read more about Self-Driving Cars and Waymo.