Waymo’s ambitious plans for high-speed taxis could be holding it back

Enlarge / A Voyage car at the Villages, a retirement community in Florida. (credit: Voyage)

In November 2017, Waymo announced that it would start taking drivers out of the driver’s seat of its prototype self-driving vehicles. A year later, Waymo still seems to be far away from completing that process.

In fact, last week the Information’s Amir Efrati reported that Waymo may actually have moved backward recently.

“Within the past month or so, due to concerns about safety, the Alphabet company put so-called safety drivers back behind the wheel of its most advanced prototypes, ending a year-long period in which those people generally sat in the passenger or back seat,” Efrati wrote.