Friday, Dec. 27, 2024 | 2 a.m.
Among the steady stream of vehicles cruising the Las Vegas Strip, onlookers might notice a boxy car with seats facing each other and cameras mounted at each corner.
Take a closer look, though, and something else sets it apart: There is no driver.
Zoox announced in early November that the autonomous vehicle company would be testing its robotaxis on the Strip, preparing to one day allow its driverless cars to transport tourists and locals along the boulevard. They’ve been spotted this month in the Resort Corridor.
Richard Kelley, a senior engineer at UNR’s Nevada Center for Applied Research, said self-driving taxis were safer than cars with a human at the wheel.
Kelley said he preferred to take a robotaxi most of the time when he was somewhere like San Francisco or Phoenix, where the driverless vehicles have been more widely deployed.
“There are some risks, absolutely, but these companies that are doing these larger-scale deployments have demonstrated that there is a path forward that preserves safety and is probably more economical as well,” he said.
Robotaxis from Zoox have been traversing public roads in Las Vegas since June 2023, according to the company. In 2019, Nevada became the second state, after California, for Zoox to launch operations.
The company began testing its vehicles in Las Vegas around its headquarters in the southwest valley, deploying a fleet of Toyota Highlanders that mapped the area and gathered data on unique driving conditions.
The cars have gone out autonomously with safety drivers on board to prepare for the deployment of the robotaxi fleet.
This year, Zoox expanded to the Strip and some surrounding roads. Company officials noted the Strip was “full of complex driving scenarios, including more than eight lanes with multiple turning lanes, high speeds, heavy pedestrian traffic and large-scale intersections.”
Data collected by the robotaxis during the first few months on the Strip will be used to help “train” the fleet of vehicles until Zoox is ready to provide people with driverless rides.
The autonomous vehicle company will soon begin offering rides to employees’ families and friends, then move to other riders who will be able to try the service for free in early 2025, Zoox said in a news release.
The company didn’t respond directly to interview requests from the Sun but did respond in writing.
“We didn’t deploy our robotaxi in these environments until we met and exceeded key metrics necessary for its safe operation,” Jesse Levinson, co-founder and chief technology officer, said in a statement.
“Driving autonomously and expanding our geofencing in California and Nevada will provide invaluable learnings as we fine-tune our technology in preparation for commercial launch,” he said.
Kelley said that because of the weather and traffic conditions, Las Vegas was a great testing ground for autonomous vehicles.
Autonomous vehicles are like any other car, but they use sensors and one or more computers to evaluate the environment around them and navigate.
Kelley said autonomous vehicles used high-definition mapping, laser scanners, cameras and GPS technology. Sensors pick up everything on the road, such as painted lane lines.
Self-driving vehicles are constantly programmed to identify pedestrians, other cars, cyclists and traffic cones.
Autonomous vehicles aren’t without issues. In 2023, Cruise, an autonomous vehicle unit of General Motors, had its license revoked by the California Department of Motor Vehicles after the agency found the company’s driverless cars posed a danger to public safety.
Though the California DMV didn’t cite any specific reason for the suspension, it came shortly after a Cruise robotaxi ran over a pedestrian in San Francisco who had been hit by another human-driven vehicle.
The pedestrian was pinned under one of the robotaxi’s tires when it came to a stop, then was dragged roughly 20 feet when the car tried moving off the road.
Autonomous cars have also been shown to cause traffic jams, experience glitches during rides and even creep into dangerous areas like construction zones, according to a 2023 article in Wired magazine.
But a study published this summer in the scientific journal Nature Communications found accidents involving driverless vehicles “generally have a lower chance of occurring” than human-driven vehicles, except when turning and in low-visibility conditions.
Mohamed Abdel-Aty and Shengxuan Ding, researchers in transportation, electrical and automotive engineering and computer science at the University of Central Florida, analyzed six years of data from 2,100 autonomous vehicles and 35,133 human-driven cars.
They concluded that the most advanced driving systems decrease the possibilities of cars running off the road and getting into rear-end, head-on or lateral collisions from 20% to 50%.
“The introduction of Autonomous Vehicles (AV) technology has made the vision of a safe transportation system with effortless driving seem attainable,” Abtel-Aty and Ding said in the study. “It is anticipated that the automation of systems will significantly reduce the number of accidents, as human errors contribute up to 90% of accidents.”
But human-driven cars are still two to five times safer in turning conditions or times of low visibility, such as around dawn or dusk.
Kelley said while there had been issues with driverless vehicles, he had seen fewer incidents over the years, and the technology was “going to continue to improve.”
Erin Breen, director of UNLV’s Road Equity Alliance Project, said that she didn’t think autonomous vehicles would solve all of Southern Nevada’s issues with pedestrian collisions, but she still supports driverless cars.
The autonomous vehicles’ ability to detect pedestrians is quicker than a human’s reflexes, which could lead to fewer pedestrian accidents and deaths, she noted.
As of Nov. 30, there were 342 crashes involving pedestrians in Nevada this year, an almost 4% rise from the same time last year, according to the Nevada Office of Traffic Safety. The number of pedestrian deaths increased by 6%, from 99 in 2023 to 105 this year, with Clark County alone seeing a jump in pedestrian traffic fatalities of nearly 16%.
Though some collisions with pedestrians happen on the Strip, pedestrian bridges cut down on those types of accidents.
The state of Nevada has passed legislation to regulate autonomous vehicles, starting back in 2011 with Assembly Bill 511, which allowed the Nevada Department of Transportation to develop rules and regulations governing driverless cars.
Some of these rules require a human operator at the wheel of an autonomous vehicle if it’s being tested or operated on a highway, and that any crashes involving the vehicle that result in personal injury or property damage estimated to exceed $750 must be reported to the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles.
The Nevada Advisory Committee on Traffic Safety discussed at its Dec. 16 meeting establishing a working group on autonomous vehicles to research and make suggestions for regulations that will eventually be taken to the Nevada Legislature.
Breen said the group would probably begin meeting again in early 2025 and present its recommendations to the full committee for approval.
“I think autonomous vehicles are the future, I really do,” Breen said. “I think everybody sees lots of new things that are happening as needing some regulation … and this is another one of those things that needs some guidelines.”
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