Waymo is paying 20 dollars to get its autonomous vehicles' doors closed

When we hear about robotaxis, or fully autonomous passenger-transport vehicles, we all assume these vehicles are capable of coming and going on their own, without any human intervention. This, however, is not entirely true. At least when it comes to the current first generation.

Waymo, an Alphabet subsidiary that also owns Google, has run into an unexpected problem in deploying its fleet of autonomous vehicles. Today the company mainly uses units of the Jaguar I-Pace, an electric model that, equipped with a solid arsenal of sensors, can take customers from one place to another like an Uber, but without a human driver on board.

The vehicle is indeed autonomous thanks to the software magic developed by Waymo itself, but its doors are not autonomous. Given that, for safety reasons, the vehicle does not move an inch if it detects that any door is not fully closed, this means that if some customers are careless and don’t close the door properly, all those vehicles will be stuck where they are, unable to move.

This is precisely what happened during the recent major blackout that affected the city of San Francisco, California. Some customers, fed up with waiting inside the vehicle after finding it had been left stranded by the lack of working traffic lights, did not hesitate to get out quickly, leaving the door improperly closed as a result of their anger.

I’ll give you 20 dollars if you go and close the door

To address this kind of situation, according to some North American media outlets, Waymo is hiring temporary workers whose sole job is to go wherever a vehicle is stuck with its door open and close it. In Los Angeles, for example, according to these outlets, the company is paying between 20 and 24 dollars per intervention through the Honk app, which is usually used by towing services.

As some of these workers have explained, it is quite common to have to go out because a customer left a Waymo without properly closing the door, or because the seatbelt got caught, which causes the vehicle to be stuck as well. To solve this problem, future Waymo models will include automated doors, but for now this is what there is, and hiring these temporary workers is the best solution the company has found.

Aside from the Jaguar I-Pace, which suffers from this problem and makes up a large part of Waymo’s fleet, the company is already testing some units of the IONIQ 5, which does not come with motorized doors as standard, but which Hyundai will indeed integrate them in all units destined for this purpose. Additionally, and in the longer term, Waymo plans to introduce robotaxis purpose-designed in collaboration with the Chinese manufacturer Zeekr. These models will include power sliding doors as standard, finally putting this problem to rest for good.

Finally, it’s worth noting that other Waymo competitors, such as Zoox, owned by Amazon, already operate in Las Vegas and San Francisco with vehicles developed specifically for passenger transport and equipped with automated electric doors.