2026-01-14
51 分钟第 126 季 第 1 集
It's December 2024 and in Phoenix, Arizona, Mike Johns is trapped inside a driverless taxi.
Johns Waymo has arrived at his destination, the airport terminal,
but instead of stopping to drop him off,
the vehicle keeps looping through the parking lot over and over.
The robo-taxi is now on its sixth lap of the lot, and Johns can't open the doors.
If he can't get out soon, he'll miss his flight.
The Waymo representative tells Johns to try using the stop command on the Waymo app.
I don't have an option to control the car.
Oh my gosh.
After several minutes, the representative finally finds a way to stop the ride.
John's bolts for the terminal shaken and vowing never to ride in a robo taxi again.
But in a growing number of US cities, passengers don't have this choice.
A tap in an app might summon a human driver or a car with no driver at all and leading this driverless revolution.
is Waymo, Google's 20-year quest to build not a car, but a driver.
Waymo says its vehicles have now driven more than 100 million autonomous miles.
That's the equivalent of traveling to the moon and back 200 times.
But this journey has cost Google's parent company Alphabet billions,
with profits still somewhere over the horizon.
And the competition, Tesla, Amazon Zooks, and China's Baidu,
is closing in fast, betting that speed, not caution, will win the race.