While we talk about taxi drivers, they talk about driverless taxis…

Some of the engineers in Silicon Valley have spent the last 10 years writing code for driverless cars to deftly maneuver through the most complex streets of San Francisco, California, USA.

San Francisco has become the unofficial hub for self-driving cars. Cruise, owned by General Motor (GM), and Zoox, owned by Amazon, as well as Waymo, owned by Alphabet, have been testing autonomous vehicles in the city for years.

Eventually, San Francisco became one of the first cities to offer a driverless taxi experience.

Cruise, the autonomous vehicle company owned by General Motor, began serving the city with approximately 240 robotic taxis late last month.

This marks a step toward a broader commercial rollout of a long-promised autonomous alternative to ride-sharing services like Uber or Lyft.

Although driverless vehicle transportation is only available to the public at night and in certain parts of the city, it is planned to become more widespread throughout the city in the future.

ROOM NUMBERS

Cruise plans to put 1 million robotic taxis on the roads by 2030.

GM CEO Mary Barra said they expect Cruise to have business operations in the United States, the United Arab Emirates and Japan by 2025 and aim to generate $50 billion in annual revenue by 2030.

McKinsey’s research shows that these projections are very rosy. McKinsey predicts that by 2030, industry-wide global revenue from self-driving technology will be at most $25 billion. That’s half of what Cruise thinks he’ll earn on his own. McKinsey assumes that revenue will be between $170 billion and $230 billion over five years when the technology is fully ready.

ACTIONS INITIATED

Earlier this year, survey company YouGov conducted a survey of consumers in 18 countries and found that 42% of respondents were concerned about self-driving technology.

On the other hand, in San Francisco, the public began to protest alleging that autonomous taxis create traffic safety problems. The Safe Street Rebel group sabotages autonomous taxis with traffic cones.

Robots don’t fall asleep, get distracted, or get angry. They don’t drink, they don’t talk on the phone, and they don’t rush to drop off a passenger and pick up a new one. However, fewer people think that the expansion of self-driving cars in the US is a good idea than those who think it is a bad idea.

According to a study published last year by Pew Research, more than half of men and 72 percent of women said they would not ride in a driverless vehicle. Concerns about travel safety are at the heart of the emergence of this image.