Waymo's Next Big Challenge: Passengers and Other Silly Humans

Waymo has spent the better part of a decade figuring out how to get humans out of the driver’s seat. Now, with the news that it is about to launch a fully driverless ride-hailing service, comes the harder part: how to deal with the humans in the passengers’ seats.

Take me, for example. A few weeks ago, our family outing to Sunday brunch ended with an unplanned walk on the beach. It was a delightful time, complete with soggy, sandy clothes and shoes and sticky popsicles. It was not so delightful, however, for the car of the Uber driver who took us back to our hotel. Hopefully, for his next passenger’s sake, the driver had a vacuum cleaner in the trunk.

How will Waymo keep cars clean and fresh after sandy kids climb in, passengers smoke, late-night party-goers vomit, or couples get too frisky? That is just one of the many issues that Waymo will have to address as it transitions from solving the technical challenge of self-driving cars to taking on the logistical and operational complexity of running what amounts to a hospitality business on wheels.

Think of Waymo’s driverless ride-hailing service as a fleet of unattended mobile hotel rooms. Passengers will be like hotel guests. They’ll want clean, reasonably appointed rooms. They’ll want good customer experiences. And, they’ll want it at a reasonable price compared to alternatives. But, rather than reserving a room and going to the hotels, customers will want the hotel room to go to them on a moment's notice and deliver them to their destinations.

Waymo will have to provide this service with no on-property staff. No front-desk clerks will be on hand to check guest in or check them out. No housekeepers will turn over the rooms between guests. No security staff will keep guests safe and ensure they do not get too unruly, and so on.

And, rather than measuring room turnover in days, Waymo will have to do it many times a day.

These are functions that human drivers now serve but won’t be present to perform in Waymo’s self-driving fleet.

It is true that a short ride across town is usually a lot less complex than an overnight stay. But, as any parent can attest, even the shortest haul can become arbitrarily messy and unruly — especially when there is no adult supervision in the car.

There will also be unpredictable humans outside the car. Random jaywalkers, cyclists and impolite drivers will test the courtesy of driverless cars’ programming. The human drivers of other cars will continue to drive poorly. Pranksters will test whether cars can distinguish them from traffic cops and road crews. Thugs (and worse) might blockade passage by simply standing in front and behind cars, and so on.

None of these issues are insurmountable. Even though there will be no human driver to watch over things, the cars will have ample sensors and cameras to record any shenanigans that might happen. But, recording is not the same as preventing, cleaning or intervening in real time.

Cars will always be monitored to some extent—though privacy concerns will need to be weighed — and passengers (and the car) will have one-click emergency access to agents and controllers in remote call centers.

Driverless cars also have the ability to take themselves in for service — and the intelligence to mostly know when to do so. But, too much need to do so will put a big dent into the economics of a business that will depend on high utilization and low operating cost.

Certainly, Waymo will be paying rapt attention in the early going and trying to learn as fast as possible. Faster learning has long been Waymo’s competitive advantage. But, it remains to be seen how much attention can be paid as the service scales to the thousands, or even tens of thousands, of cars that are envisioned.

Waymo has signed a deal with Avis Car Rental to do cleaning and routine maintenance, and with Auto Nation to perform mechanical maintenance and repairs. It is thinking about the potential issues. But, neither Waymo nor any of its partners have experience with a short-clock-cycle, logistically intense, remotely serviced, consumer-based hospitality business such as this.

In fact, no one has. Yet.

And, therein lies the opportunity. The companies that solve this aspect of future mobility will unlock safer, more affordable transportation for millions. They will also have a head start on capturing the business value of doing so.

[Update: Just moments after this article was first posted, a driverless shuttle was launched in Las Vegas. It was struck just a few hours later by a truck. The legal fault was with the human driver of the truck. The design fault laid with the shuttle, I believe, because it was not prepared to deal with an all-too-common human frailty. Luckily, no one was hurt. The accident illustrates too well some of the issues raised in the article below. Read more about that here.]

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Chunka Mui is a futurist, keynote speaker, innovation advisor and best-selling author of four books on technology and innovation. This article is updated from one originally published at Forbes.