Waymo is bringing its autonomous vehicles to New York City for (manually driven) mapping

The latest autonomous vehicle company to tackle the mean streets of New York City will be Waymo. The Google spinoff is bringing a handful of cars to the Big Apple, where they will start mapping the city streets using manually driven vehicles with two people riding inside.

Waymo cited New York’s vibrant street life, “unusual road geometries” (which is a nice way of saying utterly confusing), and the likelihood of heavy rain and snow as being among the reasons the company is eager to test there. Presumedly the company is also curious to see how its vehicles will react when down-on-their-luck street hustlers slap their hoods and shout “I’m walking here!”

Waymo won’t have more than five vehicles on the street at a time to start out, a...

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