During 2019 Waymo started operating what Brooks called a 'taxi service' in Chandler, Arizona, with no human driver in the vehicles.
Mostly true True in substance, wrong in a detail.
Factual: Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?
What would count as true or false
Judged as of 2020-01-01. True: Waymo records or reliable reporting show that during calendar 2019 Waymo was operating a ride-hailing service in the Chandler, Arizona area (Phoenix metro) with some rides carrying no human safety driver in the vehicle. Mostly true: driverless rides ran in 2019 but only for a limited group (e.g. employees or early riders), or the service area is described as Chandler although it covered nearby suburbs. Mostly false: the service ran in 2019 but always had a human safety driver aboard, or the driverless operation began clearly before or after 2019 rather than 'during 2019'. False: there was no Waymo taxi service in the Chandler area in 2019.
Set before the research began.
Evidence (4)
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E1 Driverless Cargo Delivery May Arrive Before Taxi Cabs IndustryWeek (Bloomberg licensed content) · 28 October 2019
“But in August, Waymo started offering rides with no human driver to a few hundred commuters who are part of a test group in Chandler.”
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E2 Hailing a driverless ride in a Waymo | TechCrunch TechCrunch · 1 November 2019
“The company’s driverless rides are currently free and only taking place in a geofenced area that includes parts of Chandler, Mesa and Tempe.”
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E3 Waymo One: A year of firsts Waymo · 5 December 2019
“continuing to responsibly scale our fully driverless operations in our early rider program and begin offering that experience to more of our riders.”
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E4 Chandler is the first city nationwide to partner with Waymo for autonomous vehicle ride-hailing program City of Chandler, Arizona · 24 June 2019
“The City of Chandler and Waymo have launched an autonomous vehicle ride-hailing program for select City employees.”
Reasoning
Bloomberg reporting dated October 2019 says that in August Waymo began offering rides with no human driver to a few hundred commuters in a Chandler test group (E1). TechCrunch reported in November 2019 that Waymo's driverless rides were free and only took place in a geofenced area that included parts of Chandler, Mesa and Tempe (E2). Waymo's own December 2019 post describes fully driverless operations within its early rider program (E3). Driverless rides did run in 2019, but only for a limited test group and over an area larger than Chandler, which matches the criteria for mostly true rather than true.
Cite this claim
Rodney Brooks, “During 2019 Waymo started operating what Brooks called a 'taxi service' in Chandler, Arizona, with no human driver in the vehicles.” (said 1 January 2020). Verdict: mostly true. Reliability API, claim c_4e3ef19ef3a2, method 0.1.0+c876030c, dataset release v1.1.2. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_4e3ef19ef3a2
This claim is in dataset release v1.1.2, with the same verdict.
Reply to this claim
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