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The story
Taxi-hailing app “GO,” Alphabet subsidiary Waymo, and Nihon Kotsu have agreed to a partnership to commercialize self-driving taxis in Tokyo. The three companies aim to launch Japan’s first fully driverless “Level 4” taxi service, with no driver on board, sometime in 2027. On 5ch, attention first focused on who would be liable if an accident occurred. Some posts explained that the operating company would pay damages first and then seek compensation from the manufacturer if a system defect were to blame, while others questioned why the rollout was starting in traffic-heavy Tokyo rather than a rural area.
Published 9/15 (Tue) 9:00 AM
Impress Watch
Taxi app “GO,” Alphabet subsidiary Waymo, and Nihon Kotsu have agreed to a strategic partnership to commercialize self-driving taxis in Tokyo. The three companies aim to launch Japan’s first fully driverless, Level 4 autonomous commercial taxi service in Tokyo sometime in 2027.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Read the original article here
What people said
Does someone even have to take responsibility in the first place?
Well, it'd be the taxi company, based on fault ratio — no different from now, is it?
Serious answer: it's the operating company (Nihon Kotsu, in this case).
If a driverless taxi kills a pedestrian, Nihon Kotsu pays damages first.
Then, if it turns out to be caused by a system flaw, the operator (Nihon Kotsu) apparently seeks compensation from the manufacturer (Waymo).
Unlike the US, Japan has mandatory auto liability insurance (jibaiseki), so a setup like this might actually work better here.
The city center has a lot of people, but the roads are well-maintained. In rural areas, it's the quality of the (human) drivers that's the problem.
Each vehicle costs a fortune, so you need a big city to offset that cost.
Starting in urban areas is a mistake. Heavy traffic means accidents will happen — people will die.
That'll spread public rejection of self-driving cars. If enough people oppose them, they'll never catch on.
Limit approval to rural areas — that's where this should start.
If someone you loved got killed, could you really just shrug it off as "bad luck, ha ha"?
The insurance company will pay out, and if self-driving lowers the overall accident rate compared to elderly drivers, it's a net plus for society as a whole.
Would you be satisfied if your loved one died and the human driver responsible got executed for it?
Japan could pull this off — just enshrine it as a "car god" or something (a nod to the Shinto custom of enshrining objects as deities).
If the system was working properly and the situation simply exceeded what it could handle, then it's nobody's fault — force majeure. Victims get compensated through insurance.
Because everyone kept dodging the issue with "Who's going to take responsibility if something happens?!"
Bureaucrats: "But the regulations…"
Out-of-touch old guard: "Who's going to take responsibility when there's an accident?!"
And that's how we ended up lapped by the rest of the world lol
Who's actually carrying the insurance here?
The taxi company
Probably the taxi company
It'll probably end up being the taxi company, and if the accident rate turns out lower than with human drivers, the premiums the taxi company pays could even go down.
Speeding
Falling asleep at the wheel
Driving the wrong way down the road
Mixing up the gas and brake pedals
Tailgating/road rage
Elderly people having to surrender their licenses
Seriously, nothing but upside here
Drunk driving, driving without a license — those will fade away too
It'd be a shame if elderly people no longer had to give up their licenses
Realistically impossible, what with aviation law and all
Drone taxis might actually spread faster than self-driving cars — they could stand in for ferries on remote islands without a bridge
Once humanoid robots can handle loading and unloading too, logistics won't need a single human being at all
Wonderful. A labor-short country like Japan should be first in line to adopt this
Tokyo is full of streets like this the moment you step off the main roads… is this really going to work?
Places like Suginami Ward are a no-go for this (wordplay on "ikan" — "no good")
This is rough enough in a Fiat 500, let alone a driverless car
Downtown/entertainment-district streets are the real problem — with people constantly walking around the car, once it stops it can't confirm it's safe to move again and just gets stuck
The dark truth about China's driverless taxis — they were all remote-controlled.
The driverless buses planned for Japan are apparently also lightly remote-monitored — though it sounds like one operator watches around ten vehicles at once, stepping in only when an alert comes in
That's a cheat code only possible because Chinese cities have such robust 5G coverage
Background and key points of debate
Under Japan’s Road Traffic Act as revised in 2023, Level 4 driving with no driver on board is already legally possible under certain conditions, and this partnership looks set to operate within that framework. In the US, Waymo has already been running commercial driverless taxi service in cities like San Francisco and Phoenix, and Tokyo appears to be importing that know-how directly. Opinion in the thread split mainly over two points: who’s liable in an accident, and whether it makes sense to begin testing in traffic-heavy Tokyo. On liability, some replies laid out a scheme where operator Nihon Kotsu pays damages first and then seeks compensation from developer Waymo if a system defect turns out to be the cause, while others argued that starting in an urban area makes sense given the cost of the vehicles and road conditions. The original article doesn’t go into operational details like remote-monitoring setups, so how much of this will actually run driverless in practice remains to be seen as testing proceeds.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News Plus) thread “[Transportation] Self-driving taxis in Tokyo to launch in 2027 — GO and Waymo.”
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