Waymo explains how its self-driving taxis deal with carjackings after an incident in downtown Los Angeles

Waymo, the ride-hailing app that is equipped with a driverless robot taxi, explained what happens when someone tries to steal one of the fully autonomous electric Jaguars after an incident in downtown Los Angeles on Thursday.

A man was in the driver’s seat of one of the Waymo vehicles, who authorities say may have been under the influence of alcohol. fully electric Jaguar I-PACE According to the Los Angeles Police Department, officers responded to the scene near South Hill Street and Fifth Street around 12:30 p.m. The footage shows police pulling him out of the driver’s seat, where no one usually sits in self-driving cars.

Waymo officially launched in Los Angeles in November will be available to anyone in parts of the greater Los Angeles metro area, including Santa Monica, Hollywood and the South Los Angeles areas surrounding the USC campus. Before that, the app was only available to a limited number of drivers on the waiting list.

Similar to apps like Uber and Lyft, rides are offered seven days a week, 24 hours a day through the app — just with no one behind the wheel. The service is currently available in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix and some surrounding areas of the Arizona city.

Of the more than 5 million Waymo rides, there have been “only a handful of cases” where a driver or someone else not authorized to drive the car tried to pull away, the company said in a statement Thursday to CBS News Los Angeles. .

“Waymo vehicles are designed in such a way that unauthorized persons cannot disable the automated driving system and manually operate the vehicles,” Waymo said in a statement. “When any unauthorized person is in the driver’s seat, Waymo’s driver support team can ask them to exit the vehicle and end the trip. If they do not comply with commands to leave the vehicle, Driver Support coordinates with our Emergency Response Team, who work with law enforcement to respond.”

Drivers aren’t allowed to operate the fully autonomous cars, and Waymo employees only get in the driver’s seat on rare occasions. The company said that these people are specialists who check the characteristics of vehicles and technology.

“Our vehicles are mostly self-driving, but occasionally you’ll find our vehicles have autonomous specialists in the driver’s seat,” the company’s website says. “These experts are there to monitor our autonomous driving technology and share important feedback to help us improve Waymo One.”

Waymo is not authorized to offer freeway rides, but it is fully available on street surfaces in parts of Los Angeles.

The electric Jaguars are controlled by a system the company calls the “Waymo Driver,” which includes hardware and software for self-driving capabilities. This includes sensors, cameras, radars and an artificial intelligence platform on the hardware level, as well as gathering information from sensors on the software side, according to the company’s website.

“Together, our hardware and software work in concert to paint a complete picture of the world around the car and allow us to navigate the roads safely,” the website says.

Cameras in vehicles are used to determine when a driver may be impaired by alcohol, according to Chronicle of San Franciscowho last week reported on Waymo’s handling of such situations. Car cameras, which use a real-time case-based machine learning model, can also detect whether a person inside is smoking or not wearing a seat belt, the Chronicle reported.

Earlier this year, when Waymo was only available to Los Angeles drivers on a select waiting list, a man was arrested on suspicion of trying to steal one of the self-driving cars in downtown Los Angeles. He tried to put the car in “drive” but could not manipulate the controls, according to the LAPD.