'Amazingly effective' robotaxis and autonomous trucks could improve road safety
Fully driverless vehicles may be a common sight in Canadian cities sooner than many expect, but exactly when depends on industry giants, says Steven Waslander, professor at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies and is the director of the Toronto Robotics and AI Laboratory.
Waymo leads the charge as Uber doubles down
“It's totally dependent on Waymo's business strategy,” he explains, noting the company is the clear North American leader, with strong competitors emerging in China. Toronto and Vancouver are the first Canadian cities under serious consideration, but local conditions and regulations remain barriers, since companies must still prove their systems can handle Canadian winter driving and navigate a patchwork of evolving provincial and municipal rules around testing and deployment.
Waymo already operates thousands of robotaxis in U.S. cities and has reached significant market penetration in San Francisco.
Uber is shifting from being just a ride hailing platform to becoming a direct AV player. The company is reported to be investing US$10 billion to build its own robotaxi fleet. That move will not transform streets overnight. “That'll take five to ten years,” Waslander says of Uber’s in house AV ambitions.
‘Amazingly effective’ but not without blind spots
For Canadian occupational health and safety professionals, the key question is whether autonomous vehicles, or AVs, will make roads safer for workers whose jobs keep them in traffic, including drivers, delivery workers, road crews and first responders.
Waslander is blunt about the promise. “It's an amazingly effective technology. It's working surprisingly well and the safety record for Waymo, particularly in the cities that it's deployed in, is significantly better than human driving.”
Waymo’s own data suggest dramatic gains. The company claims large reductions in property damage and injury collisions compared to human drivers.
That does not mean deployments are risk free. Each new city comes with a “learning period,” he notes, as vehicles adapt to local driving culture, signage and infrastructure. Conditions will be especially challenging in Canadian winters.
In Austin, Texas, an early deployment exposed a serious gap. Waymo vehicles in test mode failed to recognize some school buses correctly and “drove right past stopped school buses with the stop sign out.” The company paused testing for several months, issued a software recall, and resumed only after resolving the issue.
For safety leaders, Waslander says this underlines the need for extensive local testing before any fully driverless fleet goes live on Canadian streets.
Robotrucks and the 401: superhuman perception, super high stakes
The stakes may be even higher in freight. Toronto based Waabi has raised about US$1 billion to pursue driverless long haul trucking, putting massive autonomous semi trailers on corridors such as Highway 401 squarely on the horizon.
Public anxiety is understandable, Waslander acknowledges. However, he argues that from a technical standpoint, highway trucking is in some ways simpler than busy urban robotaxi operations, with more predictable lane keeping and following tasks at steady speeds.
He believes properly engineered systems can ultimately outperform humans. Robotrucks can mount sensors higher than a driver’s eye line and use lidar for precise depth measurement, giving them “superhuman perception capabilities” and better foresight of hazards and pileups ahead.
“Most accidents can be attributed to driver error,” he notes, pointing to research that links the vast majority of crashes to human mistakes in perception, prediction or vehicle control. Automated systems are less prone to distraction, fatigue or over correction, the core failure modes for many serious crashes.
Accountability, data and the future of driving jobs
If a crash does occur, AVs may offer clearer evidence than traditional collisions. Vehicles continuously record their surroundings and internal decision making, making full reconstructions possible, provided Canadian regulations require that data to be shared with investigators, regulators and courts. Waslander stresses that policy choices now will determine whether fault can be assigned fairly, rather than pitting “one human driver versus a large corporation's lawyers.”
For occupational safety professionals, AVs also raise workforce questions. Long haul drivers and taxi drivers are understandably worried their jobs will disappear. Waslander sees transformation rather than simple elimination. Many roles will shift toward loading, unloading, cleaning and maintaining automated fleets, much as other industries have seen jobs evolve with each technological wave.
The message for Canadian health and safety leaders is clear. Autonomous vehicles are likely to reduce certain kinds of risk substantially, but only if regulators, employers and technology firms move deliberately on testing, transparency and worker protections as the technology rolls onto Canadian roads.
