For now the passengers are employees, but the autonomous developer is inching toward offering driverless rides to the public.
- Waymo begins offering robotaxi rides to its employees in San Francisco, months after General Motors’ Cruise has started doing the same in the city.
- The Level 4 prototypes have not yet been cleared for use by paying passengers as part of an app-based ride-hailing service.
- Waymo has operated for years in the Phoenix area with safety drivers behind the wheel, and has tested other prototypes in San Francisco traffic.
After more than a decade of developing and testing autonomous vehicle tech, Waymo is inching closer to its vision of a robotaxi future, with plans to begin offering completely driverless taxis to its employees in San Francisco.
The Google-backed start-up has been testing prototypes in Arizona for a few years now, in addition to the Bay Area, but the next stage will involve a half step of sorts to its eventual goal: fleets of driverless taxis on the streets of America.
For now the company’s operations in the city will only allow it to offer rides for its own employees, rather than the public at large on a paid basis, but the start-up is expected to offer rides to its Trusted Testers as well in due time.
Under the Trusted Tester program that rolled out last summer in San Francisco, Waymo has been offering rides to a small pool of users with safety drivers behind the wheel, expanding this program from the Phoenix area where it had operated for four years.
“We’ve learned so much from our San Francisco Trusted Testers over the last six months, not to mention the innumerable lessons from our riders in the years since launching our fully autonomous service in the East Valley of Phoenix,” said co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana. “Both of which have directly impacted how we bring forward our service as we welcome our first employee riders in SF.”
Waymo has been testing its prototypes for years in the Phoenix area.
Waymo
Waymo’s plans for driverless vehicle testing with employees as passengers follow a similar rollout by GM’s Cruise last fall. That start-up had begun testing several of its driverless prototypes on San Francisco streets, offering a number of its employees rides via an app that can hail the appropriately equipped Chevy Bolts.
In many ways Waymo has already accomplished much more in Phoenix than in the Bay Area when it comes to shuttling actual passengers around.
But the California city is still seen by a number of developers as one of the most important metro areas for the first commercial deployment of robo-taxis.
“Just as our previous experience allowed us to deploy our 5th-gen Driver in San Francisco quickly and with confidence, the combination of our experience in San Francisco and Phoenix’s East Valley, grounded in millions of miles of real-world driving and boosted by billions of miles driven in simulation, is already guiding our progress in Downtown Phoenix and sets us up for future expansion of our fully autonomous ride-hailing service,” said Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo co-CEO.
Keyword: Waymo Is Testing Driverless Taxis in San Francisco