A Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar taxi drives alongside a avenue on March 14, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.
Mario Tama | Getty Pictures
Waymo is now offering greater than 100,000 paid robotaxi rides per week within the US, in accordance with a LinkedIn announcement by its co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana. That is double the 50,000 weekly paid journeys the corporate reported in Could.
A spokesperson for the Alphabet-owned driverless car enterprise informed CNBC on Tuesday that San Francisco now “serves essentially the most journeys” among the many cities the place Waymo operates its business service: San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Los Angeles.
Final month, Alphabet introduced that it was investing an extra $5 billion into Waymo, which began as a self-driving venture on the firm in 2009.
On Monday, Waymo revealed particulars about its new, “era 6” self-driving system, which ought to allow the corporate to supply driverless providers in a wider array of climate situations and with out requiring as many pricey cameras and sensors in its automobiles.
Waymo, which boasts round 700 automobiles in its fleet at the moment, operates the one business robotaxi service within the U.S., Waymo One.
Waymo beforehand partnered with the ridehailing big Uber in Phoenix to carry its service to the app’s current customers there. In an announcement on Tuesday, Waymo famous that in June 2024, it added 90 sq. miles to its service in Phoenix as nicely, making it the most important autonomous ride-hailing “territory” within the states.
This month, Waymo additionally expanded its San Francisco robotaxi service into three new California areas — Daly Metropolis, Broadmoor and Colma — and is now testing its driverless automobiles on freeways across the San Francisco metro space.
Whereas CNBC couldn’t independently affirm the corporate’s security claims, Waymo additionally says that “over 14.8 million rider-only miles pushed, the Waymo Driver was 3.5x higher in avoiding crashes that triggered accidents and 3x higher in avoiding police-reported crashes than human drivers.”
Though business robotaxi providers from Didi and Pony.ai are up and operating in China, Waymo at present faces restricted home competitors. GM-owned Cruise skilled setbacks that took its driverless automobiles off the highway briefly, and corporations together with Uber and Ford have shuttered their efforts to develop robotaxis.
Elon Musk’s electrical car maker, Tesla, has been promising it could flip clients’ current automobiles into driverless automobiles with a software program replace for years. Nevertheless, the corporate has not but produced a automobile able to serving as a robotaxi. Tesla plans to unveil its CyberCab, or devoted robotaxi, at a hotly-anticipated occasion on October 10.
