Waymo disclosed Tuesday it’s now giving more than 100,000 paid robotaxi rides every week across its three main commercial markets in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix.
Those figures were shared by Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana in a social media post on X. The new 100,000 figure is double what the company has previously disclosed. Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted on the company’s earnings call this summer Waymo was delivering well over 50,000 paid rides per week, a number that Waymo also noted in a June blog post.
Waymo has reached that milestone with a fleet of hundreds of fully autonomous and electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicles. The company doesn’t share specific fleet numbers, but a Freedom of Information Act request from the California Department of Revenue revealed the company has 778 robotaxis under its deployment permit in the state. It’s unclear if some of those vehicles are operating in Phoenix.
Waymo has long had a foothold in Phoenix, which it continues to grow. But its most notable expansion has been in California, where it received last August the final remaining permits required to operate a robotaxi service commercially.
Since then, Waymo has moved to a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week service in all of San Francisco and continues to move into new areas in the sprawling city of Los Angeles. Waymo recently expanded service to other cities in the San Francisco Peninsula, including Daly City, and started testing its fully autonomous vehicles with no human safety driver on freeways in the area. The company is also ramping up efforts to access pickup and drop-offs at San Francisco International Airport, although the process to obtain approval promises to be slow.
The company also operates in Austin, but has yet to charge for driverless rides there.
Commercial expansion is bringing in revenue — an amount which Waymo has never disclosed. But it also comes with mounting costs. Parent company Alphabet said in June it will spend an additional $5 billion on its self-driving subsidiary over the next few years.
Waymo is about to start testing its driverless passenger vehicles on the highway later this month, a critical milestone for the company that, if successful, will unlock expanded commercial operations.
The company said Monday that its autonomous Jaguar I-Pace SUVs will begin shuttling employees around the freeways in Phoenix, Arizona in just a few weeks, after having spent much of the last year doing testing with an operator behind the wheel. Driverless highway service will eventually expand to regular customers, the company says, though it didn’t offer a timeline for when that will become available.
Bringing its autonomous cars to the highway is just the latest in a series of big steps for Waymo, especially in the Phoenix area. In December, the company started offering curbside drop-off and pickup at the Phoenix airport. Just a few months before that, Waymo made its autonomous vehicles available in the Uber app.
These moves have come as Waymo’s competition has struggled to keep up, namely Cruise. The GM autonomous vehicle subsidiary recently slashed a quarter of its staff and pushed out a number of executives after a crash in October where one of its robotaxis dragged a pedestrian.
Waymo’s progress hasn’t happened in a perfectly straight line. Last year, the company backed away from its autonomous trucking effort in order to focus more on ride-hailing. The company said Monday that what it learned from the voluminous testing that went into the trucking project, much of which happened in Arizona, is helping it take this step toward fully launching its passenger vehicle program on highways.
Waymo is about to start testing its driverless passenger vehicles on the highway later this month, a critical milestone for the company that, if successful, will unlock expanded commercial operations.
The company said Monday that its autonomous Jaguar I-Pace SUVs will begin shuttling employees around the freeways in Phoenix, Arizona in just a few weeks, after having spent much of the last year doing testing with an operator behind the wheel. Driverless highway service will eventually expand to regular customers, the company says, though it didn’t offer a timeline for when that will become available.
Bringing its autonomous cars to the highway is just the latest in a series of big steps for Waymo, especially in the Phoenix area. In December, the company started offering curbside drop-off and pickup at the Phoenix airport. Just a few months before that, Waymo made its autonomous vehicles available in the Uber app.
These moves have come as Waymo’s competition has struggled to keep up, namely Cruise. The GM autonomous vehicle subsidiary recently slashed a quarter of its staff and pushed out a number of executives after a crash in October where one of its robotaxis dragged a pedestrian.
Waymo’s progress hasn’t happened in a perfectly straight line. Last year, the company backed away from its autonomous trucking effort in order to focus more on ride-hailing. The company said Monday that what it learned from the voluminous testing that went into the trucking project, much of which happened in Arizona, is helping it take this step toward fully launching its passenger vehicle program on highways.
California’s auto regulator, the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), is investigating an incident that occurred on Tuesday, where a driverless Waymo car collided with a cyclist, according to a report by Reuters.
San Francisco cops said that the cyclist suffered non-fatal injuries, as per a report by SFGate. Waymo, which is owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet, said there was only one person in the car, who didn’t suffer injuries. They also informed the police after the incident.
The company said that the driverless car was at a stop at a four-way intersection as a large truck was driving in the opposite direction. The car then moved into the intersection and collided with the cyclist who was behind the truck.
“The cyclist was occluded by the truck and quickly followed behind it, crossing into the Waymo vehicle’s path. When they became fully visible, our vehicle applied heavy braking but was not able to avoid the collision,” the company said in a statement.
Waymo started offering its robotaxi services to vetted riders in San Francisco in August 2021. In September 2021, the company got a regulatory nod from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to start charging for these taxi services. However, it needed a go-ahead from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) in August 2022 to start the paid service.
In October, Waymo expanded its service areas in San Francisco to cater to tens of thousands of riders, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch at that time.
Autonomous taxi companies are already under scrutiny. Last year, Cruise had to recall its entire fleet of autonomous taxis after a robotaxi ran over and dragged a pedestrian. Last month, the GM subsidiary’s internal report revealed that the Department of Justice and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission are probing the company.
Image Credits: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg / Getty Images
TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free.
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. This week’s news includes a BMW security lapse that exposed sensitive information, blowback from a federal agency over an anti-Tesla Super Bowl ad and a new federal investigation into Fisker.
But first, some words about my recent visit to Detroit, where I met with a few Ford executives to find out what they’re focused on for 2024 and beyond.
It’s safe to say that Chinese EV automakers and Tesla are top of mind; and in the view of Ford execs, a low-cost EV and cutting-edge software are the best ways to thwart those threats. The company’s EV skunkworks project, which recently came to light, is charged with that task.
Ford CFO John Lawler didn’t mince words during an interview at the company’s headquarters.
“We have to assume that eventually they’ll be here,” Lawler said. “China has been looking for its global champion for decades. They couldn’t get there with a traditional gas vehicle; they saw the writing on the wall as early as 2010 that electric was the way to go and they have subsidized and focused on that since then.”
Lawler said Chinese automakers are now competitive. Now armed with production capacity and “fantastic” designs, China is pushing into other regions.
“It’s not a short stakes game; it’s long,” Lawler said. “So everybody’s thinking about the next couple of years, they’re thinking about the next 25, 30 years. They’re not gonna sweat what’s happening right now. They’ll keep building their footprint and building their brands up, keep building their technology and building out the advanced development of their vehicles, and eventually, there won’t be any stopping it.”
China and Tesla aren’t the only concerns taking up their collective gray matter. Ford CEO Jim Farley is also intent on clawing back $2 billion in cost savings across the company’s industrial system. A big part of that is improving the quality of new vehicles — which are directly tied to warranty costs — and was a point he emphasized during a recent interview at Wolfe Research’s Global Auto and Auto Tech Conference in New York.
Let’s go!
A little bird
A little bird pointed us to a recent filing regarding Faraday Future that got our attention. For the unfamiliar, Faraday Future is an EV startup that went public in 2021 via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company. Once upon a time, Faraday Future was about as buzzy as a startup could get. But years of internal drama, a revolving door of executives and federal investigations has the company hanging on the end of its financial threads.
Now it appears the company is at risk of losing its LA headquarters. The company’s landlord filed a lawsuit seeking to repossess the commercial space after Faraday Future failed to pay rent. The current bill is close to $1 million.
Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec at [email protected] or Sean O’Kane[email protected].If you prefer to remain anonymous, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and various encrypted messaging apps.
Deal of the week
No deal of the week! Instead, here’s a list of deals that got my attention.
Celadyne, a hydrogen fuel cell startup, raised $4.5 million in a seed round was co-led by Maniv and Dynamo Ventures, with major participation from EPS Ventures.
Revel, the Brooklyn-based startup initially known for its fleet of rentable blue electric mopeds, is reportedly trying to raise $200 million in equity, Bloomberg reported. The company shutdown its shared moped business in November and is now trying to build out electric ride-hailing and EV fast-charging businesses.
Roam, a Kenyan EV startup, has raised $24 million in a Series A round, including up to $10 million debt commitment from the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. Equator, an Africa-focused climate tech VC fund, led the round At One Ventures, TES Ventures, Renew Capital, the World We Want and One Small Planet also participated.
Skylo Technologies, a direct-to-device satellite connectivity service provider, raised $37 million in a round co-led by Intel Capital and Innovation Endeavors and joined by BMW i Ventures, Samsung Catalyst Fund, Seraphim Space, and Next47.
Velocys, a startup developing sustainable aviation fuel, raised $40 million from Carbon Direct Capital, Lightrock, GenZero and Kibo Investments.
Notable reads and other tidbits
ADAS
GM is expanding access to Super Cruise, with plans to let drivers use the hands-free advanced driver-assistance system on about 750,000 miles of roads in the United States and Canada. The expansion will nearly double the automaker’s Super Cruise network by 2025 and includes rural and minor highways.
The National Transportation Safety Board ordered the Dawn Project organization to stop using its seal after it appeared in a Super Bowl ad that called for consumers to boycott Tesla.
Autonomous vehicles
Cruise named Steve Kenner, an autonomous vehicle industry veteran who has held top safety roles at Kodiak, Locomation, Aurora and Uber’s now-defunct self-driving division, as its first “chief safety officer.” My take: This is a position that Cruise should have had years ago. Meanwhile, Cruise lost another key employee. Carl Jenkins, head of hardware at Cruise, resigned from the company.
May Mobility laid off 40 people, or about 13% of its staff.
San Francisco Giants are swapping out the Cruise robotaxi uniform patch for a less controversial one that advertises Chevrolet, another GM brand.
Waymo voluntarily recalled the software that powers its robotaxi fleet after two vehicles crashed into the same towed pickup truck in Phoenix, Arizona, in December. It’s the company’s first recall. As reporter Sean O’Kane notes, the recall comes at a time when self-driving cars are facing intense scrutiny following a series of high-profile crashes and controversies, including this week when a crowd of people in San Francisco swarmed, vandalized and torched a Waymo robotaxi.
Electric vehicles, charging & batteries
EVs had a white-hot 2023 — but data in December shows sales are cooling, Automotive News reported. New EV registrations rose 52% in 2023 over the previous year, according to data from S&P Global Mobility. EVs now have 7.7% of the U.S. light-vehicle market, up from 5.7% a year earlier.
Lucid Motors dropped the price of its luxury Air sedan by thousands of dollars. Lucid also got the attention of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration this week. The regulators opened an investigation into a Lucid windshield defroster recall from January, saying it’s “concerned” the company’s over-the-air update solution doesn’t go far enough to fix the problem. Is the NHTSA starting to push back against OTAs?
The NHTSA opened a second investigation into EV startup Fisker‘s Ocean SUV, after the agency received four complaints about the vehicle rolling away unexpectedly, resulting in one injury. Fisker also received a noncompliance notice from the New York Stock Exchange because its stocks closed under $1 for the past 30 days, according to a regulatory filing.
Stellantis, the parent company of brands like Jeep and Chrysler, announced it will adopt Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS). Stellantis is the last major Western automaker to announce compatibility with NACS.
Ride-hailing and ride-sharing
HopSkipDrive, the youth ride-share startup, beat two new key California emissions standards in 2023, an accomplishment the company believes will bolster its case for relying more on shared passenger vehicles to get kids and teens to and from school.
This week’s wheels
Image Credits: Kirsten Korosec
During my short trip to Michigan, I used a 2023 Ford Mustang Mach-E to drive to various meetings in Dearborn and Detroit. (The press car came courtesy of Ford.)
My primary interest was in BlueCruise, the hands-free active driver-assistance system. I had a lot of time to test it out thanks to a number of 20- to 30-mile commutes, most of which were on highways. I was testing the BlueCruise 1.3 version, which accelerates or brakes to maintain a selected following distance from a vehicle ahead, keeps the vehicle centered in the lane and steers. When the driver hits the turn signal, the vehicle will change lanes. It also will make a suggestion to pass if traffic is slow.
What I liked: It’s simple to engage BlueCruise and crystal clear when the system is handling the driving. The passing is crisp and vehicle doesn’t ping pong within the lane, which is common in other systems. My one picky critique is that the word “ready” is illuminated in green in the instrument cluster right below BlueCruise, when it is engaged (see photo). That “ready” has nothing to do with BlueCruise and is instead meant to let the EV driver know their vehicle is ready to drive. I’m sure drivers will get used to it, but I could also see it causing some confusion.
A feature I loved: I could take over the steering and BlueCruise would remain engaged. I know that in some circles this is frowned upon because the driver might get confused. However, I loath how often I accidentally disengage other systems like Tesla’s Autopilot by moving the steering wheel just a skosh too much.
Waymo will start letting its autonomous vehicles traverse Austin without a safety operator behind the wheel as of tomorrow, a crucial step before the company opens the program up to the public.
The company announced Tuesday that it will begin shuttling employees around 43 square miles of the Texas capital, including the Barton Hills, Riverside, East Austin and Hyde Park neighborhoods, as well as downtown Austin.
The step forward comes just a few days after Waymo won the ability to start charging for rides in expanded territory across both Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Waymo didn’t offer a timeline for when it plans to start offering autonomous rides to the citizens of Austin. When it does, it will become the fourth city where the company’s robotaxis are officially in operation, following LA, SF and Phoenix.
Waymo continues to steadily expand its autonomous ride-hailing program, which it calls Waymo One, even as other companies in the space have struggled. GM-owned Cruise is currently under investigation from myriad state and federal agencies over how it handled an October crash with a pedestrian. Ford-backed Argo AI went out of business. And many of the once-prominent Chinese AV startups have slowed or stopped testing in the U.S.
Waymo has had issues itself. Just last month, one of the company’s autonomous vehicles collided with a cyclist in San Francisco — an incident that the California Department of Motor Vehicles is investigating. The company also recently issued a recall for its autonomous software after two AVs in the Phoenix area crashed into the same towed truck late last year.
TechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free.
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation.
This week, it was all about Rivian and its splashy reveal of not one, but three future EVs. I attended the event to see the vehicles up close. Perhaps, more importantly, I also went to talk to executives, investors and customers to get a better understanding of where Rivian is headed and how folks are feeling about this EV upstart that is still far from turning a profit. I even ran into former Waymo CEO and now Rivian board member John Krafcik who was in attendance and cast a positive tone about the company’s future.
I also interviewed founder and CEO RJ Scaringe after the event. Much of our conversation centered around the R2 and a big and hopefully fruitful bet to shift production to its existing factory in Normal, Illinois instead of a yet-to-be-built plant in Georgia. Stay tuned in the next day or so for a complete rundown of the interview. I will give you one teaser: relevancy was a theme.
Check out our coverage of the R2 reveal, the surprise R3 and R3x, how reservations are going and a fun cinematic feature found in one of the many R2 “adventure” accessories.
This week’s news also includes articles about GM resuming sales of Chevrolet Blazer, a financial update from Turo, another EV reveal that showed a little muscle and more!
One more thing … I’ll be in Austin for SXSW this coming week.
I am moderating two panels, and I hope to see your smiling faces in the audience. The first panel, at 4 p.m. March 12, is entitled How Sustainable Mobility is Transforming the Last-Mile of Delivery and will feature Shawn Xu of Lowercarbon Capital, Anjali Naik of Cartken and Abby Wheeler of Uber.
The following day, and also at 4 p.m., I will moderate a panel called Mobility at the Speed of Trust: AV Purpose, Policy, and Performance with Darran Anderson, who is director of strategy and innovation at Texas DOT, Jay Blazek Crossley of Farm&City and Katrin Lohmann, who is president of Volkswagen ADMT.
Please say hi if you’re in town!
A little bird
No little birds this week — at least ones that provided verifiable information I could share. Y’all have shared lots of spicy rumors though! Please keep reaching out; no tip is too small.
What I can share is an overview of the conversations I overheard at the Rivian R2 reveal, which was held March 7 at the South Coast Theater in Laguna Beach, California. (Rivian bought and restored the theater last year).
Among staff, from the lowly to the higher ups, there was a mix of excitement and relief once the event was over. The mood was positive, but some employees were clearly still processing the layoffs that occurred recently. I heard from a few folks that upper execs had underestimated the buzz around the R3 and R3X — the two surprise reveals. Importantly, the R3 and R3x vehicles don’t have a production date. (At least not a public one.)
The guests I spoke to or overheard talking — a combination of media, loyal customers and investors — were overwhelming positive about what they saw. There were a few grumbles about the location of the charging port and I heard more than a few wonder if Rivian could hold on financially through 2026, when the company is expected to begin production of the R2.
Got a tip for us? Email Kirsten Korosec at [email protected] or Sean O’Kane[email protected].If you prefer to remain anonymous, click here to contact us, which includes SecureDrop (instructions here) and various encrypted messaging apps.
Deal of the week
Will Turo ever IPO? Fellow TechCrunch reporter Alex Wilhelm and I have a running joke about the company’s long-delayed IPO; the company first filed an S-1 to go public in early 2022, and continues to update the document quarterly in preparation for an eventual offering. Alas, the venture-backed, peer-to-peer car rental service updated the S-1 once again with its fourth-quarter and full-year financial performance.
That suggests, as Wilhelm notes, that a public offering is still a key priority for Turo. Why else bother with the added paperwork?
While this isn’t a deal, per se, I do think it’s worth highlighting how the company is faring, per its latest financial reporting.
Turo saw an 18% uptick in year-over-year revenue to $879.8 million. That seems like good news until you look at Turo’s growth rate, which has dramatically declined in the last two years. Revenue growth did perk up a bit in Q4 2023 compared to the same quarter the previous year, a data point that could help it argue to public-market investors that its deceleration is not necessarily irreversible, Wilhelm wrote.
Also, Turo is actually profitable, which is no small thing. Gross margins did devolve from 54.3% in 2022 to 51.4% in 2023 and the company posted its smallest operating profit since 2020 last year. However, Turo is still in the black and that has me betting that an IPO is coming in 2024.
Other deals that got my attention …
REE, an automotive technology company and makes full by-wire electric trucks and platforms, closed its public offering of 2.3 million Class A ordinary shares, raising about $14.95 million. Multiple investors participated in the round, led by M&G Investment Management, REE’s largest shareholder.
Serve Robotics, an autonomous sidewalk delivery company, qualified to trade on the OTCQB Venture Market operated by the OTC Markets Group Inc. The company’s common shares are now trading on the OTCQB under the ticker symbol “SBOT.”
Notable reads and other tidbits
Apps
Uber Eats has added a live location-sharing capability to help couriers find customers in difficult-to-find locations, including public places such as campus courtyards, parks and playgrounds.
Waze launched a few new features to help users navigate tricky roundabouts, get alerts when a speed limit is about to change and get warnings about speed bumps and sharp curves. Question for readers: Am I the only one surprised that Google hasn’t killed off Waze?
Autonomous vehicles
Baidu’s autonomous ride hailing platform Apollo Go is now offering 24/7 autonomous driving rides in selected areas of Wuhan, China. This is the third major operational expansion of Baidu’s robotaxi service in 2024. The company was recently approved for robotaxi pilot operation on highways to Beijing Daxing Airport.
Waymo said it will start letting its autonomous vehicles traverse Austin without a safety operator behind the wheel, a crucial step before the company opens the program up to the public. The announcement comes less than a week after the Alphabet-owned company received a critical permit that allows it to charge for robotaxi rides in Los Angeles, San Francisco highways and the greater SF Peninsula.
Electric vehicles, batteries & charging
Faraday Future hit a new not-so-desirable milestone. The troubled EV company issued its first recall that covers all 11 vehicles — yes less than a dozen — it built last year. The recall centers around a problem with the warning light for the airbags in the company’s FF91 SUV.
General Motors resumed sales of the Chevrolet Blazer EV — and at a cheaper price — more than two months after the automaker pulled the vehicle over software problems.
Rad Power Bikes launched four new e-bikes and a newly engineered battery equipped with thermal resistant technology to prevent overheating or fires. The new batteries are potted with a heat-absorbing resin that protects against corrosion and overheating, according to the company. It encapsulates each battery cell, and if overheating occurs, the resin is supposed to stop the thermal event from spreading.
Stellantis introduced two all-electric versions of the Dodge Charger packed with the kind of features muscle car fans have come to expect — right down to a system that tries to mimic the rumble of a Hemi V-8 engine. Will the performance benefits in the all-electric Dodge Charger be enough to woo customers who are emotionally attached to the grumbling gas-powered version? I’m not so sure.
Tesla’s factory outside Berlin, Germany was forced to shut down after a suspected arson attack on the local power grid. The shutdown, which was expected to last at least a week, could cost the company an estimated $100 million.
This week’s wheels
Image Credits: Kirsten Korosec
What better way to get to the Rivian R2 event than to drive a Rivian R1S SUV? The company offered up one of the vehicles from its press fleet and I jumped at the opportunity. Why? I haven’t driven a Rivian in more than a year, I wanted to test the Rivian EV charging network and see how recent software updates have changed the vehicle experience. Plus, I wanted to spend time in the third-row R1S ahead of the company’s reveal of the R2, which is a smaller, more affordable SUV.
Quick thoughts:
I applaud a recent software update that added a new vehicle icon on the upper-left corner of the infotainment screen, and gives users quick access to some controls like opening the charge port or front truck as well as other shortcuts for car wash and pet mode.I still and will always loathe the lack of a physical toggle to move the HVAC vents. This is my hill to die on.The advanced driver assistance system is better, but still needs improvement. The vehicle still slightly ping pongs within the lane when the lane keeping feature is on and the torque sensor on the steering wheel is far too sensitive to my liking. I accidentally disengaged the ADAS several times. I did appreciate that the lane keeping and adaptive cruise control stayed on and did not disengage when I put my indicator on and moved into another lane. Neat!The Rivian EV charger, or “adventure network” as it is branded, was easy to use and went smoothly. It was not the fastest charge; I pulled up to 120 kw. However, I was able to park and plug without the hassle of using a credit card or app. I am curious to test what the experience is like for non-Rivian owners. Unsurprisingly, I had some issues at my next stop, where I powered up the vehicle using an Electrify America charger. Two of the charging ports were not working, the app wouldn’t communicate with the charger and I ended up just using my credit card instead.
Waymo, the self-driving company under Alphabet, began testing its robotaxis in Atlanta on Tuesday, adding another city to its ever-expanding testing and deployment domain.
Over the next few months, Waymo will deploy a handful of cars driven manually by humans to gather mapping data and get familiar with Atlanta’s environment, Sandy Karp, a Waymo spokesperson, told TechCrunch. Later, Waymo aims to test its robotaxis in Atlanta without the safety driver in the front seat.
Winter in Buffalo ❄️🦬, Spring in DC 🌸🏛️, and summer in Atlanta ☀️🍑!
We’re taking the #WaymoDriver to the ATL as we continue evaluating how our system generalizes to different environments and new experiences. Read about our cross-country training program:… pic.twitter.com/ORNxAbjJ3A
— Waymo (@Waymo) April 16, 2024
Like many other states, Georgia’s regulation of AVs is almost nonexistent, meaning Waymo can technically drop fully autonomous vehicles on the streets today without a safety driver, provided it meets the state’s minimal risk conditions.
Waymo declined to comment on whether it plans to launch commercially in Atlanta, or any of the other cities in which it has started collecting mapping data. Earlier this month, Waymo began mapping Washington, D.C., and in November 2023, the company began winter testing robotaxis in Buffalo.
“We’re laser focused on scaling our fully autonomous Waymo One ride-hailing service in the cities where we operate, as we continue safely and responsibly advancing our autonomous technology through road trips to various cities around the U.S.,” said Karp.
Atlanta is just the latest in a string of territorial gains for Waymo over the last few months. Just last week, Waymo officially launched paid robotaxi rides in Los Angeles. In March, California regulators approved Waymo to grow its commercial robotaxi service across the San Francisco peninsula and on San Francisco freeways, which unlocks a route to San Francisco International Airport. Waymo has been offering rides to and from Phoenix’s airport since November 2022, and recently expanded to include curbside drop-off and pickup.
Waymo will start testing robotaxis on Phoenix highways
Waymo also started giving driverless rides to employees in Austin in March and plans to open up the service to members of the public later this year.
Waymo’s recent wins are reminiscent of its erstwhile competitor Cruise’s increased activity last year. By August 2023, Cruise had announced initial data collection in Atlanta, alongside Seattle, Washington, D.C., Las Vegas and other cities. Cruise had also begun testing its robotaxis in Austin, Houston, Dallas and Miami and operating a limited robotaxi service in Phoenix.
Cruise’s expansion plans came to a sudden halt after an October 2 incident in San Francisco that led to suspended permits and a decision to ground its entire fleet. (The California Department of Motor Vehicles tells us Cruise is in the process of trying to get back its permits in the state.)
It’s important to note that Waymo and Cruise are not the same. Cruise has faced scrutiny for its robotaxis malfunctioning on public roads, blocking the flow of traffic, public transit and first responders. Waymo has been touted as a company that has moved slower and broken fewer things, but the company and its tech are not without their faults.
In February, Waymo recalled the software that powers its robotaxi fleet after two vehicles crashed into the same towed pickup truck in Phoenix in December. A Waymo robotaxi also hit and killed a dog in June 2023.
