An autonomous self-driving Jaguar taxi from Waymo drives down a street in Los Angeles, California on March 14, 2024.
Mario Tama |
Waymo now offers more than 100,000 paid robotaxi rides per week in the US, co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana announced on LinkedIn. That's double the 50,000 paid rides per week the company reported in May.
A spokesman for the alphabet-owned self-driving vehicle company told CNBC on Tuesday that San Francisco now “does the most driving” of the cities where Waymo operates its commercial service, namely San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin and Los Angeles.
Last month, Alphabet announced it would invest an additional $5 billion in Waymo, which began as the company's self-driving car project in 2009.
On Monday, Waymo announced details of its new “Generation 6” self-driving system, which will enable the company to offer driverless services in a wider range of weather conditions while requiring fewer expensive cameras and sensors in its vehicles.
Waymo, whose fleet currently consists of around 700 vehicles, operates the only commercial robotaxi service in the United States, Waymo One.
Waymo previously partnered with ride-hailing giant Uber in Phoenix to offer its service to the app's existing users there. In a statement Tuesday, Waymo said it would also expand its service in Phoenix by 90 square miles in June 2024, making it the largest autonomous ride-hailing “territory” in the States.
This month, Waymo also expanded its robotaxi service in San Francisco to three new areas in California – Daly City, Broadmoor and Colma – and is currently testing its self-driving vehicles on highways around the San Francisco metropolitan area.
While CNBC could not independently confirm the company's safety claims, Waymo also states that “in over 23.6 million miles driven alone, the Waymo driver was 3.5 times better at avoiding injury crashes and 3 times better at avoiding police-reported crashes compared to human drivers.”
Although commercial robotaxi services from Didi and Pony.ai are already running in China, Waymo currently faces only limited domestic competition. GMThe company's Cruise, which is owned by the corporation, suffered setbacks that temporarily kept its self-driving vehicles off the road, and companies like Uber and Ford halted efforts to develop robotaxis.
Elon Musk’s electric vehicle manufacturer, Teslahas been promising for years that it can turn customers' existing vehicles into self-driving cars with a software update. However, the company has yet to produce a car that can serve as a robotaxis. Tesla plans to unveil its CyberCab, a dedicated robotaxis, at a highly anticipated event on October 10.
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