Sweden's Minister for International Development Cooperation and Foreign Trade Johan Forsell… (+) Experience a Waymo self-driving car in San Francisco (Photo: Steve Jennings/Getty Images)
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It's real: Alphabet subsidiary Waymo recently announced a multi-year, $5 billion investment during its second-quarter earnings call, and self-driving ride-hailing services are becoming more common in U.S. cities.
At all hours of the day and night, Waymos can be seen driving past each other on the streets of San Francisco, with multiple Waymos circling popular tourist attractions like Coit Tower.
The company, which was born in 2009 as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, plans to start offering fully self-driving rides in the city in late 2022, and began offering paid services in August last year. But it faces tough competition from Cruise, a plucky rival with startup grit and a fleet of 600 vehicles, including 400 in San Francisco, and cars with endearing names like “Popsicle” and “Goldie.” Last October, Cruise had its permit revoked after a series of accidents, including one in which it dragged a pedestrian under its wheels. Suddenly, San Francisco was a Waymo town, and a frenzy ensued as the waiting list soared to 300,000 before it opened to the public in June.
By the numbers
Waymo says its fleet of about 700 vehicles currently spans three markets — San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles — and takes more than 100,000 paid rides every week, with 2 million paid rides taken to date.
San Francisco is its largest market with 300 vehicles. It has not yet been approved for public transportation to highways or airports, but its service area recently expanded to nearby areas in San Mateo and is testing on Interstate 280. In Phoenix, its second-largest market, Waymo has been offering shuttle service to the airport since 2022.
The company recently launched in Los Angeles to select passengers with a waiting list of 150,000, and will launch in Austin next. In total, the company is testing in 25 U.S. cities, including Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, New York, Seattle, and extreme weather areas like Buffalo.
Waymo's initial plan was to add 20,000 Jaguar I-Paces to expand to 1 million daily trips, but it has pivoted to a more cost-effective robot bus platform, partnering with Chinese electric car maker Geely to build purpose-built five-seater vehicles for the GeeCar brand.
Jack Wunderman, Waymo's product lead for driving behavior and inference, explained the excitement for the new form factor: “Z-Car is a platform purpose-built for ride-hailing, with a lot of interior space and large sliding doors,” and the seats remain forward-facing for comfort, Megan Nease, Waymo's head of product and customer research, told me. “Being able to know where the car is going, that the car sees what you see, and having the confidence to let your hands off and relax is really important,” she said.
Waymo Zeekr Front
Waymo
Waymo Zeekr Rear
Waymo
Competitive Environment
Waymo is leading the way in the US, with rivals gearing up to put their vehicles on the roads.
Amazon's Zoox plans to launch public rides in Las Vegas later this year, and is testing in San Francisco, Seattle, and Las Vegas. At CES, Chris Stoffel, Zoox's director of industrial and creative design, told me the company aims to offer the first paid self-driving ride-hailing service in the US in purpose-built vehicles without steering wheels. The Zoox experience is expected to differ from Waymo's Zeekr in that it's designed for bidirectional travel, with up to four people able to sit facing each other in the same quadrant, party-style.
Cruise plans to return with a self-driving Chevrolet Bolt for Uber's platform in 2025. The company is backed by GM, Honda, Microsoft, Walmart and T. Rowe Price and is testing in Phoenix, Houston, Dallas and Dubai. Previous markets include Austin, Miami and San Francisco.
Uber is adding self-driving options to its platform, including Waymo's ride-hailing service in Phoenix, Serve Robotics' food delivery service in Los Angeles, and Cartken in Miami, Fairfax and Tokyo. The company is also partnering with Chinese electric vehicle maker BYD to bring self-driving cars to markets outside the U.S. Another possible contender for Uber's platform is Mobileye, which is partnering with Volkswagen in Austin and Hamburg to prepare its ID. Buzz AD to launch a self-driving ride-hailing service by 2026.
Tesla is also focusing on developing its FSD autonomous driving system and plans to announce a cyber taxi service at its Robotaxi Day on October 10th.
But the biggest threat to Waymo may come from China, where several major robotaxi operators have obtained permits to operate in California. These include AutoX, which has 1,000 robotaxi fleets, and WeRide, which has 600 robotaxi fleets but has postponed its $5 billion IPO on the Nasdaq. Baidu, which has 500 robotaxi fleets in Wuhan, has not yet applied for a California permit but may be a company to watch, along with NIO, Didi, and Pony.ai.
Still, none of this is a sure thing. In a recent blog post announcing layoffs and a pause on Motional's Las Vegas robotaxi rollout after 100,000 rides with Uber and Lyft, Motional CEO Carl Iagnema said “large-scale driverless deployment won't happen overnight,” explaining that the commercial case has yet to be made. The company recently closed a nearly $500 million funding round with Hyundai.
The costs of operating fully autonomous vehicles are likely to be prohibitive, so it will be interesting to see whether companies without investment from incumbent cloud providers will be able to compete.
About Fans
Meanwhile, Waymo has plenty to celebrate as enthusiasts reach riding milestones.
Jayden Sterling, who took 1,107 rides, is one of Waymo's top power users, having adventured 7,105 miles and more than 34,912 minutes on the self-driving service. Sterling, who uses “they/them” pronouns, had just turned 18 and didn't have a driver's license when he arrived in San Francisco to work at the startup. It was October 2022, and fully self-driving rides were being offered for free to a select group. Sterling quickly became a trusted tester, and his adventures with Waymo led him to drive around the city, making multiple stops for Blue Bottle Coffee and pizza, and then flying to Phoenix to see an art exhibit and to Los Angeles for dancing and sightseeing.
“It's a very freeing feeling to be able to go wherever you want,” Sterling said, explaining that Waymo's “Add-A Stop” feature allows you to schedule a trip of up to five stops, and the car is zero-emission electric, so it's a cleaner way to explore.
Vili Ilchev, managing director at venture capital firm Two Sigma, is also a big Waymo customer and believes the technology could save millions of lives.
“When I'm biking, I'm on my bike and I come next to a Waymo and I can see that it's looking at me. If I try to pass on the right, it makes room for me. It's very reassuring that Waymo is always looking at me. They never cut me off or get in my way. They always prioritize my safety,” he said. “My kids would rather ride in a Waymo than any other car.” Ilchev, who owns two EVs, a Rivian SUV and a Chevy Volt, feels that everything will be autonomous in a decade or two and hopes Waymo will accelerate the transformation by licensing it to other OEMs.
On safety, Wunderman explained that the car's sensors can see hundreds of meters in all directions and can see things that humans tend to miss, like when it's dark or when a head pops out from behind the car for a split second. The sensors know there's a person there and slow down defensively. The fields of view are overlapping, so the car can see in both directions at the same time. And the AI is starting to think like a human when it comes to locating lanes and driving at the right speed in fairly complex scenarios.
“Waymo is the most mature embodiment of AI in the physical world today,” Wunderman said. “We've been working with machine learning and AI since our founding, and we've been at the forefront of applying AI to the real world. And what's really exciting is that our AI models are enabling a lot of emergent behaviors that we've always wanted and knew we wanted to have in our vehicles, but that would be difficult to achieve using just hand-coded heuristics or other traditional robotics approaches.”
Though the company is still fine-tuning the accuracy of its drop-off and pickup locations, which can sometimes be several blocks away from the requested pin, the experience is still magical for many riders.
That's by design, says Nees: “We call it a privileged space where you have the freedom to drive while knowing that the car is sensing what's around you. The on-board screen detects small road signs, the size of a bus, the difference between a bicycle and a scooter or motorcycle, and visualises that to the rider, so the driver always has the sense that we're seeing things that they might notice while driving.”
It remains to be seen whether features like conversational AI will be added to allow passengers to chat with their Waymo driver and ask for the Giants score, request a massage or guided meditation in a heated reclining seat, or suggest shoppable shows where you can order actor costumes. Perhaps the driver's seat will be removed and, on longer rides like from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the cabin will be dynamically configurable into whatever kind of active living space you need, from a game room to a yoga class or even a podcast studio.
But for now, it's still early days and we're just focused on optimizing the music experience, Neese said.
Of course, the possibility is always there: Waymo is a sister company to Google, after all.
