Self driving taxi company Waymo will start testing its autonomous vehicles on US highways later this month. Until now Waymo’s operations have been restricted to surface streets and lower speed roads in urban environments, which means rides can take longer in some instances. However, Waymo, which is owned by Google parent Alphabet, confirmed on a […]
Self driving taxi company Waymo will start testing its autonomous vehicles on US highways later this month.
Until now Waymo’s operations have been restricted to surface streets and lower speed roads in urban environments, which means rides can take longer in some instances.
However, Waymo, which is owned by Google parent Alphabet, confirmed on a blog post last week, that it is now ready to start testing its fully autonomous passenger cars without a human driver on freeways in Phoenix.
Waymo plans to take a phased approach, first providing rider-only trips to its own employees – which it refers to as “Wamonaughts” – who will provide feedback about the service and rider experience during freeway trips before the service opens up to fare-paying members of public.
The company said that now was the right time to proceed with the next stage, adding: “As part of our focus on scaling ride hailing, we’ve incrementally ramped up our testing on freeways with passenger vehicles over the past year.”
It claims to have “millions of miles of experience on freeways in passenger cars and automous Class 8 trucks with human safety operators present, and believes the next step is to remove them.
“Companies are deploying robotaxis on a larger scale than before and in more cities,” Kersten Heineke, partner and co-director of the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility told delegates at CES in Vegas last week.
Just over a year ago Uber and driverless car manufacturer Motional announced the launch of its public robotaxi service in Las Vegas. In 2022 Chinese internet giant Baidu launched a commercial robotaxi service in Chongqing and Wuhan.
