- Waymo announced that it now does 200,000 paid autonomous rides per week. That’s double what it said six months ago.
- Waymo operates self-driving taxis in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco.
- After years of broken promises around self-driving cars, Tesla plans to start an autonomous ride-hailing service in Austin this summer.
In the race to lead the autonomous vehicle space—and maybe even the future of transportation—Google’s Waymo has about a 100-mile head start. The self-driving taxi division just hit a new milestone: over 200,000 paid rides per week through its Waymo One service.
If this feels like deja-vu, that’s because it was only in August that Waymo announced it was doing 100,000 paid rides per week. The company has grown rides by 20 times in less than two years, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in a Thursday post on X announcing the news.
That means the gulf between Waymo and Tesla, which has been making huge promises around autonomous driving for years, feels bigger than ever. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said his company would sell a self-driving car “soon” since at least 2016, but you still can’t take a nap in the driver’s seat of your Model Y. (Well, while it’s moving, at least.)
Last year, Tesla revealed the Cybercab, a purpose-built robotaxi without a steering wheel or pedals that the automaker says will hit production by 2026. But the truest test of the automaker’s self-driving ambitions will come far sooner than that. Musk announced on a recent earnings call that, starting in June, the company will deploy driverless Teslas in Austin, Texas. People will be able to order rides through an app, as they do for Waymo or Uber.
After Austin, Musk says the service will swiftly expand to other cities. But, again, he’s made these claims for years. And, to date, Tesla hasn’t yet proved it can make a car that drives itself without supervision in public.
Musk’s killer app may be cost and scale. Teslas only use cameras to “see” the world, while Waymos rely on a wider array of more expensive sensors and highly detailed maps of the cities they operate in. (To get a sense of the costs involved here, just know that Waymo closed a $5.6 billion funding round last year.) If Tesla can achieve the same reliability as Waymo with cars you can buy for $40,000 or $50,000—a big “if”—that’s a big deal. But so far, while Tesla has been ironing out the kinks, Waymo has cemented itself as the driverless taxi company in the U.S.
One of the OGs of the autonomous-vehicle industry, Google (now under parent company Alphabet) started researching self-driving cars in 2009 and launched Waymo in 2016. Today, Waymo has autonomous, electric Jaguars on the road in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix. Next up: deployment in Atlanta and Austin on the Uber platform, and Miami too.
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