Waymo Driverless Cars to Enter Streets of San Francisco

"Driverless cars will soon become a more common sight in San Francisco.

Waymo LLC, Google's sister company, is sending fully autonomous vehicles onto the streets of the city, marking its first attempt to send cars without human control into a major metropolitan area.

The rides are free and currently only available to Waymo employees. The Alphabet Inc. unit since 2017 has been operating autonomous cars in suburban Phoenix, which is a much less challenging traffic environment. In 2020, it opened rides up to the public in Chandler, Ariz., which has a population of under 300,000, and took away drivers. Waymo's latest move comes nearly two months after its biggest competitor, Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors Co., started offering driverless rides to the public in San Francisco. The rides are also free and only available at night, from 10:30 p.m. to 5 a.m. local time.

A spokesman for Cruise said the company plans to expand those hours soon and is also applying to the California Public Utilities Commission to be able to charge the public for rides. The spokesman said Cruise is the only autonomous vehicle business that has applied for that specific permit so far.

Waymo is allowed to charge for rides in California as long as there is a driver in the vehicle but doesn't have a permit to offer rides to the general public, a company spokeswoman said. She declined to comment on the status of Waymo's permit applications.

The Waymo rides are available from early morning until late afternoon. The company plans to expand the service to 24 hours, the spokeswoman said.

Waymo previously piloted its robotaxi service with Jaguar I-Paces in San Francisco among a select group of participants about six months ago, but those cars still had drivers in them. The company has been building toward a launch in the city for more than a decade, first starting to test its technology back in 2009.

"This morning in San Francisco, a fully autonomous all-electric Jaguar I-PACE, with no human driver behind the wheel, picked up a Waymo engineer to get their morning coffee and go to work," the company said in a blog post. "They now join the thousands of Waymo One riders we've been serving in Arizona, making fully autonomous driving technology part of their daily lives."

In addition to Waymo and Cruise, six other companies had received permits from the state of California to test drive autonomous vehicles as of last year. San Francisco also has one of the highest concentrations of Uber Technologies Inc. and Lyft Inc. drivers in the U.S.

Waymo will also begin operating in downtown Phoenix, though only to employees." [1]

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1. Waymo Driverless Cars to Enter Streets of San Francisco
Bobrowsky, Meghan.
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 31 Mar 2022: B.1.