It’s happening. Autonomous ride-hailing is becoming ubiquitous across various US cities thanks to Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, which recently announced a $5 billion multi-year investment during its second quarter earnings call.
On any given day or night, Waymos can been seen passing Waymos on the streets of San Francisco, with multiple Waymos cruising popular tourist spots like Coit Tower.
Born as the Google Self-Driving Car Project in 2009, the company began offering fully autonomous rides in the city in late 2022 and started charging for the service last August. But it was up against stiff competition from its spunky rival, Cruise, which had startup grit, a fleet of 600 with 400 in San Francisco, and adorably-named cars like Popsicle and Goldie. That is until last October, when Cruise lost its permit over a series of incidents that included dragging a pedestrian under its wheels. Suddenly San Francisco became Waymo Town and a love affair began with its waitlist surging to 300,000 people before it opened to the public in June.
By The Numbers
Waymo’s fleet is now roughly 700 cars across three markets: San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles, with more than 100,000 weekly paid rides and two million paid rides to date, according to the company.
San Francisco is its largest market with 300 cars. Although not yet approved for public trips on the freeway or to the airport, the service area recently expanded to neighboring parts of San Mateo and is testing on I-280. In Phoenix, its second largest market, Waymo has been offering airport trips since 2022.
The company recently launched in Los Angeles to select riders with a 150,000-person waitlist. Austin is slated to go live next. In all, the company is testing in 25 US cities including Atlanta, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, New York City, Seattle, and extreme weather locales like Buffalo.
Although Waymo’s initial plan was to add 20,000 Jaguar I-PACEs to scale to a million trips a day, it’s pivoting to a more cost-effective robobus platform in partnership with Chinese electric vehicle maker Geely to build a purpose-built-vehicle that seats five for the Zeekr brand.
Waymo’s product lead for driving behavior and reasoning Jack Wanderman explained the excitement over the new form factor. “Zeekr is a platform designed specifically for ride-hailing with tons of interior space and big sliding doors.” And for comfort, the seats will remain forward facing, Waymo’s head of product and customer research Megan Neese told me. “There is something very important about being able to know where the car is going, that the car sees what you’re seeing, and there’s trust to let go and relax. That changes when you start talking about a covered front,” she said.
Competitive Landscape
With Waymo in the lead in the US, rivals are gearing up to hit the road.
Amazon’s Zoox is planning public rides in Las Vegas sometime this year and has been testing in San Francisco, Seattle and Las Vegas. Zoox director of industrial and creative design Chris Stoffel told me at CES that the company is aiming to be the first in the US to offer paid autonomous rides in a purpose-built vehicle without a steering wheel. The Zoox experience is expected to be different than Waymo’s Zeekr in that it is being designed to move bi-directionally and can seat up to four people in symmetrical spaces that face each other, party style.
Cruise is planning to make its return in 2025 and will be designating a number of its autonomous Chevy Bolts for the Uber platform. The company has been testing in Phoenix, Houston, Dallas and Dubai with the backing of GM, Honda, Microsoft, Walmart and T. Rowe Price. Previous markets included Austin, Miami and San Francisco.
Uber has been adding autonomous options to its platform including Waymo rides in Phoenix and food delivery services by Serve Robotics in Los Angeles and Cartken in Miami, Fairfax and Tokyo. The company is also collaborating with Chinese EV-maker BYD on bringing autonomous rides to markets outside the US. Other potential candidates for Uber’s platform might include Mobileye which has been working with Volkswagen in Austin and Hamburg to ready the ID. Buzz AD for autonomous ride-hailing services by 2026.
And Tesla is planning to reveal a cybercab service at its Robotaxi Day on October 10 as it doubles down on the development of its FSD automated driving system.
But Waymo’s biggest threat just might come from China where several large robotaxi operators have been granted permits to operate in California. This includes AutoX which has a fleet of 1,000 robotaxis and WeRide which has a fleet of 600, but just delayed its $5 billion IPO on NASDAQ. Baidu which has a fleet of 500 robotaxis in Wuhan has not yet filed for a California permit, but might be one to watch along with NIO, Didi and Pony.ai.
That said, none of this is a slam dunk. As Motional’s CEO Karl Iagnemma said in a recent blog post announcing layoffs and a pause on their robotaxi deployment which had reached 100,000 rides with Uber and Lyft in Las Vegas: “Large-scale driverless deployment will not happen overnight,” explaining that the business case has yet to be made. The company recently closed nearly a half billion dollar round with Hyundai.
As autonomous vehicles can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to operate, it’s likely not many companies other than entrenched cloud providers will be able to compete.
All About The Fans
Meanwhile, Waymo has much to celebrate as its super fans have started to join its unofficial 1000 Rider Club.
At 1107 rides, Jaeden Sterling is one of Waymo’s top power users having adventured over 7,105 miles and 34,912 minutes with the self-driving service. Sterling, who uses they/them pronouns, had just turned 18 and was without a driver’s license when they arrived in San Francisco to work at a startup. It was October 2022 and fully autonomous rides had become a thing. They quickly found themselves living the dream, using Waymo to chauffeur them about town, making multiple stops to pick up Blue Bottle coffee, then pizza. It soon progressed to hopping flights to Phoenix to catch an art exhibit and Los Angeles to go dancing and see the sights.
“There’s something that feels so free about just being able to go wherever you want,” Sterling said. “I’ve been researching travel credit cards and rewards programs, and have been able to travel a lot.” They explained that Waymo’s Add-A Stop feature, that allows an itinerary of up to five different stops, has very much been part of that experience. And a cleaner way to explore because it’s a zero-emissions electric vehicle.
Villi Iltchev, managing director of venture capital firm, Two Sigma, is a frequent Waymo rider as well and believes the technology is going to save millions of lives.
“As a cyclist, when I ride my bike and I get next to a Waymo. I know it watches me, and if I try to pass it on the right, it makes room for me. I feel so much safer because it always sees me. It will never get in my way. It will never cut me off. It will always prioritize my safety over itself,” he said. “My kids would much rather ride in a Waymo than in any other car.” An owner of two EVs, a Rivian SUV and a Chevy Bolt, Iltchev feels that in a decade or two, it’s all going to be self-driving and hopes Waymo will help accelerate the transformation by licensing to other OEMs.
As for safety, Wanderman explained that the car’s sensors can see hundreds of meters in every direction, things that are easy for humans to miss, like when it’s dark or a head pops out from behind a car for a second. The sensors know there’s a person there and will defensively slow. It has overlapping fields of view and can see in both directions at the same time. And the AI is starting to think like a human when it comes to lane positioning and figuring out the right speed to drive given a fairly complicated contextual environment.
“Waymo is the most mature manifestation of AI in the physical world today,” said Wanderman. “We’ve been working on machine learning and AI since inception, and staying at the forefront of applying AI to the real world. And what’s very exciting is that the AI models we have deliver a lot of emergent behavior that we’ve always wanted, and knew was desirable for the vehicle to have, but is hard to achieve with just hand-coded heuristics and other traditional robotics approaches.”
And although the company is in the process of fine-tuning location accuracy of drop offs and pick ups, which sometimes can be blocks away from the requested pin, the experience remains magical for many of its riders.
That’s by design, Neese said. “We call it a special space for time that’s yours so you can let go, knowing the car is sensing things around you. You’ll see in the in-vehicle screen that we pick up little road cones, the size of the bus, the difference between a cyclist and a scooter or motorcycle, and visualize that to the rider, so they constantly have the sense that we are seeing the things that they would be caring about if they were driving.”
Whether features like conversational AI will be added to enable chitchat with the Waymo Driver so riders can ask for the Giants game score, or request a massage and guided meditation in a heated reclined seat, or have it suggest shoppable shows where actors’ outfits can be ordered—all that remains to be seen. Perhaps once the driver’s seat is removed and rides get longer, like from San Francisco to Los Angeles, the cabin will become dynamically configurable into any type of active living space desired, from a gaming den to a yoga class to even a podcast studio.
But right now, it’s early days, Neese said, and we’re just focused on optimizing the music experience.
Of course the potential is always there. After all, Waymo is a sibling of Google.
