Waymo

https://waymo.com/

Education: https://ltad.com/

Ownership

Alphabet/Google

Status

Live to the public in Phoenix, Los Angeles & San Francisco, including paying public customers, & airport transfers (Phoenix). No minimum age (for guests), 18 for the booker.

Available Silicon Valley.

Testing without drivers in Austin.

Announced Atlanta (2025), Miami (2026), Washington DC (2026)

Some early testing in New York & Seattle.

Announced testing Tokyo (2025)

May 2024: 50,000 paid trips a week

Vehicles

Announced that Geely will be one of their robotaxi vehicle partners.

Source: https://blog.waymo.com/2021/12/expanding-our-waymo-one-fleet-with.html

Start at 2 minutes 27 for English

Announced that Hyundai will be one of their vehicle partners.

Source: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/waymo-and-hyundai-enter-partnership/

Scale up

May 2023 - Across Waymo One, we are now serving over 10 thousand trips per week to public riders, not including employees. With this latest expansion, we intend for those numbers to accelerate rapidly to 10 times that scale by next summer (2024). More than 150 million people use ride-hail services in the U.S., and with Phoenix and San Francisco as two of the most lucrative and fastest-growing markets, Waymo One is well positioned for continued growth as we commercialize our technology.

Source: https://blog.waymo.com/2023/05/waymo-one-doubles-service-area-in.html

August 2024 - A Belgian group of transportation officials and industry experts from the automotive industry are in the San Francisco Bay Area and for the first time, a concrete answer to this question has been given, as one of the participants, Tim De Ceunynck, reports. Cedric Dupont, Program Management Director at Waymo, gave very clear guidelines. In addition to a stable legal framework, Waymo needs a local partner who is prepared to provide a budget of €100 million and plan a permanent deployment of the robotaxi fleet. Pilot projects are no longer desired

Source: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/08/22/waymos-european-roadmap-partner-with-e100-million-permanent-deployment-intention/

Customer experience

For an idea of their current (test) vehicles in Phoenix, these videos give a good introduction:

Distribution

• Partnered with Uber - Source: https://blog.waymo.com/2023/05/waymo-and-uber-partner-to-bring-waymos.html