Waymo disclosed Tuesday it’s now giving more than 100,000 paid robotaxi rides every week across its three main commercial markets in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix.
Those figures were shared by Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana in a social media post on X. The new 100,000 figure is double what the company has previously disclosed. Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted on the company’s earnings call this summer Waymo was delivering well over 50,000 paid rides per week, a number that Waymo also noted in a June blog post.
Waymo has reached that milestone with a fleet of hundreds of fully autonomous and electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicles. The company doesn’t share specific fleet numbers, but a Freedom of Information Act request from the California Department of Revenue revealed the company has 778 robotaxis under its deployment permit in the state. It’s unclear if some of those vehicles are operating in Phoenix.
Waymo has long had a foothold in Phoenix, which it continues to grow. But its most notable expansion has been in California, where it received last August the final remaining permits required to operate a robotaxi service commercially.
Since then, Waymo has moved to a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week service in all of San Francisco and continues to move into new areas in the sprawling city of Los Angeles. Waymo recently expanded service to other cities in the San Francisco Peninsula, including Daly City, and started testing its fully autonomous vehicles with no human safety driver on freeways in the area. The company is also ramping up efforts to access pickup and drop-offs at San Francisco International Airport, although the process to obtain approval promises to be slow.
The company also operates in Austin, but has yet to charge for driverless rides there.
Commercial expansion is bringing in revenue — an amount which Waymo has never disclosed. But it also comes with mounting costs. Parent company Alphabet said in June it will spend an additional $5 billion on its self-driving subsidiary over the next few years.
Source : Techcrunch
