Waymo vehicles have hit the streets in the Seattle area.
A week after announcing that the company was ready to begin testing and laying the groundwork for future autonomous taxi rides, Waymo’s electric Jaguar I-Pace SUVs have been spotted.
- One photo on Reddit showed several of the cars parked in a lot at the Link light rail station at Northgate a few days ago.
- Another image showed a Waymo car stopped for a light in downtown Bellevue, Wash.
- And in the comments on that post, a distinctive white vehicle — with all of its attached camera technology — was seen merging onto I-405.
The dozen vehicles in the area are not operating without drivers — yet. Initial safety testing with humans onboard will involve making sure Waymo cars can adapt to area roadways, including in wet weather and across hilly terrain.
There is no date for when robotaxis will become a Seattle thing, like they are in cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Austin. It will depend on how long it takes to complete safety testing with drivers present and then fully autonomously without passengers.
And perhaps more importantly, it will depend on when Washington state establishes regulations permitting such operations.
“A full commercial deployment is contingent on state-level legislation being passed authorizing autonomous vehicle services,” Laura Milstead, spokesperson for the City of Bellevue’s Transportation Department, previously told GeekWire.
Mountain View, Calif.-based Waymo, a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet, began in 2009 as the Google Self-Driving Car Project. It previously tested cars in Kirkland in 2016 and in Bellevue in 2022 to better understand operations in rainy weather.
