Waymo has started offering public rides in four new cities today: Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando.
Customers who have already downloaded the Waymo app will receive an invitation to take a ride today. The company will then add new riders on a rolling basis, before opening up the service to everyone later this year.
Rides will initially be limited to geo-restricted areas in each city. Waymo has shared maps of operational areas for all four cities on its official blog. This is the first time Waymo has debuted in multiple cities at once. The number of operational cities in the US now rises to 10 after Los Angeles, Atlanta, Austin, Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Miami.
Waymo currently completes 400,000 paid rides per week and hopes to reach 1 million by the end of this year. It is running tests in over a dozen cities in the US, and a couple abroad.
The company’s latest expansion comes just weeks after its chief safety officer, Mauricio Peña, testified before the Senate Commerce Committee and answered questions about its safety standards and the use of remote operators. Questions about Waymo’s remote assistant (RAs) capabilities grabbed headlines. Waymo later explained that its human RAs can’t take over a car and drive it; they can only provide advice when the ADS (autonomous driving system) asks for it. The company uses 70 remote operators at any given time, with half based in Arizona and Michigan and the other half in the Philippines.
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Today, the company argued that its autonomous vehicles are safer than cars driven by human drivers. “Data from over 127 million miles traveled shows we achieved a ten-fold reduction in serious injury or worse crashes and 12-fold reduction in injury crashes with pedestrians compared to human drivers,” Waymo said. Despite these claims, challenges remain.
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Jibin is a tech news writer based out of Ahmedabad, India. Previously, he served as the editor of iGeeksBlog and is a self-proclaimed tech enthusiast who loves breaking down complex information for a broader audience.
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