Waymo Expands Self-Driving Car Trials to San Francisco

pcmag.com:

Waymo has started testing its autonomous vehicles in San Francisco.

Starting today, Waymo employees in San Francisco will be able to catch a ride to work from its fleet of self-driving, all-electric Jaguar I-PACE cars.

The company's been testing in Arizona for several years; with the expansion to the Bay Area, this is the "first time any company is simultaneously running fully autonomous ride-hailing operations in multiple cities," Waymo says.

Up next: The company plans to make self-driving cars available in downtown Phoenix. Waymo started testing its self-driving vehicles in the East Valley neighborhood of Phoenix in 2017, introduced fully autonomous rides in 2020, and is currently "serving hundreds of rides weekly."

"Just as we’ve done before," Waymo says of downtown Phoenix, "we'll start with Waymo employees hailing trips with autonomous specialists behind the wheel, with the goal of opening it up to members of the public via our Trusted Tester program soon after." The company didn't offer a more detailed timeline.

"Building a safe, robust, and generalizable autonomous driver—the Waymo Driver—whose capabilities and performance transfer well between geographies and product lines is our main focus,” Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov said in a statement.

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