New Delhi: Waymo, Google’s autonomous vehicle spin-off, is expanding its autonomous carpooling service to San Francisco.
Selected “trusted tester” customers in the city by the bay will be able to take a ride in autonomous Jaguar I-Pace electric vehicles, the company said.
For now, the vehicles will have human emergency drivers on board. But at some point, the company plans to run the vehicles without them, as it does now in the Phoenix area.
Waymo started the program last week with a few testers and is now expanding it, the company said. He wouldn’t say how many vehicles are involved or when he plans to remove human safeguards.
The approach is similar to what Waymo did in Phoenix when it launched a limited ridesharing service in 2017. The company says it has made thousands of fully autonomous rides on the Phoenix subway since October 2020.
People who wish to join the program can do so by downloading the Waymo One app.
Read also:
Although there is no driver behind the wheel, the passenger seat is occupied by a security operator who “has a red button that can stop the vehicle in case something happens,” James Peng told Reuters , CEO of Pony.ai.
As part of the new partnership, Ryder will take care of, among other things, maintenance and road service, the companies said.
