Waymo broadens Robotaxi services in San Francisco and Los Angeles

Waymo, an Autonomous Robotaxi operator, has announced broadened service offerings in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County.

This expansion includes the San Francisco Peninsula adding Daly City, Broadmoor, and Colma to the already available areas for public ride-hailing service. This will add Marina del Rey, Mar Vista, Playa Vista, and others from Hollywood, Chinatown, and Westwood in Los Angeles.

Waymo robotaxi enables customers to take a ride from a pickup point and drop off at their destination autonomously. To do this, the vehicle relies on equipment and LiDAR sensors to map streets, radar, and cameras to provide a vision capability.

Aside from the hardware, the company has designed an advanced software algorithm and machine learning to take input from onboard equipment and react in real-time while navigating to the endpoint.

Related – Waymo begins 6th generation driver sensor testing and validation

Last month, Alphabet announced a $5 billion investment in Waymo and confirmed that this funding will help to advance its fleet and technology to provide a better user experience. In June this year, Waymo opened a ride-hailing service for all locals in San Francisco by removing the waitlist program.

The operations in San Francisco now cover 55 square miles of the Bay Area ranging from Fisherman’s Wharf to Serramonte Center and leads to the Daly City and Colma BART Station.

In March this year, Waymo started commercial operations in Los Angeles. The company has shared data that more than 150 thousand people have signed up for the waitlist. The robotaxi operator said it is scaling operations to meet the demand. Now locals have the opportunity to take a ride of 79 square miles of LA County.

In terms of progress, the Waymo One is now completing more than 50,000 paid rides a week across San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. The ride-hailing service has added 90 square miles to the Metro Phoenix service and began curbside airport pickups and dropoffs at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

As of August, the locals in operated locations have taken more than 2 million paid trips with Waymo. It drove more than 20 million miles of autonomous driving.

Hey, CA: we’re serving more of SF and LA! Today, SF riders can now travel to Daly City. And tomorrow, LA riders can get to more of Playa Vista, Westwood, Chinatown, and Hollywood. New exciting places, same great service! https://t.co/0m05eCPXzW pic.twitter.com/69oV9wqX0f

— Waymo (@Waymo) August 6, 2024

(source – Waymo)