Tens of thousands of people in and around San Francisco are on the waiting list for a Waymo robotaxi ride, the Alphabet Inc.-owned company’s co-chief executive said Friday (Dec. 3) at the Reuters Next conference.
Hundreds of area residents have taken rides in the company’s autonomous vehicle since its test run began in August, according to the Reuters report.
Founded in 2009, Waymo has billions of dollars in financing to develop self-driving cars and trucks, but a wide-scale offering has been slow to come to fruition and San Francisco is only the second test site for Waymo passenger service.
“We are building a business, so we’re really focused on how to commercialize this technology,” co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said at the conference. She added that Waymo is exploring ways to add ride hailing, trucking, local delivery and even personal car ownership in the future.
Waymo launched the free autonomous ride offering to a select group of San Francisco residents with safety drivers using its Jaguar electric vehicles. The company has intentionally chosen diverse testers to generate feedback across all demographic sectors, as half of San Francisco’s riders are women.
“In San Francisco, we were very focused on making sure that there was gender diversity because safety and transportation is such an issue — not only safety on the roads, but also physical safety,” said Mawakana.
Waymo also has been running paid rides in driverless minivans outside Phoenix since October 2020 and has been carrying freight with autonomous semi-trucks in Texas for the last several months.
Waymo and its rival, General Motors-backed Cruise, were awarded one of two California regulatory permits to offer autonomous rides to passengers. Waymo also plans to deliver groceries ordered from a Safeway store in San Francisco to specially-chosen Waymo and Safeway employees.
Related: Self-Driving Tech Company Pony.ai Considers Going Public
In June, Reuters reported that Toyota-based self-driving tech firm Pony.ai is considering going public as part of its plan of commercializing driverless ride-hailing.
Pony.ai, which operates in China and the U.S., hopes to install its technology in hundreds of vehicles in 2022 and tens of thousands by 2025, CEO James Peng said in an interview. However, Peng said the company is “still debating and considering” the time frame for going public.
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