It’s not even close anymore. Google’s Waymo, long believed to be one of the leaders in the self-driving space, is now clearly the leader. Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana announced today that Waymo has just surpassed 100,000 paid autonomous trips per week.
Tesla, which first revealed a ‘robotaxis’ plan for a self-driving ride-sharing network in 2019, now he says will share her plans in October of this year. And General Motors, which just laid off more than 1,000 software developers, power start charging for self-driving rides in 2025.
Waymo currently operates in just three cities, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, but plans to add Austin “soon,” so its 100,000 paid rides per week should soon grow significantly. The company regularly adds new areas around the cities it operates as well.
Just yesterday the company introduced the sixth generation of its autonomous driving technology, called Waymo Driver. The new version requires fewer sensors than before, reducing costs, but still uses 13 cameras, four lidars, six radars, as well as external audio receivers. This suite of sensors, the company says, gives the Waymo Driver overlapping fields of view around the vehicle up to 500 meters away.
“Our current system allows us to provide safe and reliable service to riders in the cities where we operate, even in extreme heat, fog, rain and hail,” the company’s vice president of engineering, Satish Jeyachandran, said recently.
Waymo Driver in action in a Zeekr electric vehicle.
Tesla, on the other hand, has attempted to achieve autonomous driving using only vision technology with far fewer cameras. GM’s Cruise uses cameras, radar and lidar.
Some predictions have pegged a functioning robotaxi empire more than 5 trillion dollars by 2029, so the race to achieve safe autonomous driving has huge economic implications. That could boost Alphabet (the parent company of both Google and Waymo) to massive new stock valuations.
And if Tesla’s soon-to-be-announced robotaxi doesn’t catch on quickly, it could also be a drag on the car company’s valuation, which is already down 11% year-over-year.
