Google Leads the Autonomous Taxi Race Through Waymo
The Google subsidiary has deployed self-driving taxis in multiple American cities. Neither regulators nor hardware costs are likely to impede its slow but steady progress.
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Waymo, a subsidiary of Google’s holding company Alphabet, is a developer of autonomous “self-driving” vehicles, which it deploys via app-based taxi services. In 2023, Waymo vehicles drove 3.7 million miles in California with a human “safety driver” supervising, and 1.2 million miles completely autonomously, together more than any other self-driving vehicle company, with General Motors-owned Cruise in second place.1 As of January 2024, the company, in total, has driven more than seven million miles with no drivers across three cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, Arizona.2 The company’s short-term expansion plans include Austin, Texas in 2024 and New York City, the latter only with human safety drivers.3 In the long term, the company envisions a future where most driving is done by computers, not humans.