I just like to keep an eye on the driverless car scene.
Alphabet-owned Waymo and Toyota on Tuesday announced a preliminary partnership to explore bringing robotaxi tech to personally-owned vehicles.
“The companies will explore how to leverage Waymo’s autonomous technology and Toyota’s vehicle expertise to enhance next-generation personally owned vehicles,” the two companies announced.
The companies said they aim to use the partnership to more quickly develop driver assistance and autonomous vehicle technologies for personal vehicles. Toyota is the world’s largest automaker by sales.
Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said the strategic partnership could also result in the Google-owned company incorporating Toyota’s “vehicles into our ride-hailing fleet.”
The Toyota tie-up is the latest automotive partnership for Waymo.
The self-driving company has previously worked with automakers such as Jaguar Land Rover, Stellantis predecessor Fiat Chrysler, Daimler Trucks, Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler, Hyundai Motor and China’s Geely. The partnerships, many of which touted long-term tie-ups, largely resulted in automakers producing modified vehicles for testing or for Waymo to use in its fleets.
The partnership with Toyota will not affect Waymo’s plans to deploy Hyundai and Geely vehicles through the Waymo One ride-hailing service in the future, a spokesman for the Alphabet-owned company told CNBC.
Waymo is now serving 250,000 paid rides per week, up from 200,000 in February, before Waymo opened in Austin and expanded in the San Francisco Bay Area in March. Waymo is already running its commercial, driverless ride-hailing services in the San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin regions.
We are familiar with Waymo’s autonomous taxi service, though not yet here in Houston. Bringing it to personal vehicles is a big step, one that among other things requires the business to project what the market for personal autonomous vehicles will look like. One theory of the long-awaited technology is that once driverless cars are the norm, most people won’t bother buying them for themselves but will simply use various rideshare services, which will likely mean literally sharing rides with other people. Some people may buy the cars and rent them out as taxis while they’re not using them themselves. Or maybe we’ll keep on owning however many cars per household as we do now. I tend to believe in the latter, but I can see the appeal of simply subscribing to an on-demand auto-taxi service and never having to worry about parking, fuel, maintenance, insurance, etc ever again.
We’ll see. First the personal self-driving vehicles have to be produced and marketed, and who knows when that will happen. Tesla has been promising that for years now, but they have bigger issues to deal with at the moment. Until things change, I’ll be rooting for whoever is competing against them in this space.