A twofer here, beginning with the local news.
You may have spotted Waymo’s self-driving cars across Houston since the company began testing in the city earlier this year. Now, the autonomous ride-hailing service is preparing to take off the training wheels.
Waymo, which operates in Austin and some other U.S. cities, announced Tuesday that it will “soon begin fully autonomous driving” in Houston as well as in Dallas and San Antonio. The company has been conducting autonomous test-driving in the latter Texas cities with the supervision of humans.
“We’ll transition from supervised autonomous testing with a human at the wheel, to fully autonomous testing with no one at the wheel,” a Waymo spokesperson told Houston Public Media. “Employees will take rides as we continue validating the technology on Houston streets.”
Fully autonomous test-driving began Tuesday in Miami, according to Waymo, which said the transition will happen in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio and Orlando “over the coming weeks.” The company plans to offer autonomous rides to the public in those cities “early next year,” the spokesperson said.
Waymo is already fully autonomous and operational in some major cities, including Austin. Riders can hail a Waymo by using the Uber app.
Sounds like they’ll be here before Tesla is, which is fine by me. I’ve seen a couple of Waymos driving around (with a driver) lately, but I’d forgotten that their road trip was more long-term than that. I feel better about Waymo than I do about Tesla, obviously, but I can’t say I’m terribly excited about any of this. I know it’s coming, but I don’t think anyone really understands how big the changes will be. I may try this for the experience, just to see for myself, but as long as I remain a safe and capable driver, I don’t see myself as being anything more than an infrequent customer. The Current and the San Antonio Report have more.
Amazon’s Zoox will start giving free robotaxi rides through parts of San Francisco as it accelerates its attempt to challenge Waymo’s early lead in the race to transport passengers in self-driving vehicles.
The expansion announced Tuesday will be confined to a few major San Francisco neighborhoods and limited to people who signed up on a waiting list to ride in Zoox’s gondola-shaped robotaxis, which have no steering wheel. The San Francisco launch comes less than three months after the Amazon-owned robotaxi company launched its first ride-hailing service along the Las Vegas strip.
But Zoox still doesn’t charge people to ride in its robotaxis, something Waymo has been doing since its debut in Phoenix five years ago. The free rides are the next major milestone before charging fares like Waymo and traditional ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, as Amazon tried to make inroads in autonomous driving — a journey that began in 2020 when the e-commerce Goliath bought Zoox for $1.2 billion.
California regulators still have to approve Zoox’s application to charge for rides in San Francisco — a clearance that Waymo received in August 2023 after overcoming safety concerns raised by city officials. Since then, Waymo’s robotaxis have become a familiar sight throughout San Francisco, where some tourists now make a point of hitching a ride in a self-driving car along with hopping on one of the city’s fabled cable cars that have been operating for 152 years.
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Just as Waymo has already been doing, Amazon is gearing up to bring Zoox’s robotaxis to other major cities, including Austin and Miami. To help Zoox realize its ambitions, Amazon converted a former bus factory into a high-tech robotaxi plant in Hayward, California — about 25 miles (40 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco. Zoox eventually hopes to make as many as 10,000 robotaxis annually at the plant.
Zoox is doing something similar in Las Vegas right now. They have been testing in Austin and Miami since last July. Their vehicles look weird and are sufficiently non-standard that they have more regulatory hurdles to overcome, and may face some headwinds with the general public. Or maybe not, if they’re cheap enough. We’ll have a better idea when they start rolling out for real. CNBC and Reuters have more.
Scary development for a bike rider. With a car I can wave at a driver and get a go-ahead signal sometimes. How does that work with a robot car?