Waymo, the self-driving car service owned and operated by Google parent Alphabet, is moving up in the world.
The company will begin offering fully autonomous ride-hailing services to the general public in Los Angeles on Thursday, seven months after California regulators approved it to start charging for around-the-clock rides in San Francisco. For the first few weeks of operations, Waymo will offer free rides to the 50,000 people that have signed up for its services in Los Angeles. But with permission from the California Public Utilities Commission(CPUC), Waymo will eventually transition to a paid service.
The CPUC has also given Waymo approval to operate in San Mateo County, in addition to Los Angeles County. Waymo also plans to expand its test-drives to the public in Austin later in 2024.
“Once an unimaginable future, autonomous driving is now a real-world way of getting around for tens of thousands of people each week,” Waymo CEO Tekedra Mawakana told a crowd at the South by Southwest conference on Wednesday.
Despite Waymo’s success, its self-driving vehicles haven’t been as widely accepted as the company would like.
Its initial expansion in San Francisco last August was met with biting criticism from labor unions, residents, and some government officials. Just last month, an angry crowd in the city set a Waymo car on fire. The incident occurred just days after a Waymo self-driving car hit a bicyclist. A few days after the arson, Waymo recalled its software, pointing to a December incident in which two driverless cars crashed into the same truck in rapid succession.
Waymo’s rival, Cruise LLC, has had its own issues. The General Motors-owned subsidiary was forced to suspend operations last October following a disastrous incident that severely injured a woman in San Francisco.
California regulators later accused Cruise of withholding essential information about the incident and suspended the company’s permits. The U.S. Department of Justice and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration have also opened inquiries into the company. Since then, several executives have resigned or been dismissed from the company, and Cruise laid off a quarter of its workforce.
In wake of the controversies, Cruise hired a veteran Ford and Apple executive to be its safety chief and issued an independent third-party report on its governance and government relations. The company has been in talks with officials in several U.S. cities, such as Houston and Dallas, to resume testing its cars on public roads with safety drivers behind the wheel.