[ad_1]
Waymo will begin allowing its self-driving vehicles to traverse Austin without a safety agent behind the wheel starting tomorrow, a crucial step before the company opens the program to the public.
Company Announce On Tuesday, it will begin transporting employees across 43 square miles of the Texas capital, including the Barton Hills, Riverside, East Austin and Hyde Park neighborhoods, as well as downtown Austin.
The move forward comes just days after Waymo won the ability to start charging for rides in an expanded area across both Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Waymo has not provided a timeline for when it plans to start offering self-driving rides to Austin citizens. When that happens, it will become the fourth city where the company’s robotaxis officially operate, after Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix.
Waymo continues to steadily expand its autonomous ride-hailing platform, which it calls Waymo One, even as other companies in the space struggle. GM-owned Cruise is currently under investigation by a myriad of state and federal agencies over how it handled an October collision with a pedestrian. Ford-backed Argo AI has gone out of business. And many once-prominent Chinese AV startups have done just that slowed down or stopped Testing in the United States
Waymo has had problems of its own. Just last month, one of the company’s self-driving vehicles collided with a cyclist in San Francisco, an accident that the California Department of Motor Vehicles is investigating. The company also recently issued a recall of its autonomous software after two Phoenix-area AV vehicles collided with the same towed truck late last year.
[ad_2]
Source link
