Parent Alphabet promised in July to increase investment in Waymo’s business by $5 billion, and the company began to justify these investments in the information space, regularly reporting on its new achievements. Having recently talked about the new generation of unmanned taxis, she then noted that since May she has increased the number of unmanned passenger transports carried out weekly in the United States to 100,000.
Image source: Waymo
As of May of this year, Waymo was providing 50,000 paid self-driving taxi rides per week in the United States. Since then, the company has managed to expand the geography of providing services in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and it also provides commercial transportation of passengers in unmanned taxis in two cities in Arizona. According to Waymo representatives cited by CNBC, the majority of trips using the company’s service are now carried out in San Francisco. In total, the Waymo One fleet operates 700 prototypes of unmanned taxis in the United States.
In Phoenix, Waymo One is collaborating with Uber, allowing users of the app of the same name to call their own self-driving taxis; in June, the service area in this city was increased by 233 square kilometers. The company now serves the largest area in the United States with its self-driving taxis. According to Waymo statistics, the company’s self-driving taxis have traveled almost 24 million km, and they are three and a half times less likely to get into accidents with injuries than regular drivers, and three times less likely to be involved in accidents without injuries that require registration with the police.