It’s not even close anymore. Google’s Waymo, long one of the leaders in the autonomous driving sector, is now clearly the leader. Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana announced today that Waymo just surpassed 100,000 paid autonomous rides in one week.
Tesla, which first introduced a “robo-taxi” task for an autonomous ride-sharing network in 2019, now says that percentage of its plans in October of this year. And General Motors, which just laid off more than 1,000 software developers, may simply start charging for autonomous rides in 2025.
Waymo recently has consistent connections in just three cities, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, but plans to add Austin “soon,” so 100,000 paid rides per week could soon add up significantly. The company uploads new regions around cities where it is consistent with the results.
Just yesterday, the company presented the sixth generation of its autonomous driving technology, called Waymo Driver. The new edition requires fewer sensors than before, reducing costs, but still uses thirteen cameras, four lidars, six radars and external audio receivers. This set of sensors, according to the company, provides the Waymo Driver with overlapping fields of view around the vehicle up to a distance of 500 meters.
“Our current formula allows us to provide reliable service to passengers in the cities where we operate, even in conditions of excessive heat, fog, rain and hail,” the company’s vice president of engineering said recently. the company, Satish Jeyachandran.
Tesla, for its part, has tried to achieve a single vision generation with far fewer cameras in autonomous driving. GM’s Cruise uses cameras, radar and lidar.
Some projections put the operation of a robo-taxi empire at more than $5 trillion through 2029. The race for safe, autonomous driving has broad monetary ramifications. This could propel Alphabet (the parent company of Google and Waymo) to massive new stock valuations.
And if Tesla’s soon-to-be-announced robotaxi doesn’t succeed quickly, it could also hurt the automaker’s valuation, which is already down 11% so far this year.
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