What Is Waymo And Where Are They Operating?

James Koppman, World News Report today, January 16th, 2025. God bless you and yours, no matter where you are in the world. Please subscribe, give us a thumbs up, ring that bell for critical future updates. What is Google's Waymo, and where are they today? Waymo operates hundreds of robo-taxis, completing tens of thousands of driverless taxi rides per week. Through its commercial operations in San Francisco, which were launched in August 2023, Los Angeles, which was launched in March 2024, and Phoenix, Arizona, launched in 2019, the Alphabet-owned startup plans to launch commercial services in three additional markets, Austin, Atlanta, and later this year in Miami in 2026. Goldman's Eric Sheridan and Ben Miller provide clients with a Waymo Robotaxi update. Where is the Waymo today? Here's more of their analysis. Waymo could be in 10 U.S. cities by the end of 2025. Waymo started in 2009 as Google's self-driving car project. and launch the world's first commercial autonomous ride hailing service in the metro phoenix area in 2018 with fully autonomous rides starting in 2019. fast forward to today Waymo now serves 175 000 paid rides per week as of december 2024 up significantly from 10 000 in may of 2023 Only 18 months prior, this ramp-up has resulted in over 4 million fully autonomous rides in 2024 and over 5 million cumulative rides since first launched. Commercial operations are live in three U.S. markets, currently Phoenix, San Francisco, and L.A., with three more markets launching. We're talking about 2025, Austin, Atlanta, and Miami. For a total of six announced markets through 2026, Google expects that Waymo could be in 10 U.S. markets by the end of 2025, likely with live commercial operations in a subset. Based on comments made by Google's CEO at an industry conference in December 2024, Waymo also announced its first international road trip in Tokyo in early 2025. Vehicles will initially be driven manually to map key areas of the city. God bless you and yours, folks. This might be the end of Uber and the end of all taxis as we know it. This is coming out of Google and has been in operation since 2019. 19. As y'all know, it's currently 2025, and they're looking at actually wrapping up 10 cities, well, by the end of the year. Share, subscribe, and always remember, anything's possible in Bizarro World.