At Waymo, we’re developing a generalizable, fully autonomous Driver – the Waymo Driver – designed to integrate with a variety of vehicle platforms and commercial applications including ride-hailing, trucking, local delivery, and personal car ownership. Given the tremendous momentum and substantial commercial opportunity we’re seeing on the ride-hailing front, we’ve made the decision to focus our efforts and investment on ride-hailing. We’re iterating more quickly than ever on our technology by pushing forward state of the art AI/ML, and seeing significant business growth and rider demand in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.
With our decision to focus on ride-hailing, we’ll push back the timeline on our commercial and operational efforts on trucking, as well as most of our technical development on that business unit. We’ll continue our collaboration with our strategic partner, Daimler Truck North America (DTNA), to advance technical development of an autonomous truck platform. Both our companies share the common goal of improving road safety and efficiency for fleet customers, so we’ll follow through with the platform investments we’ve made to create a redundant chassis to facilitate autonomous trucking. We look forward to continuing to bring together our autonomous tech with DTNA’s autonomous-ready Freightliner Cascadia® platform and exploring the potential of future platforms. Our ongoing investment in advancing Waymo Driver capabilities, especially on freeway, will directly translate to trucking and benefit its development efforts.
Our goal is to set our company on a solid path of value creation by focusing on achieving commercial success for our ride-hailing business in the near term. We are rapidly improving the Driver, shaping and overcoming hurdles in the regulatory landscape, and testing use cases that will provide valuable insights for partners in the long run. We continue to see a significant future commercial opportunity for our trucking solution alongside other commercial applications of the Waymo Driver. Laser-focusing on ride-hailing today puts us, our partners, and our customers in a strong position to be successful in the future across all of the business lines we pursue over time, showcasing the breadth of the Waymo Driver.