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Waymo and Tesla have robotaxi expansion news this week. But not really. Let me explain.
Waymo Robotaxis
Waymo has been expanding into more and more cities recently. After decades of development and slow growth, it seems Waymo is finally hitting the rapid expansion phase of its life. When I saw an announcement from the company pop up this week, I thought it was going to be about an even faster rollout plan. After all, the title of the announcement was: “Bringing Waymo to more people, sooner.” Great! Where are you expanding into now?
Oh, well, the announcement was basically just an announcement that the company would be expanding its robotaxi service into new cities — at some undisclosed time. In other words, it wasn’t really news. The company wrote: “We’re constantly asked ‘when will Waymo come to my city?’ The answer— we’re on our way to serving major cities across the U.S. and other global cities as we work to bring the Waymo Driver to more people.
“With hundreds of thousands of weekly fully autonomous trips and over 100 million miles of public road experience, we’re entering a new chapter and accelerating our commercial expansion. If you see us driving in your city, it’s because we are working hard to serve you in the future.”
Oh. Okay.
Well, at least it wasn’t a vague and rambling master plan about unicorns and rainbow farts.
Waymo also provided a brief update of recent expansions and the breadth of its network today. “Today, the Waymo Driver can navigate new cities safely and faster, validated by our expansion from Phoenix to the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, and soon Miami, Washington, D.C., and Dallas. Operating in 5+ major U.S. cities and testing across the country and Tokyo has strengthened our system, creating a robust and adaptable Waymo Driver that can expand to new cities.”
Importantly, Waymo also highlighted that its operations make our roadways safer.
Tesla Robotaxi App Launched
Again, Tesla also isn’t growing its robotaxi service area. However, the company has now launched a new app, “Robotaxi.” I downloaded it to check it out. However, it’s only useful at the moment for people in the Austin metro area where Tesla is offering robotaxi rides with a safety driver onboard (and the Bay Area metro area for Tesla employees).
Perhaps Tesla also expects to expand rapidly in coming months. We’ll see. But I’ve said for years that Tesla should launch this app either way in order to get it working smoothly, get any bugs out, and get people used to it.
The app includes instructions on how to open the door handles, where to put luggage, and some other basic matters.
Elon Musk has indicated that he expects Tesla robotaxis will be blanketing much of the United States by the end of the year. Though, he has said similar things several times before in the past decade, so you can’t even take such statements with a grain of salt at this point. But maybe it will finally happen in 2025. We’ll see….
The issue is — once Tesla starts providing robotaxi rides (safety driver or not), the company will have to take on the liability in case of an accident. And accidents will happen. I’m very curious to see how quickly Tesla expands its robotaxi trials, but I don’t expect they will be without safety drivers anytime soon.
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