Milestone moment! Waymo's self-driving taxis surpass 150,000 trips in a week
1min read Waymo, the self-driving car company owned by Alphabet (GOOGL.US), announced on Tuesday that its Waymo One service now offers 150,000 paid trips per week, with over 1 million miles driven autonomously.
Waymo said: "The future is here, and it's growing every day, safely getting people where they need to go."
Earlier this year in August, Waymo confirmed it had already achieved more than 100,000 trips per week. At the time, Saswat Panigrahi, chief product officer, said the company had reached this milestone by scaling up intentionally, optimizing costs and delivering a strong consumer experience. Panigrahi emphasized that Waymo's approach of designing hardware and software from scratch was key to its early success, and that this approach would continue to be successful as the company rolled out its sixth-generation hardware.
Other major events in the self-driving taxi space also occurred in October, including Tesla's (TSLA.US) highly anticipated Robotaxi event and Pony.ai (PONY.US), a new entrant in the self-driving car space, filing an IPO on the Nasdaq. Various sized participants including Tesla, Waymo, Zoox from Amazon (AMZN.US), May Mobility, Apollo from Baidu (BIDU.US), Cruise from General Motors (GM.US), Weifu, AutoX, Aurora Innovation (AUR.US) and Aptiv (APTV.US) and its joint venture with Hyundai, Motional, are competing in the development and deployment of self-driving taxis.
