Waymo brings driverless rides to larger group of riders

Since December 2018, Waymo has provided fully driverless rides to a small group of hand-picked users in metro Phoenix. Starting Thursday, the company will offer those rides to a greater swath of riders.

All of the rides in Waymo's test bed will be fully driverless — that is, with no human safety driver aboard — for at least several weeks, the company said Thursday.

Those rides will be open to anyone who is a member of the company's Waymo One ride-hailing program, which has more than 1,500 members and is open to the general public.

Previously, fully driverless rides were available only to members of the company's Early Rider Program, a smaller group of users who signed nondisclosure agreements and provided unvarnished feedback to help shape future operations.

"We were learning with them," Waymo CEO John Krafcik said.

He hailed the service expansion as a milestone for the company, one that ranked among previous moments that have defined the early days of self-driving technology, such as the driverless ride Waymo gave to a blind man on public roads five years ago.

Though he did not pinpoint a particular metric that signaled Waymo's technological readiness to deploy its fully driverless Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans to a wider audience, Krafcik said a combination of public-road testing, closed-course evaluation and billions of miles driven in simulation helped bring Waymo to this point.

"It's a mosaic filled with literally thousands of threads that tie together and give us that confidence," he said.

Driverless service will be available in a geofenced, 50-square-mile area, about half the size of the regular zone. It begins with the self-driving Pacifica minivans. The company's Jaguar I-Pace electric vehicles, currently being outfitted with autonomous-driving systems in Detroit, are expected to join the fleet next year.

Some aspects of the driverless efforts remain nebulous. Though the company is expanding the base of users who can take these rides, it did not say how many rider-only trips it has conducted thus far within the Early Rider Program. While it expects heavy demand for driverless service in Waymo One, it did not say how frequently it expects to offer rides nor how many vehicles would be involved.

Remote human monitors will keep tabs on the progress of vehicles, but they do not have the capability to directly control vehicles should the minivans encounter vexing situations. A Waymo spokeswoman says the human monitors can watch "multiple" vehicles at a given time but she declined to say whether there was a limit on how many vehicles could be assigned to a single remote monitor.

Krafcik said Waymo is expecting demand for driverless services to outstrip its supply of vehicles in the short term, and the company likely will spend weeks working through a "backlog" of interested Waymo One members.

The company keeps between 300 and 400 vehicles in the Phoenix area. Some are used in separate delivery-focused efforts with partners such as AutoNation and UPS Inc.

After several weeks, perhaps months, the company will reintroduce human safety drivers to its everyday Waymo One operations. When that occurs, the service area will double to more than 100 square miles.

But in this period of going exclusively driverless, "we will learn a lot about fully driverless service at scale, and that allows us additional clues on when we can open up the tap," Krafcik said.

Since Waymo resumed operations after a temporary pandemic-related shutdown this year, riders have been asked to confirm that they're healthy and have not been exposed to COVID-19. The company has worked with AutoNation to increase the frequency with which vehicles are cleaned.

Working with partner Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Waymo has designed a way to flush cabin air four to five times between rides, which "extracts 99 percent of whatever prior riders might have brought into the vehicle," Krafcik said. Further, riders must wear masks in the vehicles. Compliance will be monitored via inward-facing cameras.

The ramp-up comes at a time when Waymo has been busy. This year, Waymo — the commercial descendant of Google's self-driving car project — raised $3.25 billion in its first external funding round, it established a long-term partnership with Volvo Car Group and it bolstered a partnership with FCA.

Further, Krafcik said the company's Detroit factory has been upfitting self-driving systems on both the I-Paces and its Class 8 tractor-trailers, which are part of its new Waymo Via self-driving truck division.