California dreaming: Waymo opens up its robotaxi service to everybody in Los Angeles

Waymo announced on Tuesday that it launched its autonomous ride service in the Los Angeles area to everyone. The robotaxi player said Waymo One customers can take fully autonomous rides 24 hours a day around 80 square miles of Los Angeles County through Santa Monica, Hollywood Boulevard, USC, and everything in between. The Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL) subsidiary said it has received a warm welcome from Angelenos since beginning commercial operations in Los Angeles earlier in the year to a limited group of passengers. Nearly 300,000 people joined the Waymo waitlist in the region following the initial launch.

“We’ve opened our doors to those eager riders over time, who have taken hundreds of thousands of paid trips across the city and highly rated them at 4.7 / 5 stars on average. In fact, riders recently surveyed in LA said that 98% are satisfied with our service and 96% find it useful.”

Waymo plans to scale its LA service steadily over time, just as the company has done in San Francisco and Phoenix.

Waymo’s history dates back to 2009 when it was known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, building on earlier work from the Stanford Racing Team in DARPA Grand Challenges. Led by Sebastian Thrun and Anthony Levandowski, the project aimed to develop autonomous driving technology3. In 2015, Google achieved the world’s first fully driverless ride on public roads.

In December 2016, the project was spun off as Waymo, an independent subsidiary of Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL). Waymo quickly progressed, launching its Early Rider Program in 2017 and the Waymo One commercial ride-hailing service in Phoenix in 2018. By 2020, Waymo became the first company to offer fully autonomous rides to the public without safety drivers.

The Waymo robotaxi developments are of high interest to other companies with autonomous driving initiatives such Tesla (TSLA), Amazon’s (AMZN) Zoox, May Mobility, Baidu’s (BIDU) Apollo, General Motors’ (GM) Cruise, WeRide (WRD), AutoX, Aurora Innovation (AUR), and Motional (APTV) (OTCPK:HYMTF).