Waymo expands rapidly to 100,000 robotaxi rides a week

Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) (GOOGL) Waymo confirmed on Tuesday that the autonomous vehicle specialist has surpassed 100,000 trips per week. The trip volume is double what Waymo reported in May.

Chief Product Officer Saswat Panigrahi said Waymo hit the milestone by scaling deliberately, optimizing costs, and delivering a strong consumer experience. “We look forward to bringing the benefits of full autonomy to more people in the future,” stated Panigrahi.

Panigrahi highlighted that Waymo’s approach of designing both hardware and software from the ground up has been crucial to the early success, and continues to pay off as the company introduces 6th-generation hardware.

Waymo significantly reduced the cost of its 6th-generation system while delivering even more resolution, range, compute power, and enabling more capabilities. The 6th-gen system builds on the capabilities of the current, 5th-generation system, which has been instrumental to helping Waymo scale its service to some of the densest cities in the United States and improving road safety.

“With 13 cameras, 4 lidar, 6 radar, and an array of external audio receivers (EARs), our new sensor suite is optimized for greater performance at a significantly reduced cost, without compromising safety. It provides the Waymo Driver with overlapping fields of view, all around the vehicle, up to 500 meters away, day and night, and in a range of weather conditions.”

The Waymo milestone arrived less than two months before Tesla (TSLA) is scheduled to hold its robotaxi event. The race for robotaxi development and deployment includes, to varying degrees, Tesla (TSLA), Waymo (GOOG), Amazon’s (AMZN) Zoox, Pony.ai, May Mobility, Baidu’s (BIDU) Apollo, General Motors’ (GM) Cruise, WeRide, AutoX, Aurora Innovation (AUR), and Motional (APTV) (OTCPK:HYMTF). Within the group of robotaxi fleet aspirants, Tesla (TSLA) has been the most vocal about creating a fleet that allows drivers to rent out their personal vehicles to the fleet.