Waymo will restart road tests of its fleet of self-driving vans in suburban Phoenix next week, nearly 2 months after idling them because of the COVID-19 pandemic—but no robotaxi rides
“The first part of our tiered approach to safely resume our operations begins with our test fleet and responsibly progresses to serving Waymo One riders again,” the company said. “We’ll begin driving in other cities in the days and weeks to come, including San Francisco, Detroit and Los Angeles, and the resumption of our driving operations in these locations will similarly be guided by ensuring the safety and health of our team in line with CDC and state and local guidance.
Waymo was the first company to launch a small-scale, semi-public ride program, starting in late 2018 in Chandler, Arizona. So far it’s deployed about 1,000 vehicles in cities across the U.S. and plans to add tens of thousands more over the next year or two. Waymo One operates much like Uber or Lyft, with a company designed app that lets registered users hail one of its vans anywhere within a 100-square mile section of suburban Phoenix. Fares are comparable to conventional ridehail services.
While its vehicles weren’t running on public roads, Waymo says its engineers continued hardware and software development work and continued to rack up billions of miles in complex, computer-simulated testing.
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