Waymo lays groundwork for robotaxi revolution

In recent years, Waymo has been heading towards its long goal of revolutionizing urban transport by spreading a completely developed and sustainable ride service.

The alphabet -owned company took another step in this direction with the opening of a new vehicle factory in the Phoenix metro, Arizona, in partnership with the Magna.

Wimo said in a post on his website on Monday that the new site, which has an area of ​​239,000 square feet, will build thousands of Jaguar I-Paces with completely independent Waymo technology.

The company said now has more than 1500 independent cars operating throughout San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phenix and Austin, as it provides more than 250,000 paid trips to users. Waymo also has plans to launch her service in Atlanta, Miami and Washington, next year.

These new cities are likely to get many more than 2000 I-Paces fully governance that start from the production line in 2026.

“We are proud to bring this technology – one day that is believed to be a science fiction – to more and more cyclists all over this country,” Wimo said.

The Alphabet Sundar Pichai coach recently suggested that he was considering providing his independent vehicles to personal property, as well as discussing the idea with Toyota, although organizational obstacles are still high for vehicles completely without a driver, it is possible that this scenario is a way outside.

Waymo appears to be working well in what a very competitive sector. A number of competitors-Gen. Motors and the Ford/Volkswagen Folly-Volkswagen Vollex-have found a distant challenge to build technology and services, forcing it in 2024 and 2022, respectively.

But everything was not a smooth sailing for Waymo, with many incidents related to public road technology, which increases the audit of the organizers.

While many studies have suggested that the automatic vehicles between Waymo are safer than human drivers, recent research by Professor Messi Kamings, director of the Self -government and robotics center at George Mason University, has found that Waymo works better than the human Rideshare drivers, which is approximately 1000 per 100 million miles – it is still worse than the human driver.

However, Kamings emphasized that comparing the integrity of the autonomous car with human drivers is a scientific problem because humans are leading the trillion miles annually, while cars without a driver have only registered tens of millions, making the current comparisons not statistically valid.

Self -government technology has made amazing improvements in recent years, but its limited ability to deal with all kinds of traffic scenarios and weather conditions means that it is likely to be some time before organizers give companies such as broader operational freedoms.