The rear window of a Waymo Chrysler Pacifica robotaxi is seen while parked at a Target store in Tempe, Arizona, U.S. August 31, 2021. REUTERS/Paresh Dave

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SAN FRANCISCO, March 21 (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Waymo unit said on Monday that it is ready to remove safety drivers from its autonomous vehicles in San Francisco, without elaborating on the timeframe for launching fully driverless services.

Waymo in August started giving autonomous rides free of charge to a limited number of people in San Francisco, with safety drivers on board, using its Jaguar electric vehicles.

Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said on Monday that it has given hundreds of people ‘robo-taxi’ rides for the past six months since the rollout in the densely populated city.

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The planned driverless operation would mark “a major step on our path to deploying a fully autonomous commercial service,” Mawakana said in a blog posting.

Waymo and its rival Cruise, majority owned by General Motors (GM.N), earlier this month obtained permits from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to allow them to charge riders for trips with a safety driver present in California.

They need to obtain separate permits from the CPUC to start collecting fares for driverless passenger service in California.

Waymo declined to comment on the status of its driverless permit application with CPUC.

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Reporting by Hyunjoo Jin; Additional reporting by Dave Paresh; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Kenneth Maxwell

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The post Alphabet unit Waymo says able to launch driverless automobile companies in San Francisco appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Alphabet’s (GOOGL) autonomous driving unit Waymo launched its fully driverless ride-hailing service in San Francisco. The move marks an attempt to catch up to rival Cruise, which opened its fully driverless ride service to the public in the city a month ago after initially rolling it out to its staff.

Similarly, Waymo is also offering fully driverless rides to its employees in San Francisco before opening it up to the public. Waymo’s autonomous taxis have been operating in San Francisco for months in a test program, with a human driver behind the wheel. It is now removing human drivers, so the cars will be moving alone to pick up and drop off riders.

While it is the first time Waymo is offering fully driverless rides in San Francisco, it has been offering the service in parts of Arizona’s capital Phoenix, for a few years. The launch in San Francisco comes as Waymo also prepares to expand the service to more areas in Phoenix.

$39 Billion at Stake in Robotaxi Market

Cruise and Waymo have their sights on the potentially lucrative robotaxi market, whose global size is forecast to exceed $1 billion in 2023 and reach $38.6 billion by 2030. Removing human drivers can enable companies to cut their operating costs, which could lead to a more profitable business.

Cruise is initially offering the public free rides as it awaits a regulatory green light to charge fares. Waymo is already charging customers for taking its fully driverless rides in Phoenix.

Cruise and Waymo are units of Alphabet and General Motors (GM), respectively; however, both have also received funding from outside investors. Waymo is backed by Silver Lake, Andreessen Horowitz, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, and Mubadala Investment Company. Meanwhile, Cruise is backed by SoftBank, Honda Motor Company (HMC),Microsoft (MSFT), and Walmart (WMT).

What Does Waymo’s Move Mean for Alphabet’s Stock?

Waymo belongs to Alphabet’s Other Bets division, which houses mostly experimental ventures, such as Verily in health technology and Loon in internet service. Other Bets revenue declined to $181 million in Q4 2022, from $196 million in the same quarter the previous year. But the division’s operating loss increased to $1.45 billion from $1.14 billion a year ago.

Alphabet may be able to reduce its Other Bets losses once Waymo begins to charge customers for its fully driverless rides in San Francisco and expands the service in Phoenix.

Wall Street’s Take

On March 29, Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak reiterated a Buy rating on Alphabet stock without assigning it a price target. The analyst cautions that the Russia-Ukraine war could reduce online ad spending.

Consensus among analysts is a Strong Buy based on 30 Buys. The average Alphabet price target stands at $3,490 and implies upside potential of 22% to current levels. Shares have gained 38% over the past year.

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TipRanks’ Stock Investors tool shows that investor sentiment is currently Very Positive on Alphabet, with 2.6% of portfolios tracked by TipRanks increasing their exposure to GOOGL stock over the past 30 days.

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The post Waymo Brings Absolutely Driverless Rides to San Francisco appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

• The company is initially limiting the rides to its employees before opening up to the public.
• Waymo’s autonomous vehicles have been operating in San Francisco, but with safety specialists in the driver’s seat.
• The company first began offering autonomous rides in Arizona in 2017.

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Google’s self-driving startup Waymo has begun operating fully driverless rides in San Francisco, the company announced on Wednesday.

The company said that the service is just for its employees at the moment, but it hopes to open the service to the general public soon. The company’s vehicles have been operating in the city for years, but with safety specialists in the driver’s seat.

“This morning in San Francisco, a fully autonomous all-electric Jaguar I-PACE, with no human driver behind the wheel, picked up a Waymo engineer to get their morning coffee and go to work,” the company said on their website.

The company first began offering autonomous rides in the East Valley are of Phoenix, Arizona in 2017. It went fully driverless there in 2020 when Waymo took human safety drivers out of the vehicles.

In addition to San Francisco, the company will now expand its fully automated services to downtown Phoenix, the company said, again initially with company employees before opening up to the general public.

“We’re particularly excited about this next phase of our journey as we officially bring our rider-only technology to San Francisco — the city many of us at Waymo call home,” Waymo Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in the announcement.

San Francisco has been the location of a number of automated vehicle trials, with California officials allowing a record number of them in 2021. Collisions involving autonomous vehicles also increased sharply that year as a result.

The post Waymo Is Bringing Its Totally Driverless Rides to San Francisco appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Waymo is beginning to operate electric Jaguar I-PACE SUVs in San Francisco with no human safety driver at the wheel.

Waymo

Waymo, the first self-driving company to launch a US robotaxi service, said it’s shifting to fully autonomous vehicle operation in San Francisco and expanding the service area where its Arizona robotaxi fleet operates into downtown Phoenix.

The Alphabet Inc. unit, which began testing Jaguar I-PACE electric SUVs loaded up with cameras, laser lidar sensors, radar and computers in San Francisco in 2020, said it’s operating some of those vehicles without a human backup driver behind the wheel. For now, they’ll only be hauling Waymo employees, rather than paying customers. Cruise, backed by General Motors, is starting to offer paid autonomous rides to commuters in San Francisco, although Waymo claims it’s the first company to have robotaxi services in more than one location.

“We’re particularly excited about this next phase of our journey as we officially bring our rider-only technology to San Francisco—the city many of us at Waymo call home,” co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post. “We ‘ve learned so much from our San Francisco Trusted Testers over the last six months, not to mention the innumerable lessons from our riders in the years since launching our fully autonomous service in the East Valley of Phoenix. Both of which have directly impacted how we bring forward our service as we welcome our first employee riders in SF.”

The arrival of autonomous ride services in a dense, urban environment like San Francisco is a big accomplishment for a technology that’s proven to be more complex and challenging to perfect than anticipated a few years ago, despite billions of dollars of investment and, in Waymo’s case , more than a decade of R&D. Along with Cruise, Amazon’s Zoox unit is also preparing to launch a San Francisco-based robotic ride service. Competitors including Argo AI, backed by Ford and Volkswagen, and Motional, supported by Hyundai Motor and Aptiv, have plans for their own autonomous ride services in Miami and Las Vegas, respectively.

In addition to its robotaxi program, Waymo is starting to deploy autonomous semi-trucks, initially in Texas, and has been lining up customers and truck builders for what some analysts think could be a compelling business owing to rising demand for freight and a shortage of long-haul truck drivers.

Waymo began giving test rides in autonomous minivans in suburban Phoenix in 2017, and introduced fully autonomous rides in 2020, limiting the service area to East Valley communities including Chandler and Tempe. The company is planning to make the service available in downtown Phoenix as well though just like in San Francisco, initially, only Waymo employees will be getting rides in that part of the city.

“It’s not a matter of validating your technology for certain streets, but deploying a confident Waymo Driver that is prepared to handle what could happen on that type of street anywhere,” Dmitri Dolgov, also Waymo co-CEO, said in the post. ” Just as our learnings from Phoenix’s East Valley transferred to San Francisco, our learnings from San Francisco are already informing our progress in downtown Phoenix.”

Though it’s been generating revenue for a few years, Waymo hasn’t yet disclosed that information or said when it expects to become profitable.

The post Waymo Begins Absolutely Autonomous Checks In San Francisco, Increasing Arizona Robotaxi Zone appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

AutoX, a Chinese autonomous vehicle company that has made plays in both the US and its home country, is now making a move into San Francisco, an area where its biggest competitors are creeping towards commercialization.

The company, which has been testing its vehicles in the greater San Jose area since 2016, shared plans to launch robotaxi operations and build an operations center in the Golden City. The center will be responsible for vehicle housing, maintenance and charging, as well as processing data collected by the cars locally and calibrating their sensors. AutoX is hiring to build out its local San Francisco team, according to AutoX’s CEO Dr. Jianxiong Xiao, who also goes by Professor X.

AutoX plans to initially start testing its hybrid Fiat Chrysler Pacificas, equipped with the company’s latest fifth-generation AV platform and a redundant drive-by-wire system, with human safety operators behind the wheel. The AV company has already acquired both a drivered testing permit, which allows testing with a human safety operator behind the wheel; and a driverless testing permit, which allows testing without a human safety operator, from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. However, AutoX’s driverless testing permit is for its third-generation vehicle and is strictly limited to San Jose, so AutoX will have to request that the DMV expand that permit to include driverless testing using its newest system in San Francisco.

The Dongfeng Motor-backed company did not say when it plans to pull the driver out for testing in San Francisco, but it did say that it would continue driverless testing in San Jose.

AutoX is moving into San Francisco at a time when others like Cruise and Waymo are actually spinning up commercial operations. Both companies have permits from the DMV to deploy their vehicles, which means they can start earning revenue for autonomous deliveries. Cruise still needs a final permit from the California Public Utilities Commission before it can charge for its robotaxi service, but the General Motors-owned company just nabbed an additional $1.35 billion from investor Softbank as it opened up its driverless ride-hailing service to the public .

The DMV’s annual disengagement reports, which were released on Wednesday, showed that Waymo drove 2.3 million autonomous miles on California’s public roads in 2021, which was far more than any competitor. Cruise followed second with around 900,000 miles driven, both with and without a human safety driver.

The same data shows that AutoX, which only drove around 50,000 miles with a safety operator, did not report any driverless testing of its vehicles. That said, AV developers aren’t required to report testing done on private tracks or closed courses.

In California, AutoX’s fleet size is 44 vehicles, according to the company. The DMV’s data shows that only six of AutoX’s total fleet were actively used for autonomous testing last year. AutoX attributes this to COVID leading the company to scale down testing, but it plans to ramp it back up this year.

AutoX is also claiming to be scaling massively in China with a robotaxi fleet of 1,000 vehicles, which the company says are distributed throughout the cities of Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, where AutoX deploys a driverless fleet. The company would not share the number of rides it has accrued via said fleet.

AutoX frequently touts its in-house full stack hardware capability, which includes a compute platform and various kinds of sensors. The kind of tech to back this up, combined with the move to increase operations in San Francisco and the expansion of a robotaxi fleet back in China, would require seriously large amounts of capital to fund.

The company last publicly announced a Series A raise in 2019, an investment that put AutoX at $160 million in total funding. For comparison, nearly all of AutoX’s Chinese competitors received funding in 2021. Momenta and Pony.ai raised $1.2 billion and $1.1 billion, respectively, WeRide raised over $600 million within a span of five months last year, and Deeproute.ai, a relatively newer company, has raised $350 million as of September 2021.

To the question of how AutoX is able to do so much scaling with less funds, Professor X told TechCrunch that while the company is indeed looking to raise a round in the coming months, it leans on the support from previous investors as well as the massive market in China for robotaxi services.

The post Chasing Cruise and Waymo, Chinese language AV firm AutoX plans to start testing in San Francisco – TechCrunch appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

cruise and Waymo are in a race to see who can win the market for autonomous driving – and have recruited lobbyists here in San Francisco to iron out the high-tech rules of the street. Waymo is Google’s own startup with a valuation of $ 31 billion. (Yeah, I just spat coffee on my screen too). Waymo lobbyists have reported or expected to pay $ 96,000 to San Francisco City Hall this year, city records show. GM-owned Cruise, also valued at over $ 30 billion, is headquartered at the South Beach baseball stadium. Cruise lobbyists have reported or expected to pay SF City Hall $ 136,000 this year.

If that seems like a lot Foreclosure just said, “Hold my beer.” The namesake of the tallest office building west of Chicago cannot be beat. Salesforce lobbyists have reported a staggering $ 1.1 million (coffee, screen) to SF City Hall in fees received or expected over the past 10 years. (If you wonder about the clumsy phrase “received or expected”, sometimes the bill is not paid when reports are due.) …

When a database company has its name in the practice hall, you might as well follow your strokes in practice, and the warrior do this with fancy new technology from, you guessed it, oracle. The Warriors Player Dashboard, powered by Oracle, aggregates and compares game and practice metrics of player shots with the league average. The Oracle Performance Center is the 25,000 square foot section of the Chase Center where the Warriors train and hang out. If you’re wondering what you’re doing with exercise metrics, you can look at where gunshots come and go and say, “Hey Steph, scooch over 5 feet and those threesomes get even cuter. ”It’s hard to do better than curry did it against the Clippers a few weeks ago when he went eight for 13 from downtown on the way to 45 points …

If you’re curious about what’s next Relaxed (I am, but I am a nerd), you will find out this next Thursday at an ask-me-anything online event Nolan Caudill, Senior Director for the in-house tools team in the team messaging application. Go to slackcommunity.com. Here are two things you might not know: 1. Slack is an acronym for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge. 2. In the Salesforce Tower you could look across the park to Slack HQ, where friendly messages used to be posted in the windows (before Foreclosure acquired)…

A contemplative musical “MindTravel” event is planned for November 14th at 7:00 am in Land’s End. (Kevin N. Hume / The Examiner)

This is trippy: you can “MindTravel” by strolling through Land’s End, the park on the northwest corner of The City overlooking the coast and the Golden Gate, while a lot of people listen to “evocative, improvisational” piano music on headphones . The composer of music, Murray HidaryShe swears a “contemplative and powerful creative journey”. It happens on Thursday, November 14th at 7am. Bet you would be Zen at work all day? Go to mindtravel.com/upcoming-schedule…

I still don’t fully understand NFTs. Non-fungible tokens sound like a dessert that you can’t eat to me, and it is. You buy unique things that are only available online. But if that doesn’t seem real, it brings in real money from a well-funded VC. Andreessen Horowitz, the investor in Menlo Park in Facebook (Forgiveness, Meta), Airbnb, Elevator, Pinterest and many more, has participated in more than a third of all largest NFT finance deals, according to PitchBook data …

Finally, if you want to surprise your spouse, you can put a colored light in the toilet a night before bed. the Glow bowl adds some color to your life where you never expected it, and has a dimmer and “carousel mode” that alternates between colors. Go to Glowbowl.com. Don’t blame me, people send me these things …

Send articles to jelder@sfexaminer.com

The post How a lot are Waymo and Cruise paying lobbyists at San Francisco’s Metropolis Corridor? appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

One by one, Waymo vehicles piled up at the end of an otherwise sleepy intersection in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond neighborhood.

The cars lurched to a halt, as if confused by the sign blocking their path, as they gave a strange mechanical hum. Then they did a U-turn, reversed, and headed south on 15th Avenue toward California Street, where they had come from.

A video shared by KPIX Thursday morning shows the Waymo cars performing the repetitive (and admittedly hilarious) dance that has puzzled neighborhood residents for weeks. The incident also caught the attention of Elon Musk.

Haha

– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 14, 2021

“There are days when it can be up to 50 [cars]“Resident Jennifer King told KPIX. “We talked to the drivers, they don’t have much to say unless the car is programmed and they just do their job.”

The autonomous white SUVs with a blue and green W are ubiquitous in the neighborhood and across San Francisco as they gather traffic and other road map information, though it’s unusual for so many of them to get stuck at the same time. However, the cause of the jam is pretty simple.

“We are constantly adapting to the dynamic road rules of San Francisco. In this case, cars traveling on 15th Avenue north of California will have to turn around due to the signs for Slow Streets on Lake, ”a Waymo spokesman told SFGATE in a statement. “So the Waymo driver followed the same road rules that every car must obey.”

The section of Lake Street between 2nd and 28th Avenues was approved as permanent Slow Street on August 3 by the board of directors of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Cars are only allowed to travel less than a block down Slow Street before reaching their destination.

Lake Street was established as a permanent Slow Street on August 3, causing Waymo vehicles to stop and turn around.

Amanda Bartlett / SFGATE

By Thursday noon the hustle and bustle seemed to be over. Only a couple of moving trucks blocked the intersection, and there wasn’t a single Waymo vehicle in sight – until about 10 minutes later I spotted one of the cars traveling west along California Street even though it wasn’t trying to turn right on 15th Avenue .

Waymo said it is currently restricting cars on the road.

No Waymo cars here – the road was mostly clear until Thursday afternoon.

Amanda Bartlett / SFGATE

The post Waymo automobiles getting caught at San Francisco intersection appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

An influx of confused self-driving cars has swarmed through a nominally peaceful neighborhood of San Francisco for “six, eight weeks, maybe more,” according to local residents. The vehicles that are part of the Waymo robot taxi fleet pour into a cul-de-sac in the Richmond District. While some are doing a complicated multi-point turn, others are queued one after the other. KPIX 5 reported on Wednesday that on some days “up to 50” of the technology-heavy driverless cars can turn up, disrupt the routes of the drivers and disrupt local residents. “It’s literally every five minutes,” said Jennifer King, a local homeowner. “And we all work from home, so we hear this.” Waymo has yet to provide an explanation for the technological malfunctions behind the invasion. Waymo cars also regularly get confused by puddles and left turns, according to CNN.

Read it below KPIX 5

The post Misplaced Waymo Self-Driving Vehicles Plague Residents of Useless Finish Richmond District Avenue in San Francisco appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Waymo, the self-driving vehicle company under Alphabet, has launched a robotic taxi service open to certain verified drivers in San Francisco.

On Tuesday, the company officially launched its Waymo One Trusted Tester program in town with a fleet of all-electric Jaguar I-PACEs equipped with the company’s fifth generation of its autonomous vehicle system. This AV system, known as the Waymo Driver, is informed of 20 million self-driven miles on public roads and over 10 billion miles in simulations, according to Waymo.

The Waymo One Trusted Tester program mirrors the company’s strategy in Phoenix, where it launched its first commercial ride-hailing service a few years ago. The Trusted Tester program is a renaming of Waymo’s previous early rider program that was launched in Metro Phoenix in April 2017. Since it was over four years ago, these drivers are no longer exactly “early”, so a name change was appropriate to a Waymo spokesman.

In Phoenix, Waymo finally invited some of the early riders to switch to the Waymo One service, which allowed users to publicly share their impressions about the service and invite friends or family members who were not part of the early rider program. Waymo then opened the service to everyone.

San Franciscans can download the Waymo One app and express their interest in participating in the program, which Waymo says begins with an initial select group of different backgrounds and transportation needs, including wheelchair access. The company didn’t say how many drivers would be in the starting group or how many Jaguars it will roam the city, but it said drivers need to be willing to provide plenty of detailed feedback on their driving experience and sign a nondisclosure agreement .

Waymo will encourage drivers to use its autonomous service to assist them with their everyday mobility needs. Rides are initially free and begin in an initial area in parts of San Francisco, including Sunset, Richmond, Pacific Heights, Noe Valley, Castro, Haight-Ashbury, and more, with the expectation of growing over time. The service is offered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the spokesman told TechCrunch.

The company will have so-called “autonomous specialists” – another term for security personnel – in the front seat to monitor the journey and ensure a safe experience. These security drivers are contract workers and employed by Transdev. Waymo has long worked with Transdev to provide staff for some of its operations.

Waymo’s driver support team will also be available by tapping the button on the screen in the car or through the app if drivers have any questions during their journeys, the spokesman said.

Waymo’s first ride-hailing service was launched in Phoenix, but its roots are in California, particularly in the Silicon Valley enclave of Mountain View. It has been tested in the greater San Francisco Bay area for more than a decade.

The company started testing its Robotaxi service earlier this year by offering autonomous rides to its employees in the city.

News of Trusted Tester’s launch comes a week after Waymo announced it is expanding its Waymo Via autonomous trucking operations in Texas, Arizona and California and building a trucking hub outside of Dallas. The company also tested its fifth generation driver on Class 8 trucks in Texas that haul cargo for freight forwarders like JB Hunt to put the last $ 2.5 billion in good use.

The post Waymo launches robotaxi service in San Francisco – TechCrunch appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Waymo, the self-driving vehicle spin-off from Google, is expanding its autonomous ride-hailing service to San Francisco

fromThe Associated Press

August 24, 2021, 4:46 p.m.

• Read for 1 minute

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Waymo, the self-driving vehicle spin-off from Google, is expanding its autonomous ride-hailing service to San Francisco.

Selected “Trusted Tester” customers in the City by the Bay will be welcomed to ride in Jaguar I-Pace self-driving electric vehicles, the company said.

For the time being, the vehicles will have human substitute drivers on board. But at some point the company wants to drive the vehicles without them, as is the case now in the Phoenix area.

Waymo started the program with a few testers last week and is now expanding it, the company said. It wouldn’t tell how many vehicles are involved or when the human backups are scheduled to be pulled.

The approach is similar to what Waymo did in Phoenix when it launched a limited ride-hailing service in 2017. The company says it has offered thousands of fully autonomous rides on Metro Phoenix since October 2020.

People who wish to join the program can do so by downloading the Waymo One app.

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