Waymo’s robotaxis are coming to Uber’s ridesharing app

By Trevor Mogg Published May 23, 2023

Uber will soon offer rides in Waymo’s autonomous vehicles using the regular Uber app. It will also integrate with Uber Eats for meal delivery.

Announced on Tuesday, the service will begin toward the end of the year in the Metro Phoenix area, where Waymo is already offering driverless rides for paying passengers through its Waymo One app. Earlier this month, Waymo said it was doubling its service area in Phoenix to serve 180 square miles of The Valley, an expansion that it said makes it “the largest fully autonomous service area in the world.”

Two people exit a Waymo taxi. — Waymo

Tekedra Mawakana, co-CEO of Waymo, said that by working together with Uber, the two companies will be well-placed to speed up the pace of development for fully autonomous driving.

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“We’re excited to offer another way for people to experience the enjoyable and life-saving benefits of full autonomy,” Mawakana said. “Uber has long been a leader in human-operated ridesharing, and the pairing of our pioneering technology and all-electric fleet with their customer network provides Waymo with an opportunity to reach even more people.”

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, said his company is looking forward to bringing fully autonomous driving to its platform.

“Uber provides access to a global and reliable marketplace across mobility, delivery, and freight,” Khosrowshahi said. “Fully autonomous driving is quickly becoming part of everyday life, and we’re excited to bring Waymo’s incredible technology to the Uber platform.”

Earlier this month, Waymo revealed that it’s currently operating more than 10,000 trips per week to public riders via the Waymo One app and is aiming to increase this to 100,000 trips by the summer of 2024. Its partnership with Uber should give it a decent shot at achieving this goal.

The tie-up marks a further improvement in relations between the two companies, which five years ago saw Waymo accuse Uber of stealing important autonomous technology trade secrets for its own, now defunct, driverless-car project. Uber and Waymo settled out of court in 2018, and two years later engineer Anthony Levandowski — who worked for Waymo (then Google) before launching self-driving trucking firm Otto and selling it to Uber — was handed an 18-month prison term for trade secret theft.

The latest collaboration follows an earlier one between Uber and Waymo announced last year involving Waymo’s self-driving technology and Uber’s truck-based freight network.

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Contributing Editor

Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…

Cars

Tesla posts exaggerate self-driving capacity, safety regulators say

Beta of Tesla's FSD in a car.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is concerned that Tesla’s use of social media and its website makes false promises about the automaker’s full-self driving (FSD) software.
The warning dates back from May, but was made public in an email to Tesla released on November 8.
The NHTSA opened an investigation in October into 2.4 million Tesla vehicles equipped with the FSD software, following three reported collisions and a fatal crash. The investigation centers on FSD’s ability to perform in “relatively common” reduced visibility conditions, such as sun glare, fog, and airborne dust.
In these instances, it appears that “the driver may not be aware that he or she is responsible” to make appropriate operational selections, or “fully understand” the nuances of the system, NHTSA said.
Meanwhile, “Tesla’s X (Twitter) account has reposted or endorsed postings that exhibit disengaged driver behavior,” Gregory Magno, the NHTSA’s vehicle defects chief investigator, wrote to Tesla in an email.
The postings, which included reposted YouTube videos, may encourage viewers to see FSD-supervised as a “Robotaxi” instead of a partially automated, driver-assist system that requires “persistent attention and intermittent intervention by the driver,” Magno said.
In one of a number of Tesla posts on X, the social media platform owned by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a driver was seen using FSD to reach a hospital while undergoing a heart attack. In another post, a driver said he had used FSD for a 50-minute ride home. Meanwhile, third-party comments on the posts promoted the advantages of using FSD while under the influence of alcohol or when tired, NHTSA said.
Tesla’s official website also promotes conflicting messaging on the capabilities of the FSD software, the regulator said.
NHTSA has requested that Tesla revisit its communications to ensure its messaging remains consistent with FSD’s approved instructions, namely that the software provides only a driver assist/support system requiring drivers to remain vigilant and maintain constant readiness to intervene in driving.
Tesla last month unveiled the Cybercab, an autonomous-driving EV with no steering wheel or pedals. The vehicle has been promoted as a robotaxi, a self-driving vehicle operated as part of a ride-paying service, such as the one already offered by Alphabet-owned Waymo.
But Tesla’s self-driving technology has remained under the scrutiny of regulators. FSD relies on multiple onboard cameras to feed machine-learning models that, in turn, help the car make decisions based on what it sees.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s technology relies on premapped roads, sensors, cameras, radar, and lidar (a laser-light radar), which might be very costly, but has met the approval of safety regulators.

Cars

The UK’s Wayve brings its AI automated driving software to U.S. shores

wayve ai automated driving us driver assist2 1920x1152 1

It might seem that the autonomous driving trend is moving at full speed and on its own accord, especially if you live in California.Wayve, a UK startup that has received over $1 billion in funding, is now joining the crowded party by launching on-road testing of its AI learning system on the streets of San Francisco and the Bay Area.The announcement comes just weeks after Tesla unveiled its Robotaxi at the Warner Bros Studios in Burbank, California. It was also in San Francisco that an accident last year forced General Motors’ robotaxi service Cruise to stop its operations. And it’s mostly in California that Waymo, the only functioning robotaxi service in the U.S., first deployed its fleet of self-driving cars. As part of its move, Wayve opened a new office in Silicon Valley to support its U.S. expansion and AI development. Similarly to Tesla’s Full-Self Driving (FSD) software, the company says it’s using AI to provide automakers with a full range of driver assistance and automation features.“We are now testing our AI software in real-world environments across two continents,” said Alex Kendall, Wayve co-founder and CEO.The company has already conducted tests on UK roads since 2018. It received a huge boost earlier this year when it raised over $1 billion in a move led by Softbank and joined by Microsoft and Nvidia. In August, Uber also said it would invest to help the development of Wayve’s technology.Just like Tesla’s FSD, Wayve’s software provides an advanced driver assistance system that still requires driver supervision.Before driverless vehicles can legally hit the road, they must first pass strict safety tests.So far, Waymo’s technology, which relies on pre-mapped roads, sensors, cameras, radar, and lidar (a laser-light radar), is the only of its kind to have received the nod from U.S. regulators.

Cars

Are self-driving cars the death of car ownership?

Tesla Cybercab at night

Self-driving cars are coming. It remains to be seen how long that will take. Plenty of vehicles can more or less drive themselves on highways, but for now, they still can't completely reliably drive themselves on all streets, in all conditions, taking into account all different variables. One thing is clear, though: the tech industry sees autonomous driving as the future of personal transportation, and they're spending billions to reach that goal.

But what happens when we get there? Tesla made headlines for not only announcing its new Cybercab fully autonomous vehicle, but simultaneously claiming that customers will be able to buy one. That's right, at least if Tesla is to be believed, the Cybercab doesn't necessarily represent Tesla building its own Uber-killing fleet of self-driving cars, but instead giving people the ownership over the self-driving car industry.

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