Waymo One, the driverless ride-hailing app, is now available to everyone in Los Angeles, after previously only offering LA rides to people on a waiting list.
What started as a secret project at Google has grown into a robotaxi service available in Phoenix, San Francisco and now Los Angeles. On Tuesday, the company announced that the Waymo One app will be available to an 80-square-mile area of greater LA – including Santa Monica, Hollywood and parts of South LA around the USC campus, in surrounding areas.
With no one at the wheel, Waymo One vehicles are fully autonomous, with the fleet consisting entirely of fully electric Jaguar I-PACEs. Like rideshare apps like Uber and Lyft, passengers can hail a car 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“This is an exciting time to welcome everyone in Los Angeles along for the ride,” Tekedra Mawakana, co-CEO of Waymo, said in a statement announcing the expansion to LA. “Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving. We are so grateful to all of our first riders in LA and we can’t wait to serve more riders soon.”
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Waymo started in Los Angeles with rides available only to people on a waiting list, with nearly 300,000 people eventually participating, according to the company. Waymo claims these rides resulted in an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars, with LA riders surveyed reporting that 98% of them are satisfied with the service and 96% said it was helpful.
The company initially launched in San Francisco after receiving approval from government agencies to charge for rides last year, after first offering its service in Phoenix starting in 2020. Waymo rides in the Arizona city are available across an area of 315 square kilometers.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a federal agency under the U.S. Department of Transportation, reports that fully autonomous vehicles like Waymo’s robotaxi service could have some safety benefits because these cars may be able to detect the threat of a crash that humans cannot detect. The agency says these vehicles, like all other cars, must be tested by the companies that make them and meet the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards that apply to all U.S. cars.
However, some watchdog agencies and experts have warned of potential dangers. The National Transportation Safety Board issued recommendations for Tesla’s Autopilot system in the early years of the driver-assisted technology’s launch. An NTSB investigation into a 2018 crash in Culver City found that the driver relied too much on the system despite the manufacturer’s warnings.
Meanwhile, the MITER Corporation, a nonprofit that manages federally funded research for U.S. government agencies in the areas of transportation and defense, released a report in 2021 calling for changes to federal safety regulations for fully autonomous vehicles — stating that such changes must be implemented as the safety approach in their production and development “maturs.”
“Regulators have recognized this need for traditional vehicles and codified it in the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, and states are requiring their own levels of driver certifications through driver licensing and behavioral testing,” the report said.
Last year, General Motors’ own robotaxi service, Cruise, had its license revoked by California regulators and had to end its service in San Francisco due to safety concerns, including reports from police and fire departments that said the vehicles were disrupting traffic during emergencies while still in the testing phase, the Associated Press reported.
