Waymo to expand to Minneapolis, Tampa, and New Orleans
Waymo currently operates in five cities with plans for 20, while Tesla operates in two with named plans for seven so far.
It’s been a big week for autonomous cars, and it’s only getting bigger.
Right on the heels of announcing this week that its driverless cars would be available to the public next year in five more markets — Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando — Google’s Waymo said Thursday that it’s also planning to expand to Minneapolis, Tampa, and New Orleans. It will begin manual testing there in the “coming days.”
Currently in five cities in the US, Waymo already plans to more than quadruple that number, and says there’s “more to be announced.”
The company did not provide a time frame for the most recent announced expansion, but typically Waymo follows a set of procedures in each city: it reveals that it will expand to that market, tests with — and then without — drivers, and finally opens to the public.
The time between Waymo announcing its expansion to a city and actually opening to the public in that city has been getting shorter. Most recently, Waymo became available through the Uber app in Atlanta in June, less than a year after the company said it would expand there.
Waymo’s biggest competitor, Tesla, also made some big progress this week. It got approval to launch its robotaxi service in Phoenix — one of the markets it said during its annual shareholder meeting that it was expanding to in addition to Las Vegas, Dallas, Houston, and Miami.
Currently, Tesla operates a ride-hailing service in Austin, with a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and in the Bay Area, with a driver using supervised Full Self-Driving tech. As of this week, the app is no longer invite-only in those cities but is now open to the iPhone-holding public. On the last earnings call, CEO Elon Musk said the company planned to operate in 8 to 10 markets by the end of the year.
