Waymo starts driverless rides in San Francisco
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Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), has moved forward with plans to bring fully driver-free rides to San Francisco.
Those rides are for employees only at first.
"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," Waymo said Wednesday. "Since sharing that we were ready to take the next step and begin testing fully autonomous operations in the city, weâve begun fully autonomous rides with our San Francisco employees."

Those riders join thousands served in Arizona, the company says. And it's also expanding the Arizona operation to cover downtown Phoenix; it's been offering some limited autonomous rides to the public in Phoenix's East Valley since 2020.
The company is moving to catch up to Cruise from GM (GM
-1%), which said last month it would start offering autonomous driver-free rides to the public in San Francisco.