Waymo expanding autonomous ride service to San Francisco

Waymo, the Google self-driving vehicle spinoff, is moving to expand its autonomous ride-hailing service to San Francisco. The company says “trusted tester” customers in the city will be able to hail a ride in Jaguar I-Pace self-driving electric vehicles. For now the vehicles will have human backup drivers on board. But at some point the company plans to run the vehicles autonomously like it now does in the Phoenix area. Waymo says in a statement that it began the program last week with a few testers and is now expanding it. The approach is similar to what Waymo did in Phoenix when it started a limited ride-hailing service in 2017. The company says it has given thousands of fully autonomous rides in metro Phoenix since October of 2020.