The great nightly Waymo honk-a-thon — in which the company’s robotaxis erupted into a chorus of honking at night’s end in a San Francisco parking lot— was resolved, then not. Now it is again. The backstory: Software engineer Sophia Tung set up a livestream of the parking lot that captured the robotaxis streaming in to park — and […]
Waymo to begin testing driverless robotaxis on San Francisco freeways
Waymo plans to start testing its fully autonomous vehicles with no human safety driver on freeways in the San Francisco Bay Area this week. Its employees will be the first guinea pigs. For those who didn’t already know, Waymo got the approval from California regulators to charge for autonomous rides on the freeway back in […]
Alphabet pours $5B into Waymo, Cruise scraps the Origin and Elon’s bet on autonomy
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! I don’t know about you, but for me, the past few days have offered up even more evidence that our world is vulnerable to software bugs. Yep, […]
Alphabet to invest another $5B into Waymo
Alphabet will spend an additional $ 5 billion on its self-driving subsidiary, Waymo, over the next few years, according to Ruth Porat, the company’s chief financial officer. Porat announced the commitment to a new “multi-year investment” Tuesday during Alphabet’s second-quarter earnings call. “This new round of funding, which is consistent with recent annual investment levels, […]
Waymo wants to bring robotaxis to SFO, emails show
Waymo is ramping up efforts to gain access to a lucrative robotaxi use case: pickups and drop offs at the San Francisco International Airport, according to emails viewed by TechCrunch and obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Waymo already has the required permits to commercially operate its robotaxi service 24 hours a day […]