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Tesla's robotaxi service expands as Alphabet Waymo gains speed

Alphabet’s Waymo roboticaxis have driven over 100 million miles with no human driver, double the mileage in six months. The company is accelerating deployment in U.S. city amid increasing competition.

Tesla, a rival company, is expanding its self driving taxi service following a trial last month with a few Model Y SUVs.

Waymo's service has been growing slowly for years, despite Elon Musk's statement that Tesla would launch the service in multiple U.S. Cities by 2025. It is currently available in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin.

Saswat Pantigrahi, Waymo’s chief product office, said: "Achieving 100 million fully automated miles represents years' worth of methodical progress that is now accelerating to rapid, responsible scale-up."

As we continue to expand our service, we will face new challenges.

Waymo had driven 71 million autonomous kilometers (114.3 millions miles) by March. This is up from 50,000,000 miles at the end 2024, and 25,000,000 miles until July 2024. It completed its first mile in January 2023.

D.A. Gil Luria, Davidson analyst.

The commercialization of autonomous vehicles is more difficult than expected. High costs, strict regulations, and federal investigations have forced many to close down, including General Motors Cruise. Amazon's Zoox is one of the few remaining competitors. It is testing a vehicle that does not have manual controls, such as a pedal or steering wheel, and is planning to launch its commercial services in Las Vegas in this year.

Waymo, the U.S. company that operated driverless taxis for paying passengers before Tesla launched its robotaxi last month was the only one.

After collisions, federal agencies have launched investigations into Waymo and Tesla as well as recalling Zoox and other vehicles.

Musk, despite multiple traffic problems and driving errors as Tesla teetered into the robotaxi industry after years of broken promises, expanded the service area to Austin and announced last week that it will roll out its services in the San Francisco Bay Area in two months.

Waymo announced in March that it plans to launch fully automated ride-hailing services in Washington, D.C., next year. It also applied for a New York permit to operate autonomous cars, with a specialist driving the vehicle in Manhattan. Last month, it said it would start manually driving the vehicles until the permit is granted.

Robotaxis, which began as a small Google project for self-driving cars in 2009, and were spun off seven years later, cover over two million miles per wk autonomously.

By May, the company had completed 10 million autonomous trips compared to 5 million trips by the end of 2024.

(source: Reuters)