Waymo Plans To Widen Robotaxi Lead Over Tesla With 2026 Dallas Launch

Waymo, based on Mountain View, California, has announced in a blog post that will start commercial transport services in Dallas in 2026, a city where it is already being tested, without however specifying the exact date. The company is currently operational in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and Atlanta, and had previously declared that she wanted to launch the service to Miami and Washington, DC, already next year. Dallas represents a strategic objective for Waymo also for its potential impact on road safety: the city records the highest rate of fatal accidents between the US urban areas with more than a million inhabitants.

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The announcement comes a week after Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, said Waymo could double or even triple the number of cities in which it operates shortly. "The driver Waymo has already traveled over 100 million miles on public roads, and the team is taking tests in more than ten cities this year, including New York and Philadelphia," said Pichai during the conference call on July 23 on the financial results of Alphabet. "We hope we can serve passengers in all ten cities in the future."

In addition to Dallas, New York and Philadelphia, Waymo has confirmed that he is in the testing phase with electric robotaxi in Houston, San Antonio, Miami, San Diego, Nashville, Washington, Boston and Tokyo. Currently, the company carries out over 250,000 paid runs every week in the five cities where the service is available. This volume could generate a weekly turnover of at least 5.1 million dollars, considering an average rate of $ 20.43 in the running, according to an estimate of the OBI app, which aggregates the prices of Ride-Hailing services in real time.

For comparison, Tesla is offering races with "supervised" robotaxi in a small area of Austin, with a technician sitting in the front of the front passenger ready to intervene in case of problems. Among the accidents recorded so far there are no correct turning maneuvers, collisions with parked vehicles and at least one case in which a car did not stop independently at a level crossing while approaching a train. Tesla is also testing its technology in San Francisco, but with security technicians on board, given that the company does not have the permissions necessary to operate a robotaxi service in California (moreover, it is awaiting a decision by the Office of Administrative Hearyings of the State regarding accusations of deceptive advertising presented by the DMV for exaggerating the capacity of the Autopilot software and Full Self-Driving).

Despite Tesla's still limited commercial progress in the Robotaxi, Elon Musk reiterated last week that his company is a leader in technology, despite using only cameras for the vision system, excluding Lidar Laser and Radar, technologies that Waymo and most of the self -driving competitors and experts consider fundamental to guarantee security.

"Tesla is by far the best in the world in the AI applied to the real world," said Musk during the corporate call conference. "An obvious test is the comparison with Waymo. Waymo's car is full of who knows how many sensors. Google is not good at artificial intelligence? Yes, it is. But she is not good in the real world. Tesla is much further on Google. A far."

In Dallas, Avis will collaborate with Waymo to guarantee charging, cleaning and basic maintenance of robotaxi at the fleet depot centers.

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