Waymo is adding four more cities to its growing list of robot taxis. The company announced Wednesday that it has begun testing its autonomous vehicles (with a safety display) in Philadelphia and will begin manual driving to collect data in Baltimore, St. Louis and Pittsburgh.
Waymo didn’t offer a timeline for when it plans to launch commercial service at those locations, nor do we know if the Alphabet-owned company will partner with other companies to operate robotaxis at each of them. That was the move in cities like Atlanta and Austin, for example, where Waymo partnered with Uber to promote the rollout of robotaxi.
However, the new locations join a list of more than 20 cities where the company is either offering rides, preparing a commercial launch or testing. Waymo also now offers freeway routes in Los Angeles, Phoenix and the San Francisco Bay Area. The company plans to make one million rides per week by the end of 2026.
Waymo has done all this while claiming to operate at a level five times safer than humans, according to data the company recently launched.
But the expansion didn’t come without its problems. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating how the company’s vehicles operate near school buses after a Waymo was filmed driving around a stopped bus in Atlanta in September.
This week, Austin news outlet KXAN published one report showing that Waymo’s vehicles passed school buses that were in the process of unloading or loading children multiple times — even after Waymo claimed it sent software updates to address the problem.
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