Robotaxi Services Expand To New Cities

Read the full story on The Auto Wire

Robotaxi services from Waymo and Tesla are reportedly expanding to additional cities as competition heats up. This means if you don’t already live where autonomous ride services are available, that could be coming sooner than you might expect.

Already recalled Ram trucks are under investigation.

Waymo is busy testing its service in Philadelphia and New York City. Robotaxi service isn’t being made available to customers in those cities, yet. Instead, human drivers are traveling the roads to help the robot cars learn the complex grid in both metropolitans.

The streets in both cities are far more complicated than in any other city where Waymo is operating currently. But there’s another big challenge the robotaxis would face in the City of Brotherly Love and the Big Apple: weather.

More specifically, it snows in the two metros. Where Waymo currently operates are cities where snow is a rarity.

This is the stage before Waymo offers autonomous rides to the public, likely with a human driver sitting up front in case anything goes wrong.

In the meantime, Tesla is teeing up to offer its robotaxi service to riders in the San Francisco Bay Area within the next two months. That area already has had multiple autonomous ride hailing services, including Waymo, so Tesla is moving in on their territory.

Tesla did a small test of its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas not too long ago, so this shows the automaker is looking to expand its offering rapidly to more cities. One would expect Tesla to move into other areas where robotaxis are already running, like Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Houston.

However, Tesla is awaiting approval from the state of California before it can offer its services in San Francisco or Los Angeles. That might be a sticking point, especially with the current political climate, so we’ll see how that goes.

Image via Waymo

Join our Newsletter, subscribe to our YouTube page, and follow us on Facebook.