Six years after launching its autonomous-truck program, Waymo has said it’s decided to focus more on developing its ridesharing ambitions using its self-driving cars and minivans.
The California-based, Alphabet-owned company said its decision to effectively put autonomous trucking on the back burner is down to the “tremendous momentum and substantial commercial opportunity” that it’s seeing with the pilot ridesharing service it launched in Arizona in 2018 before taking it to several other states. Customers involved in the program can use an app to call a Waymo driverless car in the same way they would book an Uber.
“With our decision to focus on ride-hailing, we’ll push back the timeline on our commercial and operational efforts on trucking, as well as most of our technical development on that business unit,” Waymo co-CEOS Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov said in a blog post shared on Wednesday.
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