Skip to main content

Waymo becomes the first company to charge for rides in self-driving cars

Waymo One

Waymo’s self-driving car program has reached a significant milestone. On December 5, the company began charging users in and around Phoenix, Arizona, for rides in its autonomous cars. Aptly named Waymo One, the program makes Waymo the first company in America to generate revenue by giving rides in autonomous cars. It’s a step towards recouping the billions of dollars spent on developing the technology over the past 10 years.

Waymo One works a lot like Uber in the sense that customers request a ride 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by using a purpose-designed smartphone application. After opening the app, they select their pick-up point and their destination, and the app shows how long it will take for a car to show up plus how much the ride will cost. Users can then accept the ride or cancel it. Once on the road, the app tracks the ride, provides the estimated time of arrival, and immediately puts riders in touch with a support agent if they have any questions. Users need to store their credit card information in the app to pay for rides.

Related Videos

As of writing, Waymo One is only available in a 100-mile zone in Phoenix suburbs Chandler, Tempe, Mesa, and Gilbert. Additional details remain few and far between; the company notably hasn’t revealed how many cars will initially participate in Waymo One. Pricing remains vague, too, but Reuters reports it’s about on par with what Uber and Lyft charge. The publication took an early ride in a Waymo One car and paid $7.59 for a 15-minute, three-mile ride.

Limiting the scope of the autonomous ridesharing service allows Waymo to maintain tight control over what is still a new and largely unproven technology. Restricting where autonomous cars can go ensures they will stay in areas with adequate mapping, and roads that won’t present any challenges the cars can’t handle. Waymo hopes to gradually expand the service as it maps roads in new areas. The service launches with Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans (pictured above), but Waymo also plans to add the Jaguar I-Pace electric SUV to its fleet. Every prototype has a human backup driver on-board to take over in case something goes wrong.

Not everyone can request a ride. The first group of passengers are being drawn from Waymo’s existing Early Rider Program, which consists of about 400 volunteer families in the Phoenix area that have been riding in test cars for about a year. The firm notes up to three adults and a child can ride in each car at the same time.

“Over time, we hope to make Waymo One available to even more members of the public as we add vehicles and drive in more places. Self-driving technology is new to many, so we’re proceeding carefully with the comfort and convenience of our riders in mind,” Waymo CEO John Krafcik wrote in a Medium post.

Eliminating human backup drivers could save a lot of money, so Waymo will likely move to get rid of them as quickly as possible. That could translate into cheaper fares for passengers. But the biggest benefactor will likely be Waymo, which will be able to increase profits.

Uber and Lyft are working hard to catch up with Waymo, as are automakers like Ford, General Motors, and Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler. But if other companies take the same gradual approach as Waymo, it could be a long time before self-driving cars become a common sight on the road.

Editors' Recommendations

Officers confused as they pull over an empty self-driving car
Cruise

In what appears to be the first incident of its kind, police officers recently pulled over a self-driving car with no one inside it.

The incident, which took place on a street in San Francisco earlier this month, was caught on video by a passing pedestrian. It shows several traffic cops pondering about how to handle the incident after stopping the vehicle for failing to have its front lights on while driving at night.

Read more
How a big blue van from 1986 paved the way for self-driving cars
Lineup of all 5 Navlab autonomous vehicles.

In 1986, a blue Chevy van often cruised around the streets of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania near Carnegie Mellon University. To the casual observer, nothing about it appeared out of the ordinary. Most people would pass by it without noticing the camcorder peeking out from its roof, or the fact that there were no hands on the steering wheel.

But if any passerby had stopped to inspect the van and peer into its interior, they would have realized it was no ordinary car. This was the world's first self-driving automobile: A pioneering work of computer science and engineering somehow built in a world where fax machines were still the predominant way to send documents, and most phones still had cords. But despite being stuck in an era where technology hadn't caught up to humanity's imagination quite yet, the van -- and the researchers crammed into it -- helped to lay the groundwork for all the Teslas, Waymos, and self-driving Uber prototypes cruising around our streets in 2022.

Read more
Watch folks react to their first ride in GM Cruise’s driverless car
Two people taking their first ride in an autonomous car.

General Motors autonomous car unit, Cruise, has started to offer driverless rides to residents of San Francisco as it moves toward the launch of a full-fledged robo-taxi service.

Following a test run of the service last week, Cruise has released a video (below) showing the reaction of the very first passengers as they rode through the streets of the Californian city in a vehicle that had nobody behind the wheel.

Read more