Eactly one year after Waymo made its autonomous technology available in metropolitan Phoenix, the company is looking to extend its reach in the pilot city where it has been testing autonomous vehicles since 2017. One way it hopes to accomplish this is by making it easier for people to reserve rides via a Waymo One app. The Android version of the app has been available on Google Play since last spring, but as of today there’s also an iOS app for iPhone users.
Waymo says that in the year since they made their service publicly available—in 2017, it was only a select group that could use the service—they have accumulated more than 1500 monthly active riders. The company expects that making the Waymo One app available to more of the public will cause more people to sign up as riders.
It wasn’t until October 2019 that the users who are a part of Waymo One’s Early Rider Program were sent a notice that “completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way.” The early riders are the Waymo One users who are the first to test Waymo’s updates to their autonomous vehicles; in order to be a part of the program, users are screened and have signed nondisclosure agreements.
Users are placed on a waitlist to be a part of the Early Rider program, but a spokesperson for Waymo said most of those still on the waitlist are outside the service area. New iOS users will also be able to join the program if they meet requirements.
It is now over two years since Waymo’s AVs began testing on the streets of Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. And over the course of those two years, there has been a bit of resistance including nearly two dozen attacks on the self-driving vehicles, with people in Chandler throwing rocks at the cars, trying to run them off the road, or slashing the vehicle’s tires. Surveys from AAA have found that over the time that Waymo has been testing its driverless vehicles on public roads, Americans have become more fearful of AVs, with a survey from March showing that 71 percent of Americans are afraid of them.
Still, as we’ve been saying, autonomous technology is here, it’s developing, and it’s not going away, as today’s incremental update to the Waymo project shows.
