Waymo Orders 62,000 Cars With Fiat Chrysler

With a big splash comes today’s announcement from the Google sister company Waymo to buy up to 62,000 Fiat Chrysler minivans and later this year deploy them for their commercial robotaxi operation.

A few months ago Waymo had already announced to buy ‘several thousand’ minivans from Fiat Chrysler, and doubled down shortly after, by buying up to 20,000 Jaguar i-Pace and equip them with Waymo technology.

Today Waymo has 600 Fiat Chrysler minivans on the roads, mostly in the Phoenix area and Mountain View. The company is also working on autonomous delivery services and trucks.

Waymo is far ahead of their competitors and is leading the race for autonomous cars. The 2017 Disengagement Report published beginning of this year shows the technology advantage, the company also has driven more than 5 million miles on public roads in autonomous mode. While others struggle with disengagements every few miles or are even involved in fatal crashes with their experimental vehicles, Waymo is making exponential gains.

Not least because of this head start and the exponential growth nature of self-driving technology, Swiss investment bank UBS expects Waymo to own fully sixty percent of the of the self-driving market by 2030.

This article has also been published in German.