Waymo’s Expansion Plans Into The East Bay

With now 100,000 paid rides per week, a doubling in just three months, Waymo is beginning to expand further and further into other cities and regions. Now Waymo wants to expand its driverless robotaxi service even faster and has set its sights on San José south of San Francisco and the East Bay with cities such as Oakland, Fremont and Berkeley.

To prepare for these expansions, Waymo has now also set up a second assembly factory to equip the Jaguar iPaces with the Waymo Driver hardware and software, as Forbes reports. This factory, with more than 21,000 square meters (230,000 square feet) of space, will open in Mesa, Arizona, and will be operated jointly with Magna, which already manufactures the Jaguar IPace in Graz, Austria. Since 2019, the robotaxis operated by Waymo have been equipped with cameras, lidars, radar and computers only in Detroit.

Alphabet, Waymo’s parent company, is investing an additional 5 billion US dollars in the expansions. After the Jaguar iPace, which is no longer in production, the Zeekr vehicles, which no longer have steering wheels, are to be used.

This article was also published in German.