Alphabet’s Waymo to offer driverless rides in San Francisco – The National

Alphabet’s Waymo to offer driverless rides in San Francisco – The National

Waymo, the self-driving car arm of Google's parent company Alphabet, will begin to offer driverless rides in San Francisco as it tries to match General Motors.

The company said that it started the service by using a fully-autonomous, all-electric Jaguar I-Pace, with no driver behind the wheel, to pick up a Waymo engineer "to get their morning coffee and go to work", it said in a blog post on its website.

California-based Waymo said on March 21 – six months since it started offering rides to San Franciscans as their first "trusted testers" – that it was ready to take the next steps and begin testing fully autonomous operations in the city. The company is going going head-to-head with GM's autonomous unit Cruise, which announced its own driverless rides last month.