Your friend in SF may soon be price-checking a ride-hailing app other than Uber and Lyft. Last week, the California DMV granted both Waymo and Cruise permission to offer autonomous vehicle rides to the public, under new permits.
But…there’s a lot of fine print involved. And the companies have two different sets of marching orders.
Let’s sort through the Venn Diagram:
For both companies: Waymo and Cruise were already testing free autonomous rides for passengers, but now, they’ve got permits to officially go commercial…kinda. For the moment, they’re still stuck offering those rides for free.
- In order to begin charging for autonomous services, they’ve got to secure one more puzzle piece: a deployment permit from the state’s Public Utilities Commission.
Driverless deployment: Cruise is cleared to offer fully autonomous rides—read: no human safety driver—in five vehicles. They’ll operate at a max speed of 30 mph, in designated areas of San Francisco between 10am and 6pm.
Drivered deployment: Waymo can operate (semi-)autonomous rides—read: with a human safety driver—in certain parts of the SF and San Mateo areas. The vehicles can run at all hours, at speeds up to 65 mph.
All this means we’re closer to seeing commercial robotaxi services go live in California, although the scope will likely still be limited even then, as it is with Waymo’s fully driverless service in Arizona. Cruise, for its part, foresees its robotaxi business bringing in $50 billion in revenue and hopes to start charging in 2023, Bloomberg reported.