Google’s parent company Alphabet has a division called Waymo that’s working on self-driving cars. It has an entire fleet of autonomous cars that are being tested on public roads. The company eventually wants to launch a ride-hailing service that uses these self-driving cars. Waymo hasn’t said what the fares for its self-driving taxi service will be but it has reportedly started testing trip fares with early riders.
Bloomberg reports that Waymo is testing trip fares with early riders as the company inches closer to its global of launching a commercial ride-hailing service which relies on autonomous cars in Phoenix.
Reporters from the scribe were shown a mock-up of Waymo’s ride-hailing app that hasn’t been publicly revealed as yet. The app displayed probable trip fares but Waymo said that the numbers are mere placeholders. The fares do appear to be similar to those of other ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft.
Waymo actually has “various pricing models” under consideration, the company itself confirmed this much, but this goes to show that it has made considerable progress to achieve its goal of launching the autonomous ride-hailing service. The cars it will use for this service will be hundreds of Chrysler Pacifica minivans which will be fully capable of driving themselves. Waymo’s service is expected to be launched at some point later this year.
Filed in . Read more about Self-Driving Cars and Waymo.