- Waymo opened autonomous ride-hailing service in Los Angeles to the public on Tuesday.
- The service can't quite cover all of LA's urban sprawl, but you can get from Santa Monica to Downtown without a driver.
- If you've never tried it, I highly recommend hailing a driverless Waymo. It's a wild experience.
Autonomous taxi company Waymo is now open to the public in Los Angeles, the company announced Tuesday.
Now, anyone with the Waymo One app can order a fully driverless ride within the services' operating domain. Until Tuesday, that option was limited to approved riders picked off a waitlist. LA joins San Fransisco and Phoenix on the list of operational Waymo cities, though with less of the city accessible via autonomous taxi than in those other markets.
Waymo works in an area bounded at the South by Play Vista and Marina Del Rey, at the North by Santa Monica and West Hollywood and at the West by Little Tokyo. Neighborhoods like Silver Lake, Echo Park, East Hollywood, Ladera Heights, Brentwood and El Segundo are all outside of the service area. High-traffic areas like the Sunset Strip and Los Angeles International Airport are also off-limits. That makes sense, as we haven't seen Waymo doing airport pickups or drop-off in San Fransisco or Phoenix, either. It may be a long time before any autonomous system can handle the chaos of a busy airport, especially LAX.
But the rollout is a big deal, as it shows Waymo remains serious about expanding its service. For LA residents, I highly recommend giving it a try. Eight years of reporting on services like Tesla Autopilot made me a skeptic of autonomous driving, but one weekend in San Fransisco reversed that entirely. Hailing self-driving Waymos there was one of the most genuinely astounding technology experiences I've ever had. I couldn't believe how well it worked, and how quickly I got comfortable with a robot driver.
I'm heading to LA next week, so I'll be sure to sample the Waymo experience up there, too. If it's anything like San Fransisco, I expect prices to be a bit more than a comparable Uber, though roughly equivalent with tip included in the Uber. (You cannot tip your robot driver in a Waymo, which the robots will remember when The Time Comes.) Wait times tend to be longer, and surges hit harder as the number of robo-taxis on the road doesn't change with demand. It likely won't replace Uber for most people in the short term, but it's an experience worth trying.
Contact the author: Mack.hogan@insideevs.com.
