On October 8, 2020, Waymo announced it was opening its fully driverless service to the general public in Phoenix. In the company’s words: “Beginning today, October 8, we’re excited to open up our fully driverless offering to Waymo One riders.” For the first time, members of the public could hail a ride with no human safety operator in the vehicle at all.
The cars were Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans running what Waymo calls the fourth-generation Waymo Driver, which the company said had “pioneered fully driverless, paid rides on high-speed roads across a service area larger than the city of San Francisco.” Before this launch, only “5-10% of our rides in 2020” had been fully driverless, restricted to an exclusive group of early riders under non-disclosure agreements. Waymo said that in the near term, “100% of our rides will be fully driverless.”
This was the moment self-driving moved from demonstration to a real, paid, no-safety-driver service open to ordinary customers. It came almost exactly a decade after Google publicly revealed the self-driving project in 2010, and underscored how long the road from working demo to deployable product really is - a gap measured in years, not months.