Waymo robotaxis open to all users in San Francisco

Pop in a driverless taxi with the Google owned self driving company Waymo opening up its robo taxis to all users in that city. That is the focus of today's tech check with Deirdre Bosa Dee, are you going to take one today? I already did Carl. It was as easy as booking an Uber or Lyft, and in fact, I took one here to Moscone Center for Figma's developer event conference. It's called Config My driverless car. It arrived in under 5 minutes. It was easy to find, it was a smooth ride. I took some video from it. You're going to see a jaywalker in a moment. The driverless car handled it pretty well. Now I've taken a Waymo before when it was still in beta mode, so that was organized by Google. So this was truly Waymo in the wild. I only decided to book it like 5 minutes before I left and it's how anyone in San Francisco can now book one. There is a ton of interest. The company says that nearly 300,000 people here have signed up to ride with Waymo since they opened a wait list. That is more than 1/4 of the city's population, so demand could increase by a huge amount. How it handles that will be interesting. This is only day 2 so far, but so far, at least in my experience, so good. The path here though has not been easy and it will not be easy looking forward. The real test is going to come now with this broader rollout. It has taken a lot longer than many in the industry thought that it would take to get to this point. The technology, of course, is hugely expensive. I'm talking like billions and billions of dollars of investment with a so far unclear path to profitability. And of course, maybe most importantly for Waymo and other AD companies, safety is still a huge issue. They're going to have to convince consumers and regulators that these vehicles, driverless vehicles, are safer than human drivers. Waymo speaks to that last point in its blog post, saying that Waymo, the Waymo driver, is safer than even the most attentive human drivers. Points out that traffic violence and drunk driving killed 10s of thousands of people in the United States each year. Still though, as we know we've been covering this industry very closely. A few high profile driverless car accidents has the ability to really set back the industry. Cruz, that's GMSAV subsidiary, remember, it suspended its services and saw its CEO resign last year after a string of safety issues. It just announced a new CEO, Mark Witten. He's a veteran of the video game industry. And that could be more competition for Waymo ahead, which is the current leader, could also mean more supply for growing interest. The question, though, for investors, key question, when does this all pay off? As I said, it has cost billions and billions of dollars. Waymo is owned by Google parent Alphabet, and it's part of its Other Bets business unit, one that loses billions of dollars each year. Now that it's giving rides to, you know, a city the size of San Francisco, investors are going to be looking for some return on that investment. Yeah, a lot of takes this morning, DI know, you probably saw Morgan Stanley. We still think given the long runway ahead, these autonomous players will still need to partner with hybrid human networks. And that's why they're still overweight. Uber, and that's exactly it. I mean, that's what you would hear from the Uber and Lyfsios when I talk to them as well, is that you're going to need some kind of hybrid solution because while Waymo is giving 10s of thousands of rides each week, there's many, many more rides that need to be fulfilled. Some people too. I mean, I just spoke to someone recently who moved to the city who said that she does not want to get into a Waymo car by any means. And that's because of some of those high profile incidents, not necessarily that the cars get into themselves, but the backlash. And that's an important part of this as well. There's a group of people here in the city, in lots of cities where this is even being piloted that don't want these cars on the road, that still need to be convinced that this is a good thing for safety. Yeah. Now you're going to be up against municipalities and regulators. But it seems like just the other day, Eunice Yoon did this package in in China, and it's moving very quickly. D Pretty fascinating. I was surprised by how flawless it was this morning, too. Truly, that was my first chance, you know, just trying it out in the wild. And it was very easy, very smooth. Yeah. I look forward to more pictures. That's our Deirdre Bosa out West this morning.