Waymo LLC, formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car Project, is an American autonomous driving technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California.

The company traces its origins to the Stanford Racing Team, which competed in the 2005 and 2007 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenges.

[22] Waymo has or had partnerships with multiple vehicle manufacturers, including Stellantis,[23] Mercedes-Benz Group AG,[24] Jaguar Land Rover,[25] and Volvo.

[5][6] The initial software code and artificial intelligence (AI) design of the effort started before the team worked at Google, when Thrun and 15 engineers, including Dmitri Dolgov, Mike Montemerlo, Hendrik Dahlkamp, Sven Strohband, and David Stavens, built Stanley and Junior, Stanford's entries in the 2005 and 2007 DARPA Challenges.

[2] The ensuing episode depicting Pribot delivering pizza across the San Francisco Bay Bridge under police escort aired in December 2008.

[2] In 2011, Google acquired 510 Systems (co-founded by Levandowski, Pierre-Yves Droz and Andrew Schultz), and Anthony's Robots for an estimated US$20 million.

[46][47] In December, Google unveiled a Firefly prototype that was planned to be tested on San Francisco Bay Area roads beginning in early 2015.

[57] In 2017, Waymo unveiled new sensors and chips that are less expensive to manufacture, cameras that improve visibility, and wipers to clear the lidar system.

In March 2018, Jaguar Land Rover announced that Waymo had ordered up to 20,000 of its I-Pace electric SUVs at an estimated cost of more than $1 billion.

[68] In April 2019, Waymo announced plans for vehicle assembly in Detroit at the former American Axle & Manufacturing plant, bringing between 100 and 400 jobs to the area.

[80] In 2023, coverage of the Waymo One area was increased by 45 square miles (120 km2), expanding to include downtown Mesa, uptown Phoenix, and South Mountain Village.

[85] On December 13, 2022, Waymo applied for the final permit necessary to operate fully autonomous taxis, without a backup driver present, within the state of California.

[87] In July 2024, Waymo began testing its sixth-generation robotaxis which are based on electric vehicles by Chinese automobile company Zeekr, developed in a partnership first announced in 2021.

It uses a graph neural network to model the interactions between vehicles and has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets for trajectory prediction.

[95][96] With Carcraft, 25,000 virtual self-driving cars navigate through models of Austin, Texas; Mountain View, California; Phoenix, Arizona; and other cities.

[95] As of 2024, Waymo's fifth-generation robotaxis were based on Jaguar I-Pace electric vehicles augmented with automatic driving equipment that according to Dolgov costs up to $100,000.

[23] In 2017, Waymo began testing its level 4 cars in Arizona to take advantage of good weather, simple roads, and reasonable laws.

[23] In March 2018, Waymo announced its plans for experiments with the company's self-driving trucks delivering freight to Google data centers in Atlanta, Georgia.

[121] As of October 2024[update], Waymo is offering 100,000 paid rides per week across its Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles markets.

[133][134][135] As of December 16, 2024, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has received 762 reports[136] documenting 632 incidents involving Waymo vehicles.

[138][139] Waymo operates in some of its testing markets, such as Chandler, Arizona, at L4 autonomy with no one sitting behind the steering wheel, sharing roadways with other drivers and pedestrians.

Additionally, the lidar technology cannot spot some potholes or discern when humans, such as a police officer, signal the car to stop, the critic wrote.

[154] In August of 2024, residents of San Francisco's SoMa district began to complain about noise pollution from Waymo vehicles honking at each other in a local parking lot.

Residents reported that the car horns could be heard daily, with varying levels of activity, usually peaking at around 4 AM and during evening rush hour.

[156] In 2017, Waymo highlighted four specific business uses for its autonomous tech: Robotaxis, trucking and logistics, urban public transportation, and passenger cars.

[158][72][159] The company is testing Class 8 tractor-trailers[160] in Atlanta,[160] and southwest shipping routes across Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

[163] In 2023 Waymo issued a joint application along with Aurora Innovation to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for a five-year exemption from rules that require drivers to place reflective triangles or a flare around a stopped tractor-trailer truck, to avoid needing human drivers, in favor of warning beacons mounted on the truck cab.

[167] In February 2017, Waymo sued Uber and its subsidiary self-driving trucking company, Otto, alleging trade secret theft and patent infringement.

[174] Part of the agreement included a guarantee that "Waymo confidential information is not being incorporated in Uber Advanced Technologies Group hardware and software.

[177] In January 2022, Waymo sued the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) to prevent data on driverless crashes from being released to the public.