Waymo is sending its fully driverless cars to handle some of the trickiest types of passenger pickups you can muster: airport trips. The company announced that customers flying in and out of Phoenix’s Sky Harbor Airport will now be able to hail one of the company’s “rider only” vehicles, a sign that the Alphabet company is willing to take on more risk as it seeks to bolster the case for a fully autonomous taxi service.
For example, it took three years to go from limited testing to rider-only trips in Chandler, Arizona, while in San Francisco, it took about a year and, in downtown Phoenix, six months. This bodes well for the company’s efforts to scale up its business beyond just the two cities in which it operates, Panigrahi argued. “If you look at our specific milestones, things are accelerating,” he added. Waymo’s service area in downtown Phoenix is “more than doubling” to 41.