Waymo develops the Waymo Driver, an autonomous driving system that integrates Lidar, camera, radar, and AI-based perception and planning to operate vehicles without human intervention. The technology has completed over 100 million miles on public roads across 15+ U.S. states and billions of miles in simulation. Crash involvement data from operating areas shows 92% fewer crashes causing serious or fatal injuries compared to human drivers, providing a quantified safety baseline for the system's real-world performance.
The company operates a fully autonomous ride-hailing service available 24/7 in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, Atlanta, and Miami using an all-electric Jaguar I-PACE fleet. This service has completed over 20 million rides with a 93% customer satisfaction rate, demonstrating sustained operational capability across multiple cities and time periods. The ride-hailing platform serves as both a revenue stream and a continuous data source for system refinement.
Waymo's technical stack spans sensor fusion, real-time decision-making under uncertainty, simulation infrastructure for testing edge cases at scale, and fleet operations management. The company has grown from the Google self-driving car project (founded 2009) into an independent Alphabet subsidiary (2016), with expansion plans underway for London and Tokyo. Work across perception, planning, prediction, and control systems addresses the core hard problems of autonomous vehicle deployment: handling novelty in real environments, managing computational constraints, and maintaining safety assurance as operational domains expand.