Three months ago, Waymo abandoned its waiting list, opened up its on-demand robotaxis to everyone and announced it was expanding to more US cities including Los Angeles, Austin in Texas and Atlanta, Georgia. And Cruise is expected to relaunch its operation over the next few weeks in several US cities.
As soon as I walked out of Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport’s Terminal 3, I spotted a young woman trying to open the trunk of a driverless Waymo robotaxi and get her luggage out. You can’t open the doors or trunk of a robotaxi without pressing the right button on your smartphone app. The robotaxi, a sleek white Jaguar, had pulled over at the curbside, behind where a long queue of arriving passengers were waiting for their internal combustion engine-based ride-hailing vehicles from Uber or Lyft.
I had failed in my efforts in trying to hop into a robotaxi since July last year. First, there was a long waitlist to ride in robotaxis operating in San Francisco and Phoenix. There were over 300,000 people on the Waymo waitlist in San Francisco alone. Then, a year ago, Cruise, the robotaxi subsidiary of General Motors, suspended all its operations after an incident in San Francisco in which a pedestrian was dragged 20 feet by its robotaxi, after she was first struck by a human driving a regular taxi.
