Google's Self-Driving Waymo Significantly Expands Driverless Taxi Service in LA

Google's self-driving subsidiary Waymo is expanding its unmanned "Robo Taxi" service in Los Angeles, the largest city in the West.

Waymo announced on its blog on the 12th local time that "the service will be open to everyone in LA," adding, "From today, anyone can use the fully autonomous ride service 24 hours a day with the 'Waymo One' app."

Waymo launched its paid service in parts of L.A. in March with the approval of California authorities.

However, due to the limited scope and size of the service, only some of the applicants were available.

"Since we started commercial operations in L.A. this year, about 300,000 people have been on the waiting list," Waymo explained.

Waymo said its self-driving taxis can currently traverse about 129 square kilometers of LA County and plan to expand their service coverage in the future to cover a wider area.

With Waymo's expansion of service, L.A. has become the largest city where the company operates a robotaxi.

LA has a population of about 3.8 million, the second largest city in the United States after New York, and LA County, a metropolitan area commonly referred to as LA, has a population of about 9.7 million, the largest county in the United States.

U.S. economic media CNBC reported that Waymo's expansion of LA services is "the largest ever" in the history of robo-taxi.

Waymo has been doing paid operations in San Francisco and Phoenix, Arizona, but they are smaller cities than L.A.

As Los Angeles is a city with a large floating population not only in the United States but also globally, the robotaxi ride experience is expected to be a major trigger for popularization.

Waymo also succeeded in raising $5.6 billion (about 7.78 trillion won) to expand its robotaxi operations late last month.

In addition, the company announced early last month that it had formed a strategic partnership with Hyundai to deploy Hyundai's Ioniq 5, its electric car, as a robotaxi-powered vehicle, drawing attention in Korea.

Although Waymo is currently the leader in the robo-taxi industry, competition in the robo-taxi industry is expected to intensify in the future as Tesla, an American electric vehicle company, unveiled a prototype of its new "CyberCap" for robo-taxi on the 10th of last month and announced that it will start operating in California and Texas with existing vehicles next year.