Waymo’s robotaxi service is going live at its fourth major airport today: San Antonio International. The company said its vehicles will drop off riders curbside at the terminals, and pick up passengers at the airport’s designated rideshare area.
This is the first airport Waymo is servicing in Texas, where the company currently operates in San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, and Houston. Waymo has been offering airport pickups and drops at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International for a few years now, and has started servicing the San Francisco and San Jose Mineta international airports over the past few months. It also serves a handful of regional airports.
Waymo launched its San Antonio robotaxi service in February, though it’s still not fully available to the public yet. The company has been operating an invitation-based system that it is scaling on a rolling basis — an approach it used in Dallas, Houston, and Orlando, too. The company said on Tuesday that has brought “[t]ens of thousands of people” into the San Antonio service and that it plans to make the service available to “all public riders soon” in the city.
This phased approach is one way that Waymo is still being cautious in a year of otherwise rapid expansion. The company has said it wants to launch in around 20 new cities this year, including Tokyo and London. Its robotaxi service is currently live in 10 cities and is running more than 500,000 paid rides per week, roughly double the number it was operating at this time last year. Waymo is expected to start offering rides in its newest vehicle, the Zeekr-built van called Ojai, at some point this year.
The company has shared data that it says proves its robotaxis are already safer than human drivers and reducing serious crashes. Still, Waymo keeps running into new obstacles as it expands.
Waymo’s robotaxis have illegally passed school buses that were picking up or dropping off children, a problem that is being investigated by both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). It has issued software updates to address this problem, but is still working with local officials in Austin, where the most school bus incidents have been documented, to figure out how to make its robotaxis behave around the buses, according to Wired.
The NTSB and NHTSA are also investigating the company after one of its robotaxis crashed into a child at a low speed in Santa Monica. The child reportedly sustained minor injuries, and Waymo said its robotaxi slowed from 17 miles per hour to six miles per hour before it made impact.
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We’re also learning more about everything that goes into Waymo’s on-the-ground operations as it expands. The company has dozens of so-called “remote assistance” staff located in the U.S. and the Philippines who help Waymo’s robotaxis navigate tricky or unexpected scenarios. Waymo also relies on a team of “roadside assistance” workers — as well as first responders — in the rare case that a vehicle gets truly stuck, as TechCrunch recently detailed.
This story has been updated with information about Waymo serving regional airports.
