Call an Uber in Phoenix and you might get a driverless Waymo, starting today
Waymo and Uber have rolled out a partnership in Phoenix wherein riders who order an Uber within Waymo’s service area might get picked up by a driverless Waymo vehicle, rather than a human-driven Uber car, starting today.
Waymo, Google’s driverless taxi arm, has been gradually rolling out its service to more members of the public and more locations recently. We rode it in Los Angeles earlier this month, where it is currently “touring” around the city and operating on a trial basis.
But its Phoenix service area is much larger – a total of 225 square miles – and has been running since 2017, in some capacity or another. In Phoenix, Waymo even services the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport for pickups and dropoffs.
So its service in Phoenix is more developed than elsewhere, to the point where Waymo and Uber now find themselves comfortable enough to offer driverless taxis to any random rider who requests an Uber pickup.
But if you order a human, you won’t be surprised to have an empty car pick you up. First, your pickup and dropoff points both have to be in Waymo’s service area, of course.
The area generally covers the area between downtown Phoenix, Tempe, Scottsdale, Mesa, and Chandler, including the aforementioned Phoenix Sky Harbor airport.
So, you order a car, with whatever pricing Uber has decided on for the time being (which suggests pricing will be identical between human and driverless taxis). Then, if the system finds a Waymo car that is convenient for your pickup, the app will give you a notification saying that a Waymo has been chosen for you, which you have the option to accept or decline. This is what the whole process looks like:
After accepting the driverless ride, the flow goes somewhat similar to how Waymo’s first-party Waymo One app works – the car decides where the best place to pick you up is, and may ask you to walk a short distance to that pickup point (it tries to avoid places that are busy and confusing – you can read more about that in our detailed log of our ride in LA). Then you need to unlock the car from within the Uber app when it arrives, hop in, and you’re off.
The system requires no additional registration with Waymo One, doesn’t require having that app on your phone, and doesn’t require any special settings within Uber’s app. If you want to be picked up by a Waymo, you can go into the “ride preferences” section of your Uber app and check a setting that will increase your chances.
Electrek’s Take
There are a lot of interesting notes to be had about this news.
Uber previously had a self-driving technology arm operating both in California and Arizona, but that arm was sold off in 2020 after a lot of setbacks. One of those setbacks included a lawsuit between Waymo and Uber over trade secrets (for which some legal action is still ongoing), so this partnership between the two companies, first announced in May and bearing fruit today, is curious given that context.
It’s also interesting that these Ubers look like they will be the same price whether you get a driver or not… at least for now?
One of the potential benefits of self-driving taxis is that they can save on labor costs, both making it cheaper and easier to get around and freeing up man-hours to increase productivity elsewhere in society.
With self-driving tech in its infancy, sensors and systems to run them are expensive, so we may not be there yet. But this also raises the specter of the possibility that as humans are made redundant, the pay that used to go to these humans will instead go to the owners of robots.
This runs the risk of concentrating wealth into the hands of few capital owners who own the driving robots, rather than the laborers who used to make money from driving, which is not a good thing for society. “Driver” is, after all, one of the most common job titles in the US, so while the potential societal gains are high from automation here, those gains need to be distributed properly or else there are going to be a lot of angry people with nothing to do.
We’re seeing the same conversation had throughout many industries with the advent of AI, and societally we really aren’t ready for this. Some of the more forward-thinking members of the tech industry have called for a “basic income” as a result, though others question if this is just a cynical ploy to undermine the current welfare state of targeted assistance to the needy.
Either way, this is something that we needed to talk about yesterday, and nobody’s having an adult conversation about it, and that’s a problem.
Instead, the conversation has focused on oft-sensationalized rhetoric about the safety of autonomous vehicles. Just this week, Cruise’s license to operate in California was revoked as a result of an accident earlier this month where the Cruise car was not initially at fault, but responded poorly in the post-accident scenario, and Cruise misrepresented facts to the DMV in attempting to cover-up the poor decisionmaking of its vehicle.
The reason for that cover-up is probably because Cruise wanted to avoid the societal flack it knew it would get. And that flack spills over to other AVs, Waymo included, which is unfortunate since Waymo does seem to have a better safety/reliability/responsibility record than Cruise – so far.
In short, there are a lot of difficult conversations to have here as a society related to the advent of AI, and how it can benefit everyone, but they really aren’t served by sensationalism. And the longer we put off having those conversations, the more technology is going to keep progressing, whether we want it to or not (and we should – we should just want it to happen responsibly for all of society).
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Renewables increased their output by almost 10% and provided nearly a quarter of US electrical generation in 2024, according to newly released US Energy Information Administration (EIA) data.
Solar was still No 1
Solar remained the US’s fastest-growing source of electricity in 2024. Utility-scale and “estimated” small-scale (e.g., rooftop) solar combined increased by 26.9% in 2024 compared to the same period in 2023, according to the SUN DAY Campaign, which reviewed EIA’s “Electric Power Monthly” report data.
Utility-scale solar thermal and photovoltaic expanded by 32%, while small-scale solar increased by 15.3%. Together, solar was nearly 7% (6.91%) of total US electrical generation for the year.
In December alone, electrical generation by utility-scale solar expanded by 42% compared to December 2023.
Small-scale solar (systems <1 MW) accounted for 27.9% of all solar generation and provided 1.9% of the US electricity supply in 2024. In fact, small-scale solar PV generates over five times more electricity than utility-scale geothermal.
2024 renewables milestones
The electrical output of US wind farms in 2024 grew by 7.7% year-over-year. Wind remains the largest source of electrical generation among renewable energy sources, accounting for 10.3% of the US total.
Wind and solar combined provided more than 17.2% of US electrical generation during 2024. The mix of all renewables – wind, solar, hydropower, biomass, geothermal – provided 24.2% of total US electricity production in 2024 compared to 23.2% of electrical output a year earlier.
Between January and December, electrical generation by renewables grew by 9.6% compared to the same period the year before – nearly three times the growth rate of natural gas (3.3%) and over 10 times that of nuclear power (0.9%).
In December alone, electrical generation by renewables grew by 10.1% compared to December 2023.
Wind and solar together produced 15.9% more electricity than coal and came close to matching nuclear power’s share of total generation (17.2% vs. 17.8%).
The mix of renewables reinforced their position as the second largest source of electrical generation, behind only natural gas.
“Renewable energy sources now provide a quarter of the nation’s electricity,” said the SUN DAY Campaign’s executive director, Ken Bossong. “Consequently, the rash efforts of the Trump Administration to undermine wind, solar, and other renewables will have serious negative consequences for the nation’s electricity supply and the economy.”
Read more: Renewables provided 90% of new US capacity in 2024 – FERC
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Tesla has applied for a permit to operate a ride-hailing service in California, but it will be using human drivers rather than the promised robotaxi.
Last year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed that Tesla would launch “unsupervised self-driving in Texas and California in Q2 2025.”
However, we suspected that this would not be “unsupervised self-driving’ in customer vehicles like Tesla has been promising since 2016, but an internal fleet with teleoperation support in a geo-fenced area for ride-hailing services, much like Waymo has been doing for years.
Sure enough, Musk confirmed last month that this was the plan for Austin in June. We describe this as a “moving of the goal post” for Tesla.
With the focus on Austin in June, Tesla stopped talking about California, which was announced to happen at the same time as Texas last year.
Now, Bloomberg reports that Tesla has applied for a ride-hailing permit in California:
The electric vehicle manufacturer applied late last year for what’s known as a transportation charter-party carrier permit from the California Public Utilities Commission, according to documents viewed by Bloomberg. That classification means Tesla would own and control the fleet of vehicles.
But this application is for a regular ride-hailing service, like Uber, albeit for an internal fleet rather than vehicles operated by customers.
Tesla has yet to apply for a permit to operate driverless vehicles:
In its communications with California officials, Tesla discussed driver’s license information and drug-testing coordination, suggesting the company intends to use human drivers, at least initially. Tesla is applying for the same type of permit used by Waymo, Alphabet Inc.’s robotaxi business. While Tesla has approval to test autonomous vehicles with a safety driver in California, it doesn’t have, nor has applied for, a driverless testing or deployment permit from the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles, according to a spokesperson.
Musk claimed that he believes Tesla will be able to achieve “unsupervised self-driving” in California by “the end of the year”, but he has claimed that every year for the past decade.
The latest available data shows that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving system is achieving about 500 miles between critical disengagement. Tesla has stated that it believes it needs to reach 700,000 miles between critical disengagement to be safer than humans.
Electrek’s Take
This is just a step for Tesla to test ride-hailing services ahead of autonomy. A nothing burger, really, since ride-hailing has obviously been solved already by several companies, Lyft, Uber, Didi, etc.
What needs to be solved is autonomous driving.
As I have been saying for the last year, I am sure Tesla will be able to launch an internal fleet with teleoperation support in a geo-fenced area for a ride-hailing service in California later this year like it plans to do in Austin in June, but that’s nowhere near what Tesla promised since 2016.
It’s a moving of the goal post, and it’s basically just proving that Tesla is able to do something similar to Waymo – 5 years later.
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Tesla drivers in China are using the new Full Self-Driving update and are racking up fines as the system drives in bike lanes and makes illegal turns.
As we reported earlier this week, Tesla has started to release advanced driver-assist features sold under its Full Self-Driving (FSD) package in China.
The feature is called “Autopilot automatic assisted driving on urban roads” as Tesla seems more cautious about using the term “Full Self-Driving” in China, but it is a feature known for being in the FSD package everywhere else.
Tesla has been facing a lot of issues in releasing FSD features in China. The automaker has been limited in its neural net training due to restrictions about data coming in and out of the country, and it found it difficult to adapt to regulations regarding bus lanes and other China-specific road rules.
CEO Elon Musk warned that FSD in China would be a problem during Tesla’s earnings call last month due to the different rules. He mentioned bus lanes as an example:
By the way, were about the biggest challenges in making FSD work in China is the bus lanes are very complicated. And there’s like literally like hours of the day that you’re allowed to be there and not be there. And then if you accidentally go in that bus lane at the wrong time, you get an automatic ticket instantly. So, it’s kind of a big deal, bus lanes in China.
The automated ticketing system is not just for bus lanes and Tesla owners are learning about it the hard way.
Tesla owners have been testing out the features in live streams on social media and some of them are reporting getting numerous tickets for using FSD.
For example, this Tesla driver received 7 tickets in the space of a single drive because the FSD drove in bike lanes and made illegal maneuvers:
Car News China tracked several live streams and customer feedback on Chinese social media, and the consensus appears to be that it’s “pretty good, but with lots of bugs”.
The drivers are particularly impressed with how “natural” FSD drives, but they also noted that it still
Where the system lacks is the understanding of local traffic rules (such as no use of shoulder/bike lanes on turns, similar to the bus lane rules that Elon talked about in the most recent earnings call) and the sporadic use of wrong lanes (e.g. going straight in a left or right turn only lane) or navigation showing the vehicle in one lane when in fact it’s in another or wrong perception of objects (red balloons as traffic lights). Many of the live streams counted the number of traffic violations from the vehicle and the number of points that would have been taken off or licenses suspended (12 points = suspension) as a result.
Chinese media websites are now getting flooded with Tesla vehicles running red traffic lights, failing to recognize green lights, and driving on restricted lanes, like the video above.
The report also highlights how Tesla is facing strong competition in ADAS in China, with competitors like Nio, Xpeng, BYD, and others launching competitive products, which is not necessarily the case in other markets for Tesla.
Electrek’s Take
I feel like this is likely going to result in bad PR for Tesla in China. You can’t have drivers losing their licenses because FSD doesn’t recognize bike lanes.
Now, of course, Tesla will say that the driver remains responsible, but I don’t know how good Tesla’s messaging is on that front in China.
It’s going to be an interesting story to track in the coming months.
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