Waymo starts fully autonomous rides in LA tomorrow; Austin later this year
Waymo has announced that it will start offering fully autonomous ride-hailing services to the general public in Los Angeles starting tomorrow, March 14th, and that Austin, Texas will open up “later this year.”
Waymo has been testing its Level 4 autonomous ride-hailing service in Los Angeles since late 2022, and is now finally ready to open up the service officially.
Level 4 is one of the SAE driving automation levels, signaling that the car drives itself with no human driver input, but is limited to certain circumstances – most driver assist systems on cars today (e.g. Autopilot, Super Cruise, etc.) count as Level 2, with only Mercedes offering a Level 3 system in the US. In this case, Waymo’s limitation means it’s geofenced to a particular service area.
Waymo has spent the last few months hosting its “Waymo Tour,” where it bounced around small parts of town to offer free rides to locals in various neighborhoods one-by-one (we experienced it on a chaotic weekend day in Venice Beach). Now, Waymo is ready to open up to all the regions its tour previously covered, spanning from Santa Monica to downtown LA, and will operate 24/7 in the stated coverage area.
The LA service area covers a somewhat odd geographical area, encompassing Santa Monica, Century City, K-Town and Downtown, with parts of West Hollywood, Beverly Hills and Culver City. It seems to stop at Santa Monica Blvd on the north end, signaling that Waymo would rather deal with traffic than with tight, twisty, one-lane hill streets (where lots of people street park and give you no room to drive).
In total, the area covers approximately 63 square miles – a larger area than Waymo’s 47mi² San Francisco service area, but much smaller than the 180mi² area that Waymo operates in in Phoenix. Waymo says that it wants to “scale its operations over time,” and cover a larger area than this, but doesn’t give a timeline for doing so.
And these rides don’t start some time in the distant future – they start tomorrow. So if you’re interested, you better hop on the waitlist quick – or find a time machine, because it already has 50,000 Angelenos on it, so if you join today you might be waiting for a while.
In the beginning, Waymo plans to offer these services for free, but “in the coming weeks” it will transition to a paid model thanks to recent approval from the California Public Utilities Commission. This is part of why Waymo started the “tour” in LA months ago, because CPUC requires a certain timeline of operation before transitioning to paid services.
Waymo will also start offering rides in Austin, Texas soon, but hasn’t given a specific timeline for when that will happen, only stating today that it would happen “later this year.” Waymo’s coverage area in Austin is 43 square miles, and it has already started testing autonomous, but for Waymo employees only.
If you want to sign up and get on the waitlist for Waymo’s LA (or Austin) service, download the Waymo One app and it will add you to the waitlist for whatever coverage area you’re close to.
Electrek’s Take
Waymo touts that its LA tour went quite well, claiming that it earned an average 4.7/5.0 star drive rating across 15,000 rides (which is hard to compare, given the uniqueness of its service). It shared a video of one of its vehicles correctly interpreting a police officer’s hand signals in a complicated LA intersection, which is quite impressive.
When we rode in a Waymo in LA, we were mostly impressed as well. While the vehicle had difficulty in a few ways (getting stuck and having to phone home on 2 separate occasions, one of which was a complex intersection, and one of which was just a tight cul-de-sac that a human-driven car wrongly led it down), it mostly handled an extremely chaotic driving situation very well.
It recognized and reacted to pedestrians early – in fact much quicker than I would have as a human driver – and confidently handled a complicated moment with closed lanes, difficult visibility, cones in the road, tree work ahead and oncoming traffic all at once.
If you want to read more about it, you can read our long writeup of the drive here: We tested Waymo’s driverless taxi in LA in the perfect chaos of Venice Beach.
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EV sales kept up their momentum in December 2024, with incentives playing a big role, according to the latest Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book report.
December’s strong EV sales saw an average transaction price (ATP) of $55,544, which helped push the industry-wide ATP higher, according to Kelley Blue Book. The December ATP for an EV was higher year-over-year by 0.8%, slightly below the industry average, and higher month-over-month by 1.1%. Tesla ATPs were higher year-over-year by 10.5%.
Incentives for EVs remained elevated in December, although they were slightly lower month-over-month at 14.3% of ATP, down from 14.7% in November.
EV incentives were higher by an impressive 41% year-over-year and have been above 12% of ATP for six consecutive months. Strong sales incentives, which averaged more than $6,700 per sale in 2024, were one reason EV sales surpassed 1.3 million units last year, according to Cox Automotive, a new record for volume and share.
(My colleague Jameson Dow reported yesterday, “In 2024, the world sold 3.5 million more EVs than it did in the previous year … This increase is larger than the 3.2 million increase in EV sales from the previous year – meaning that EV sales aren’t just up, but that the rate of growth is itself increasing.”)
Kelley Blue Book estimated that in December, approximately 84,000 vehicles – or 5.6% of total sales – transacted at prices higher than $80,000 – the highest volume ever. KBB lumps gas cars and EVs together into this luxury vehicle category, so this is where Tesla Cybertruck is slotted.
However, Tesla bundles sales figures of Cybertruck with Model S, Model X, and Tesla Semi(!) into a category it calls “other models,” so we don’t know for sure exactly how many Cybertrucks Tesla sold in Q4, much less in December. However, Electrek‘s Fred Lambert estimates between 9,000 and 12,000 Cybertrucks were sold in Q4, and that’s not a stellar sales figure.
What will January bring when it comes to EV ATPs? What about tax credits? Check back in a month and I’ll fill you in.
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Tesla is now claiming that Cybertruck was the ‘best-selling electric pickup in US’ last year despite not even reporting the number of deliveries.
There’s a lot of context needed here.
As we often highlighted, Tesla is sadly one of, if not the most, opaque automakers regarding sales reports.
Tesla doesn’t break down sales per model or even region.
For comparison, here’s Ford’s Q4 2024 sales report compared to Tesla’s:
You could argue that Tesla has fewer models than Ford, and that’s true, but Tesla’s report literally has two lines despite having six different models.
There’s no reason not to offer a complete breakdown like all other automakers other than trying to make it hard to verify the health of each vehicle program.
This has been the case with the Cybertruck. Tesla is bundling its Cybertruck deliveries with Model S, Model X, and Tesla Semi deliveries.
Despite this lack of disclosure, Tesla has been able to claim that the Cybertruck has become “the best-selling electric pickup truck” in the US in 2024:
It very well might be true. Ford disclosed 33,510 F-150 Lightning truck deliveries in the US in 2024 while most estimates are putting Cybertruck deliveries at around 40,000 units.
Those are global deliveries, but Tesla only delivered the Cybertruck in the US, Canada, and Mexico in 2024, and most of the deliveries are believed to be in the US.
However, there’s essential context needed here, as we highlighted in our recent ‘Tesla Cybertruck sales are disastrous‘ article.
First off, Tesla had a backlog of over 1 million reservations for the Cybertruck that it has been building since 2019. This led many to believe Tesla already had years of demand baked in for the truck and that production would be the constraint.
However, based on estimates, again, because Tesla refuses to disclose the data, Cybertruck deliveries were either flat or down in Q4 versus Q3 despite Tesla introducing cheaper versions of the vehicle and ramping up production.
Again, that’s after just about 40,000 deliveries.
Furthermore, with almost 11,000 deliveries in Q4 in the US, Ford more likely than not outsold Cybertruck with the F-150 Lightning in Q4.
Electrek’s Take
Tesla is in damage control here. There’s no doubt that it is having issues selling the Cybertruck.
Inventory is full of Cybertrucks and Tesla is now discounting them and offering free lifetime Supercharging.
Tesla is great at ramping up production, and it’s clear the Cybertruck is not production-constrained anymore. It is demand-constrained despite having over 1 million reservations.
Again, those reservations were made before Tesla unveiled the production version, which happened to have less range and cost significantly more.
The upcoming cheaper single motor version should help with demand, but I have serious doubts Tesla can ramp this program up to more than 100,000 units in the US.
As a reminder, Tesla installed a production capacity of 250,000 units annually and Musk said he could see Tesla selling 500,000 Cybertrucks per year.
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