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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Thanks to Trump’s repeated executive order attacks on US clean energy policy, nearly $8 billion in investments and 16 new large-scale factories and other projects were cancelled, closed, or downsized in Q1 2025.
The $7.9 billion in investments withdrawn since January are more than three times the total investments cancelled over the previous 30 months, according to nonpartisan policy group E2’s latest Clean Economy Works monthly update.
However, companies continue to invest in the US renewable sector. Businesses in March announced 10 projects worth more than $1.6 billion for new solar, EV, and grid and transmission equipment factories across six states. That includes Tesla’s plan to invest $200 million in a battery factory near Houston that’s expected to create at least 1,500 new jobs. Combined, the projects are expected to create at least 5,000 new permanent jobs if completed.
Michael Timberlake of E2 said, “Clean energy companies still want to invest in America, but uncertainty over Trump administration policies and the future of critical clean energy tax credits are taking a clear toll. If this self-inflicted and unnecessary market uncertainty continues, we’ll almost certainly see more projects paused, more construction halted, and more job opportunities disappear.”
March’s 10 new projects bring the overall number of major clean energy projects tracked by E2 to 390 across 42 states and Puerto Rico. Companies have said they plan to invest more than $133 billion in these projects and hire 122,000 permanent workers.
Since Congress passed federal clean energy tax credits in August 2022, 34 clean energy projects have been cancelled, downsized, or shut down altogether, wiping out more than 15,000 jobs and scrapping $10 billion in planned investment, according to E2 and Atlas Public Policy.
However, in just the first three months of 2025, after Trump started rolling back clean energy policies, 13 projects were scrapped or scaled back, totaling more than $5 billion. That includes Bosch pulling the plug on its $200 million hydrogen fuel cell plant in South Carolina and Freyr Battery canceling its $2.5 billion battery factory in Georgia.
Republican-led districts have reaped the biggest rewards from Biden’s clean energy tax credits, but they’re also taking the biggest hits under Trump. So far, more than $6 billion in projects and over 10,000 jobs have been wiped out in GOP districts alone.
And the stakes are high. Through March, Republican districts have claimed 62% of all clean energy project announcements, 71% of the jobs, and a staggering 83% of the total investment.
A full map and list of announcements can be seen on E2’s website here. E2 says it will incorporate cancellation data in the coming weeks.
Read more: FREYR kills plans to build a $2.6 billion battery factory in Georgia
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Tesla has reportedly delayed the launch of its new “affordable EV,” which is believed to be a stripped-down Model Y, in the United States.
Last year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk made a pivotal decision that altered the automaker’s direction for the next few years.
The CEO canceled Tesla’s plan to build a cheaper new “$25,000 vehicle” on its next-generation “unboxed” vehicle platform to focus solely on the Robotaxi, utilizing the latest technology, and instead, Tesla plans to build more affordable EVs, though more expensive than previously announced, on its existing Model Y platform.
Musk has believed that Tesla is on the verge of solving self-driving technology for the last few years, and because of that, he believes that a $25,000 EV wouldn’t make sense, as self-driving ride-hailing fleets would take over the lower end of the car market.
However, he has been consistently wrong about Tesla solving self-driving, which he first said would happen in 2019.
In the meantime, Tesla’s sales have been decreasing and the automaker had to throttle down production at all its manufacturing facilities.
That’s why, instead of building new, more affordable EVs on new production lines, Musk decided to greenlight new vehicles built on the same production lines as Model 3 and Model Y – increasing the utilization rate of its existing manufacturing lines.
Those vehicles have been described as “stripped-down Model Ys” with fewer features and cheaper materials, which Tesla said would launch in “the first half of 2025.”
Reuters is now reporting that Tesla is seeing a delay of “at least months” in launching the first new “lower-cost Model Y” in the US:
Tesla has promised affordable vehicles beginning in the first half of the year, offering a potential boost to flagging sales. Global production of the lower-cost Model Y, internally codenamed E41, is expected to begin in the United States, the sources said, but it would be at least months later than Tesla’s public plan, they added, offering a range of revised targets from the third quarter to early next year.
Along with the delay, the report also claims that Tesla aims to produce 250,000 units of the new model in the US by 2026. This would match Tesla’s currently reduced production capacity at Gigafactory Texas and Fremont factory.
The report follows other recent reports coming from China that also claimed Tesla’s new “affordable EVs” are “stripped-down Model Ys.”
The Chinese report references the new version of the Model 3 that Tesla launched in Mexico last year. It’s a regular Model 3, but Tesla removed some features, like the second-row screen, ambient lighting strip, and it uses fabric interior material rather than Tesla’s usual vegan leather.
The new Reuters report also said that Tesla planned to follow the stripped-down Model Y with a similar Model 3.
In China, the new vehicle was expected to come in the second half of 2025, and Tesla was waiting to see the impact of the updated Model Y, which launched earlier this year.
Electrek’s Take
These reports lend weight to what we have been saying for a year now: Tesla’s “more affordable EVs” will essentially be stripped-down versions of the Model Y and Model 3.
While they will enable Tesla to utilize its currently underutilized factories more efficiently, they will also cannibalize its existing Model 3 and Y lineup and significantly reduce its already dwindling gross margins.
I think Musk will sell the move as being good in the long term because it will allow Tesla to deploy more vehicles, which will later generate more revenue through the purchase of the “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) package.
However, that has been his argument for years, and it has yet to pan out as FSD still requires driver supervision and likely will for years to come, resulting in an extremely low take-rate for the $8,000 package.
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Environment
Podcast: how Elon killed Tesla Model 2, global EV sales surge, and Chinese EVs keep killing it
In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss how Elon Musk killed Tesla Model 2, global EV sales surging, how Chinese EVs keep killing it, and more.
The show is live every Friday at 4 p.m. ET on Electrek’s YouTube channel.
As a reminder, we’ll have an accompanying post, like this one, on the site with an embedded link to the live stream. Head to the YouTube channel to get your questions and comments in.
After the show ends at around 5 p.m. ET, the video will be archived on YouTube and the audio on all your favorite podcast apps:
We now have a Patreon if you want to help us avoid more ads and invest more in our content. We have some awesome gifts for our Patreons and more coming.
Here are a few of the articles that we will discuss during the podcast:
Here’s the live stream for today’s episode starting at 4:00 p.m. ET (or the video after 5 p.m. ET):
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