Waymo starts testing its autonomous cars in Atlanta
The company's self-driving service continues to grow around the US.
Waymo started offering free autonomous rides in Phoenix last April as a way to promote its self-driving cars. The Alphabet-owned company has been trying to ramp up its own ride-sharing service to compete with Uber and Lyft, offering a driverless taxi service Waymo hopes to use in covering a region larger than London. Now, Waymo is expanding beyond Arizona, launching a test program set to launch in Atlanta, Georgia.
Hello ATL! Metro Atlanta is the next stop for Waymo's test program. Now that we have the world's first fully self-driving vehicles on public roads in AZ, we're looking to take our tech to more cities. pic.twitter.com/YFLvxkVMMd
— Waymo (@Waymo) January 22, 2018
According to The Verge, Waymo started mapping Atlanta's downtown last week for an up-to-date, accurate map of the area, an important dataset for self-driving cars. The test program has seen the Waymo fleet cover 4 million miles, with a million of those driven in the last six months of 2017. In addition to Phoenix, the test program has been running in San Francisco, Austin and Kirkland, Washington.
