Waymo One Launches Fully Driverless Rides to the General Public in Phoenix, Arizona
On 8 October 2020, Waymo opened its Waymo One ride-hailing service to the general public in the greater Phoenix, Arizona area, operating without a safety driver in the vehicle, the first time a commercial autonomous vehicle service had done so at public scale.
Background
Getting a self-driving car to handle a controlled stretch of road is one problem. Getting it to handle strangers, arbitrary pick-up points and the ordinary chaos of a city is quite another. For years the autonomous vehicle industry worked toward the second goal in public, but always with a catch: a trained safety driver sat behind the wheel, ready to take over.
Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, had been running a ride-hailing service called Waymo One in the Phoenix area since late 2018. The service used its own vehicles, fitted with lidar (sensors that build a three-dimensional picture of the surroundings by bouncing laser pulses off nearby objects) alongside cameras and radar. Phoenix suited the programme well. The roads are wide, the weather is mostly dry and clear, and the city’s grid layout keeps routing relatively predictable. But every trip still had a Waymo employee in the driver’s seat.
That constraint mattered more than it might appear. A safety driver changes almost everything about how passengers experience the ride and how regulators think about liability. It also sets a ceiling on how cheaply and how widely a service can scale: human time costs money, and there is only so much of it. Removing the driver was the condition the industry had set itself as the real test.
What happened
On 8 October 2020, Waymo opened Waymo One to the general public in the greater Phoenix area with no safety driver in the vehicle. Anyone could download the app and book a ride. The vehicles operated inside a geo-fenced area, meaning the system would only accept trips that stayed within a defined zone it had been mapped and tested in, rather than driving anywhere a passenger might ask to go. Within that boundary, though, the service was genuinely public and genuinely driverless.
The Phoenix area had been the development ground for this capability for some time. Waymo had accumulated millions of real-world miles there over several years of testing, first with safety drivers and then, from 2019, in a more limited programme that allowed a small group of vetted riders to travel without one. The October 2020 opening removed the vetting. No prior relationship with Waymo was needed.
Waymo described the Phoenix geography as covering the East Valley region, which includes parts of Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert. The geo-fenced boundary kept the service manageable, but it was large enough that the trips were real journeys rather than demonstration runs. Whether this was the first commercially available, safety-driver-free public ride-hailing service at this scale is a claim Waymo made and competitors disputed to varying degrees, and it is fair to note the qualification: it applied to a defined geography, not open roads anywhere.
Why it mattered
The removal of the safety driver from a public-facing, revenue-generating ride-hailing service marked a practical threshold that the autonomous-vehicle industry had long treated as a key proof point: that a driverless system could operate reliably enough to carry fare-paying strangers without human oversight inside the vehicle. Limiting the service to a defined geo-fenced area of greater Phoenix demonstrated a credible path to commercial deployment even where full nationwide coverage remained distant. The launch shifted the industry conversation from whether driverless public services were possible to how quickly geo-fenced coverage could be expanded.
Organisations
Waymo, alphabet
Sources
- Waymo is opening its fully driverless service to the general public.Waymo (official company blog).Primary source
- Waymo is now offering fully driverless rides to the public in Phoenix.The Verge.Secondary
- Waymo Opens Its Driverless Taxi Service to the Public.Wired.Secondary
Cite this page
AI Achievements. (2020). Waymo One Launches Fully Driverless Rides to the General Public in Phoenix, Arizona. Retrieved 2026-08-22, from https://achievements.ai/milestone/waymo-self-driving-cars-for-public
@misc{achievements_waymo_self_driving_cars_for_public,
title = {Waymo One Launches Fully Driverless Rides to the General Public in Phoenix, Arizona},
author = {{AI Achievements}},
year = {2020},
url = {https://achievements.ai/milestone/waymo-self-driving-cars-for-public}
}