Expanding our Waymo Via operations

These past few months have been busy for Waymo Via. We’ve been ramping up our testing to help advance our fifth-generation Waymo Driver on Class 8 trucks, hauling freight for carriers’ top customers, and continuing our ongoing work with Daimler Trucks to develop a robust L4 redundant vehicle platform. To help support all of these initiatives, we’re scaling up our operations across Texas, Arizona, and California, and today, we’re sharing a few exciting updates on our progress.

Building a long-term trucking hub in Dallas

We’re building a dedicated trucking hub in the Dallas-Fort Worth area as we grow our footprint in Texas and continue driving across I-10, I-20, and I-45. Located in South Dallas, this 9-acre hub will be built from the ground up uniquely for Waymo Via and our autonomous driving operations. It will be our primary operations center in Texas designed for commercial use with our carrier partners and be able to accommodate hundreds of trucks and personnel as we scale our presence in the region and enable increasingly large and complex testing needs on our path to fully autonomous operations. This hub will not only bolster our operations in Texas but is also well-suited to support long haul routes across the Southwest and connect with our Phoenix operations center.

We look forward to moving in early next year and, along with our partners, are looking for great local talent to join our team as we build out our operations in Texas.

Partnering with Ryder to scale autonomous trucking operations

As we expand our autonomous trucking operations in Dallas and beyond, we’ve partnered with Ryder for fleet management services, including fleet maintenance, inspections, and roadside assistance, across all of our Waymo Via hubs and testing sites. Ryder brings nearly 90 years of fleet management experience and has a national network of 500+ facilities that will offer access to standardized fleet maintenance across one network and enable us to scale efficiently.

Partner services, like those offered by Ryder, will be a key component of our Driver-as-a-Service model. With Ryder, we’re developing first-of-their-kind best practices for autonomous truck maintenance that will maximize vehicle uptime and reliability and ensure a seamless and efficient experience for our customers. Ryder conducts regularly scheduled preventative maintenance and as-needed incidental maintenance, and we are working together to refine and evolve guidelines for Ryder’s technicians’ maintenance practices on Waymo’s unique autonomously driven vehicles. Longer term, we’ll be able to optimize the performance of our autonomous trucks by combining Ryder’s deep maintenance expertise and Waymo’s proprietary AV fleet data to create solutions tailored for Waymo’s technology.

This partnership has started out focusing on fleet management across our Waymo Via trucking hubs and testing sites in Texas, Arizona, California, Ohio, and Michigan, but over time, we see tremendous opportunity to expand our collaboration to accelerate the broad deployment of autonomous trucks. For example, based on their decades of experience, Ryder has provided feedback on our layout and design for our new Dallas facility to ensure it’s optimized for serviceability of trucks and for the transfer hub model we’re pursuing in the near term.

There are many synergies between our Waymo Via vision and operations and Ryder’s expertise and resources, and we look forward to working with the Ryder team to continue driving innovation in the trucking industry.

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Together, these important developments create an even more streamlined path to commercialization for autonomously driven trucks. Our new Dallas hub will be a central launch point for our increasing testing across the Southwest U.S. with our fifth-generation system and is uniquely designed for launching, scaling and commercializing fully autonomous trucks with our carrier partners via our transfer hub model. Ryder will serve as a strong fleet management partner across all of this work and help us provide a smooth experience and fully integrated solution to our fleet and carrier customers.

There’s never been a better time to be a part of our journey to make the movement of goods safer and more efficient. In addition to our operations teams, we’re hiring for roles across the entire Waymo Via trucking team. Join us today!