In late April, we will deploy the Jaguar I-PACE and our fifth-generation Waymo Driver in the Phoenix East Valley, making our entire Waymo One ride-hailing fleet fully electric. We’ll retire the previous-generation Waymo Driver from our service, as we have done with similar platforms in the past.

Editor’s note: David, a Downtown Phoenix rider, tried out a “90 days of Waymo” test, where he was seeing if he could use Waymo One for trips he would usually use his personal car for. It went pretty well, and he’s enjoying the trusted space Waymo One provides for him to decompress after work and all the time he’s saved not driving (1,902 minutes to be exact). Check out our conversation and the video he shared with us to hear more about his Waymo experiment.

For many years, Waymo has relied on an established safety framework — a comprehensive set of methodologies that we use to assess the safety of our technology and operations and that guides the deployment of the Waymo Driver. Our robust safety framework has enabled us to launch the world’s first fully autonomous ride-hail service, Waymo One, and expand our 24/7 operations with no human driver across multiple major U.S. cities. Today, residents of Metro Phoenix and San Francisco rely on Waymo to commute, run errands, meet friends and get a safe ride home as part of their daily lives.

Waymo’s recent technology advancements and rapid expansion across Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles wouldn’t be possible without the underlying innovative research that helps drive our progress forward. As a pioneer in the AV industry, we have continuously contributed to the research community through publishing and expanding the Waymo Open Dataset — one of the largest and most diverse autonomous driving datasets ever released. Today, we are excited to announce the latest expansion of the dataset with even more sensor data and labels. We are also launching our new and exciting 2023 Waymo Open Dataset Challenges -- this is our 4th annual Challenge edition, and we invite all researchers to participate!

Waymo has teamed up with iHeartRadio to provide a new in-car audio experience for Waymo One trips in our Jaguar I-PACE vehicles. Our thousands of riders in San Francisco and Downtown Phoenix can now pick a vibe for their ride by simply selecting “Music” on the passenger screens.

Waymo has achieved many global industry firsts. Each time we delight our riders and deliver on our mission safely, we are proudest. In January, we accomplished another first: we exceeded one million miles on public roads with no human behind the wheel. To put this into perspective, this equates to 40 trips around the Earth, or over 80 years of driving for the average American. But this number is not a meaningful measure of progress, without context. What’s more important is our safety performance over the course of these one million rider-only miles that demonstrates the safety benefits of the Waymo Driver. We’re sharing this safety performance data today to both acknowledge this next step on our journey, and to encourage greater transparency across the industry.

Editor’s note: As a single dad in San Francisco, Erik needs a safe and reliable transportation method to get his kids around the city. Enter Waymo One. Since becoming a Trusted Tester over a year ago, Erik has taken over 450 rides with the Waymo Driver and has seen a marked improvement from then to now. Hear more from Erik about what’s gotten better and some of the interesting scenarios he’s encountered along the way, including details of his first rider-only trip.