Good news, Phoenix. There’s now another way to catch a ride with the Waymo Driver.

Starting today, Uber customers can get matched with a fully autonomous, all-electric Waymo ride — with no human driver behind the wheel—in the 225+ square miles of Metro Phoenix where Waymo currently operates.

Waymo and Swiss Re, one of the world’s leading reinsurers, partnered in 2022 to advance risk assessment methodologies and approaches to evaluating safety of autonomous vehicles.

At Waymo, we’re developing a generalizable, fully autonomous Driver – the Waymo Driver – designed to integrate with a variety of vehicle platforms and commercial applications including ride-hailing, trucking, local delivery, and personal car ownership. Given the tremendous momentum and substantial commercial opportunity we’re seeing on the ride-hailing front, we’ve made the decision to focus our efforts and investment on ride-hailing. We’re iterating more quickly than ever on our technology by pushing forward state of the art AI/ML, and seeing significant business growth and rider demand in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.

I’m so pleased to share that Elisa de Martel, a finance executive with 20+years of experience leading private and public companies, is joining Waymo as our Chief Financial Officer. Elisa brings powerful value to Waymo with her depth of financial leadership experience spanning both tech and traditional automotive industries. Elisa’s global, strategic perspective positions us well as we deploy and commercialize the Waymo Driver across multiple geographies and vehicle platforms.

This morning in San Francisco, a fully autonomous all-electric Jaguar I-PACE, with no human driver behind the wheel, picked up a Waymo engineer to get their morning coffee and go to work. Since sharing that we were ready to take the next step and begin testing fully autonomous operations in the city, we’ve begun fully autonomous rides with our San Francisco employees. They now join the thousands of Waymo One riders we’ve been serving in Arizona, making fully autonomous driving technology part of their daily lives.

The most innovative technologies can only be built when teams are laser-focused on a common goal. This year, the hard work and determination of our teams resulted in huge strides towards Waymo’s mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to get where they’re going.

Over a decade into our journey building the World’s Most Experienced Driver, we’ve partnered with some of the world’s leading automakers to deploy our fully autonomous technology as we help people and things get where they’re going. So, we’re pleased to announce our latest OEM collaboration with Geely, a top global auto manufacturer.

The Waymo Driver has tested in dozens of cities spanning a diverse range of climates and topographies. Starting tomorrow, we’ll build on these learnings as we begin to map in New York City for the first time.

As we build, deploy, and commercialize the Waymo Driver, it’s gratifying to see so much interest in being part of our journey to transform mobility, making it safer, more accessible, and more sustainable along the way. So we’re proud to announce our latest investment round of $2.5 billion, with participation from Alphabet, Andreessen Horowitz, AutoNation, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Magna International, Mubadala Investment Company, Perry Creek Capital, Silver Lake, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., Temasek, and Tiger Global. We’ll use this latest round of investment to continue advancing the Waymo Driver, as well as continuing to grow our team.

Dear Waymonauts,

After five and a half exhilarating years leading this team, I’ve decided to depart from my CEO role with Waymo and kick-off new adventures. To start, I’m looking forward to a refresh period, reconnecting with old friends and family, and discovering new parts of the world. And I’ll continue to serve as an advisor to Waymo, as you expand the world’s first autonomous public ride-hailing service, Waymo One, and ramp our autonomous delivery product with Waymo Via.

Last year was a big one for us - we raised our first external investment round, we rolled out the 5th generation of our Waymo Driver and we opened Waymo One to the public, among other milestones. As we get started in the new year, we’ll have even more to share with you. And when we do, you’ll see us using more deliberate language, referring to our fully autonomous driving technology, and no longer referencing “self-driving.”

The health and safety of our team is our top priority as we continue to navigate the global pandemic and gradually resume our driving operations. That’s why we’ve partnered with Verily, an Alphabet company focused on healthcare and life sciences, to provide integrated COVID-19 testing, symptom and exposure screening, and data analytics for our front-line team members and partners. Verily’s Healthy at Work program uses the best of current recommendations from federal, state and local authorities, and Verily’s operational, clinical, data science modeling and scientific testing capabilities. In addition to the rigorous COVID-19 safety protocols we’ve implemented, we believe that providing regular testing for our team, through Verily’s CLIA-certified lab in South San Francisco, will promote our high standards for workplace safety. 

On the path to building the World’s Most Experienced Driver, we partner with some of the world’s largest automakers to realize our mission to make it safe and easy for people and things to get where they’re going. We focus on custom designing our hardware suite, software, and compute. We then collaborate with carmakers, leveraging their expertise in automotive design, engineering, and manufacturing, to help us create vehicles that integrate easily with the Waymo Driver, making them well-suited for ride hailing, local delivery, trucking, and personal car ownership. That’s why we’re pleased to share today our latest automotive partnership.