After some mishaps, it’s now full steam ahead for Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo LLC, which today said its driverless taxi service is available to anyone in San Francisco who has downloaded the app.

The company has been operating in the city since 2009. It introduced fully autonomous cars in 2022, but people wanting to experience a robotaxi were put on a waitlist, in which they might have had to wait weeks or even months for a ride. They were also asked to sign non-disclosure agreements, making the experience seem somewhat labor intensive.

Nonetheless, around 300,000 people in San Fransisco have so far become passengers of a Waymo autonomous taxi. The cars have collectively logged about 3.8 million miles in a fleet that currently numbers 300, up from 250 at the start of the year. The only other city where Waymo’s driverless cars are operating is Phoenix, Arizona, where the taxis cover about 180 square miles.

“About 30% of Waymo rides in San Francisco are to local businesses,” Waymo explained on its website.  “We’ve provided thousands of rides to and from individual restaurants, live music venues, bars, coffee shops, ice cream parlors, parks, and museums, boosting the local economy. In a recent survey, over half of our riders said they used Waymo in the past couple of months to or from medical appointments.”

Right now, if you have the Waymo app, you are good to go. Potential riders will, of course, have safety concerns. The company just had to issue a recall of its cars after a crash in Phoenix, although no one was hurt. Waymo said a software update was needed but operations were not affected.

The same can’t be said for General Motors Co.’s Cruise LLC, a company suffering the slings and arrows of business in the fast lane, lately having to lose a good chunk of its staff and shuffle executives. That was partly a result of a series of unfortunate incidences involving its driverless cars. Today Cruise hired former Amazon and Microsoft executive Marc Whitten as its new chief executive.

The near future looks brighter for Waymo, which says its “track record for safe operations is unparalleled.” With an average of 50,000 rides a week across all cities and a number of research papers published on its technology and safety, Waymo says, its cars make San Francisco a safer place to travel. “The Waymo Driver avoids high-severity collisions better than even the most attentive human drivers, and the data shows that we have fewer insurance claims and injuries or police reports than human drivers,” the company said.

If things go well in San Francisco we are taking another step closer to the self-driving future, a long journey that for all companies involved has, at times, been somewhat bumpy.

Photo: Waymo