Waymo LLC, the self-driving car division of Alphabet Inc., today announced that it has begun limited testing of an autonomous robotaxi service in San Francisco some two years after it launched a commercial service in Phoenix.

The testing of the service in San Francisco involves Waymo employee volunteers who are tasked with gathering feedback on how the service works in the city to improve the technology. Although the technology has been proven to work in Phoenix, San Francisco is said to present new challenges.

“In San Francisco, that means tackling the city’s iconic topographical variety – from rolling hills to sandy ocean highways, tiny side streets to huge freeways, bike lanes to tram tracks and everything in between,” Waymo said in a blog post. “It also means learning how to handle the city’s other road users safely. San Francisco’s streets are busy with traffic, pedestrians, cyclists, scooters and emergency vehicles – and that’s not to mention the cable cars, trolleys, streetcars and light rail vehicles that define the cityscape.”

To deal with driving in dense cities such as San Francisco, Waymo has made adjustments to its autonomous vehicle technology. They include optimizing Waymo Driver’s 360-degree vision system and lidar to navigate urban driving as well as teaching its software to reason about context.

Waymo is deploying self-driving Chrysler Pacificas and Jaguar I-Pace electric SUVs for the trial service. VentureBeat reported that the vehicles drove more than 20 billion autonomous miles through computer simulations and 20 million autonomous miles on public roads in 25 cities in 2020.

Although Waymo is ahead of the competition in the U.S. in deploying this technology for commercial use, there have been some hiccups along the way.

In 2018 it was reported that some Phoenix residents had taken to attacking Waymo self-driving vehicles in an apparent backlash to the use of the technology on their streets. Some incidents may have simply been wanton acts of vandalism such as rocks being thrown at the vehicles, but other cases were more serious, such as a Waymo vehicle and safety driver being threatened by a man with a gun.

Waymo did not give a time frame for how long the testing would be undertaken prior to launching a commercial service in the city. If the San Francisco trial runs along similar lines to Phoenix, Waymo later this year or early next year will offer the service to a limited selection of the public followed by a full commercial rollout likely about 2023.

Photo: Waymo