In a monumental move, Alphabet Inc.’s Waymo announced Tuesday that it will deploy a commercial, fully autonomous vehicle ride-hailing service with no safety drivers in Phoenix, Arizona, later this year.

The company, formerly known as the Google self-driving car project, launched a trial of the service in November and is so confident that the service is safe that it’s now taking it to the next level.

The announcement was made at the Google I/O conference despite Waymo’s relative independence from Google. Waymo Chief Executive Officer John Krafcik showed a video (below) of people trying the service before going on to discuss the use of artificial intelligence in the vehicles, much of which still relies on technology developed and supported by Google.

Dmitri Dolgov, chief technology officer and vice president of engineering explained in a post on Medium and at I/O that Google’s AI researchers helped give Waymo a “jumpstart on the road to truly self-driving cars.” He also said Waymo’s “self-driving engineers worked side-by-side with the Google Brain team to apply deep nets to our pedestrian detection system.”

Today, Waymo uses Google’s TensorFlow ecosystem and its data centers, including its custom Tensor Processing Unit chips, to train its neural networks, Dolgov added.

Waymo is clearly confident in the strength of its technology in being able to provide a safe experience for customers, but the announcement comes at a time that the safety of self-driving car technology is in the spotlight on concerns that it’s not as safe as promised. While Tesla Inc.’s autonomous vehicles are hitting concrete barriers and Uber Technologies Inc.’s self-driving cars ran over a pedestrian, a Waymo vehicle was involved in an accident May 4 in Chandler, a suburb of Phoenix.

Police are now saying that Waymo’s autonomous Chrysler Pacifica minivan was not at fault in the accident, but there’s a growing perception, driven by the media and in some cases politicians, that the technology is neither safe nor ready for commercial deployment.

Those concerns will continue to weigh on Waymo as it tries to bring its commercial driverless car service to market.

Photo: Waymo