Despite its earlier neck-and-neck competition with Waymo, GM's Cruise has stumbled in recent months due to a series of safety concerns and incidents. This shift has not altered Waymo's position or the outlook of regulators, according to Waymo's chief product officer, Saswat Panigrahi who spoke to CNBC. Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car unit, has been in operation since 2009 and is still having a relatively good couple of months.
Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car branch, is having a successful couple of months in comparison to one of its major competitors, GM's Cruise. The company, formerly the Google self-driving car venture and now an autonomous subsidiary of Alphabet, has been functional since 2009. Five years ago, they debuted in the Phoenix area with the world's first commercial autonomous taxi service. San Francisco followed thereafter, then Austin this year, and more recently the company is testing in the winter weather of Buffalo, New York.
Cruise seemed to be advancing at a comparable speed, with the same $30 billion evaluation when Waymo raised funding in 2020, and commencing autonomous rides in San Francisco immediately after Waymo. This August, California regulators authorized 24/7 robotaxi service in San Francisco from both organizations, thus being the first major US city to permit two robotaxi organizations to compete for service "at all hours of day or night".
But the landscape has shifted after Cruise has run into a series of safety issues and incidents lately. Cruise has halted all public road operations- both supervised and manual, fired contractual workers, and recalled around 1,000 robotaxis after a pedestrian crash. The California Department of Motor Vehicles also suspended Cruise's deployment and testing permits for its autonomous vehicles last October. Furthermore, GM announced recently that it would reduce spending on Cruise in 2024.
Waymo's chief product officer, Saswat Panigrahi, reported to CNBC that the self-driving car unit has not observed any difference in attitude from regulators or in the company's public image. Panigrahi remarked that building the Waymo Driver is indeed a hard task, but assessing the Driver is as equally hard; he noted that the company has had to perform simulations on a gigantic scale, which necessitates computational infrastructure and AI capability. Waymo has tested about 25,000 vehicles in their simulator, and experienced close to billions of miles in simulations.
Ridership is rising in both Phoenix and San Francisco, with more than ten thousand trips happening in each city every week, surpassing 700,000 trips in autonomous vehicles for 2023. We want the city to be a combination of a challenge that makes sense for us, and also a market that's going to have a great impact on our business.
Despite the controversies of the past few months, riders have responded overwhelmingly positively to our programs. We take their ratings, usage patterns, and feedback from focus groups into consideration. We engage with other groups in the cities we operate in, such as first responders and firefighters, and have trained over 5,000 of them in San Francisco alone. We also released our safety framework and collision data before any regulator asked us to. AI is utilized in multiple aspects of the system, using deep learning, reinforcement learning, and more. The autonomous vehicles are driven by Waymo Driver, with our remote operations team acting like an air traffic control. We have focused on reducing cost, and when looking for our next city, take into account its challenges and potential impact on our business. This includes if the city has rain, fog, and eventually snow.
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