By the end of February, the California Public Utilities Commission did not have time to approve Waymo's application to carry out commercial transportation of passengers using driverless taxis in certain areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco, but the deadline for reviewing the application was extended by 120 days, and regulators managed to fit in. The corresponding permit was issued to Waymo at the end of the past week.
On the first day of calendar spring, a notification appeared on the website of the Californian regulator that Waymo had received the right to launch a driverless taxi service in certain areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco (on the peninsula). Waymo has been testing its self-driving taxis in this area for several years, but now the company is allowed to charge customers for its services.
In mid-February, Waymo voluntarily decided to recall its prototype self-driving taxis in the United States due to a pair of incidents in Phoenix, Arizona, which occurred within minutes of each other on December 11, and were associated with incorrectly predicting the trajectory of a towed vehicle. Two different Waymo self-driving taxis took turns colliding with the same towed pickup truck due to this software flaw. The software update took place during the period of scheduled maintenance of unmanned taxis; for this, they did not have to be removed from the line.
Competitor Cruise, we recall, cannot yet resume operation of its driverless taxis in California, as an investigation is underway into an October incident involving a collision with a pedestrian that took place in San Francisco. It is noteworthy that the expansion of the operating area of Waymo's driverless taxis in Los Angeles will allow prototypes of this brand to move in close proximity to the Tesla engineering center, which is in charge of developing proprietary autopilot technology.
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