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Investing.com -- Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), has disclosed plans to expand its autonomous vehicle testing to ten new cities in 2025. The initiative kicks off with Las Vegas and San Diego, the company exclusively revealed to The Verge.
The vehicles involved in the operation will be manually driven, and the expansion is not necessarily an indicator of an impending commercial robotaxi service launch. However, the company does not rule out the possibility of such a service in the future. Waymo considers these testing drives as chances to evaluate how well its self-driving system adjusts to different locations with diverse weather conditions and regional driving habits.
Nick Rose, the product manager for Waymo’s expansion efforts, explained the company’s intentions. "So what we’re looking for is places that are going to challenge our system and look very, very different," Rose said. He pointed out that Las Vegas was of particular interest due to its unique characteristics compared to other US cities.
Rose further elaborated on the objectives for San Diego. "What we wanna validate is that the system performs well in San Diego without having a ton of prior driving information there," he stated.
The expansion aims to test how well Waymo’s autonomous driving system performs in new environments without requiring adjustments or retraining. "When we go to a brand new city in the US, there are things that are subtly different," Rose said. "And we want to see how well the driver performs on those things out of the box without having to retrain or make adjustments."
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