So waymo just announced that it has plans to open another technical service center in the Phoenix area, the new technical center is aimed to increase the startup’s capacity in the area. The center which is gonna be located at mesa and is set to be open in the second half of the year.
The company’s existing 60,000-square-foot facility in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler will remain, while it open’s this new 85,000-square-foot center. The former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet opened its first location in Chandler, Arizona in 2016. Since then the company has ramped up its testing, launched an early rider program and slowly crept toward commercial deployment. The early rider program, which launched in April 2017, had more than 400 participants the last time Waymo shared figures on the program.
Recall the company rolled out it waymo–one in december, although it not widely available right now and Waymo-trained test drivers are still behind the wheel. (Waymo does have driverless vehicles on public roads in Phoenix.) The company already has operations going on in Chandler, Tempe, Gilbert and Mesa. So if you live around any of this areas you should be seeing lots of waymo’s self-driving vehicles on the road.
The company as of right now have a total of 600 cars worldwide with the most of it in the phoenix area. The new technical center will act as a second dispatch center as well as a place to maintain, clean and manage the fleet, according to the company. So we should be expecting some employment in the area in the coming months. The facility is gonna be housing support teams, fleet technicians, fleet dispatch, fleet response and rider support.
