New York City authorized a Waymo pilot allowing eight sensor-equipped Jaguar SUVs to operate autonomously in Manhattan (south of 112th Street) and Downtown Brooklyn (north of Atlantic Avenue, west of Carlton Street) through September, with potential extension. Waymo previously mapped the city with manually driven vehicles in 2021 and collected driver-controlled data in July; the pilot marks the first time the vehicles will autonomously steer in the boroughs. State law requires a trained specialist to ride along in each car ready to take control. Passenger pickups are prohibited during the pilot without a Taxi and Limousine Commission license, and the rollout has faced public skepticism.
The Alphabet-owned Waymo already operates self-driving fleets in cities including San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin and has long had designs on the five boroughs: Drivers in its now-retired Chrysler Pacifica minivans manually mapped the city back in 2021, and driver-controlled Waymos were again collecting data across the city beginning in July. But it wasn't until last week that the city gave the company the all-clear to let the self-driving vehicles actually steer themselves.
Under the current pilot, which runs through September with the possibility of an extension, the cars are allowed to drive in Manhattan south of 112th Street and in Downtown Brooklyn north of Atlantic Avenue and west of Carlton Street. But there's a sort of driver's-ed rule in place for autonomous vehicles under state law, so in each of these cars, a "trained specialist" is required to ride along, ready to take control of the vehicle should anything go sideways.
No one is setting the Waymos on fire here (yet?), but the so-called self-driving revolution has been met with heavy skepticism in some corners of the city. "If there's one place on Earth that was NOT meant for self-driving cars, it's NYC," former Mayor Bill de Blasio recently wrote on X. "This is a really bad idea."
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