On Tuesday, the Chinese multinational automotive company Geely announced that their premium electric brand, Zeekr, will partner up with Waymo. This partnership is to build an all-electric, self-driving vehicle for the Waymo One ride-hailing autonomous fleet in the United States.
For those unaware, Waymo LLC is an American autonomous driving technology development company that is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc (Google’s parent company).
Both Geely and Waymo stated in a press release that the ride-hailing cars would be designed and developed by Zeekr, Geely’s electric mobility brand, at a facility in Gothenburg, Sweden using “a new proprietary and open-source mobility architecture.” Once the cars are delivered to Waymo in the United States, the company plans on setting it up with their autonomous driving technology called Waymo Driver.
The company did not provide any specific timeline of when we can expect the vehicles to hit the streets but stated that the cars would be introduced in the Waymo One fleet in the years to come. However, the company has already has been testing its self-driving vans in Phoenix, Arizona for more than a year now.
Google first established its self-driving car project in 2009. It was later re-named Waymo and made a separate subsidiary of Alphabet. However, after almost 13 years of its establishment, it looks like we still have a while before Waymo offers a widespread, fully autonomous ride-hailing service to the general public.
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