Vehicles drive themselves off the production line
Self-driving car developer Waymo has opened a manufacturing and integration plant in Phoenix, Arizona, with Canadian Tier One supplier Magna where the cars drive themselves off the line and straight into operation.
The company has taken delivery of its last batch of 2000 I-Pace electric vehicles from Jaguar Land Rover which will more than double the fleet, which has been operating in San Francisco since 2021. The vehicles are then adapted with cameras, lidar laser sensors and a central compute hub, all developed in-house.
Waymo says the Driver integration plant will build thousands of vehicles equipped with fully autonomous technology, moving from Jaguar to the RT model from Chinese supplier Zeekr.
The plant allows vehicles assigned to the Phoenix fleet to drive themselves out of the facility and directly into service and can pick up their first public passengers less than 30 minutes after leaving the factory.
For vehicles intended for other cities, they can be deployed into public service in a matter of hours after being shipped to the local depot. The company currently runs 1500 I-Pace vehicles across San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin, Texas.
“The Waymo and Magna manufacturing facility in Mesa is the latest example of Arizona being the new home for technology to innovate and grow,” said Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs. “I’m proud to see autonomous vehicles on our streets every day, helping get people where they need to be safely. The new manufacturing facility will enhance this presence, and the local jobs it’s creating will help Arizona’s tech economy continue to rise on the world stage.”
“The Waymo Driver integration plant in Mesa is the epicenter of our future growth plans,” said Ryan McNamara, Vice President of Operations, Waymo. “With our partners at Magna, we’ve opened a manufacturing site that enables the cost efficiency, flexibility, and capacity to scale our fleet to new heights.”
The plant will introduce an automated assembly line to handle both the Jaguar and Zeekr integrations, and at full capacity will be capable of building tens of thousands of fully autonomous Waymo vehicles per year.
After the Driver is installed, the system needs to be validated and commissioned before carrying riders, and Waymo has simplified the end of line commissioning to reduce the time and cost required.
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