2022 hasn't been a very good year for companies focused on developing self-driving cars. Argo AI, the joint venture between Ford and Volkswagen, for example, announced its closure in late October, while the stock price of another company focused on that business, Aurora Innovation, fell by 80% in the first ten months of the year.

But others have continued to make progress. Take Waymo, for example—the self-driving car company owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company—which already operates an autonomous taxi service, Waymo One (learn more), in the Phoenix metropolitan area and is preparing to do so in Los Angeles. The process isn’t immediate. The company receives permission to conduct tests, and the first rides are taken by employees, followed by “trusted users,” before the service is made available to the public. 

In addition to driverless taxis, Waymo is testing driverless trucks (read more). As of early October, the company had transported nearly 500 metric tons of Modelo and Corona beer bottles between Houston and Dallas as part of a pilot program it is conducting with the bottler Constellation. Waymo Via’s trucks were making a daily trip covering the 350 kilometers between the two cities, with a human driver on board as a safety measure.