2022 has not been a very good year for companies focused on developing driverless cars. Argo AI, the joint venture between Ford and Volkswagen, for example, announced its closure at the end of October, while the share price of another company focused on that business, Aurora Innovation, showed an 80% drop in the first ten months of the year.

But others have continued to move forward. This is the case with Waymo, the driverless vehicle company owned by Alphabet, Google's parent company, which already operates an autonomous taxi service, Waymo One (see more)in the Phoenix metropolitan area and is preparing to do so in Los Angeles. The process is not immediate. The company receives permission for testing, and the first trips are made by employees, then by "trusted users," before the service is made available to the public. 

In addition to driverless taxis, Waymo is testing the use of driverless trucks (see more). By early October, the company had transported nearly 500 tons of Modelo and Corona beer bottles between the cities of Houston and Dallas, under a pilot program it has with the Constellation bottling company. Waymo Via trucks were making a daily trip covering the 350 kilometers between the two cities with a human driver on board as a safety measure.