(Credit: Shutterstock/Robin Guess)
You can now get donuts or Mediterranean food delivered by a self-driving Waymo car if you live in the 225-square-mile expanse that is the Phoenix, Arizona, metro sprawl.
Waymo cars started to deliver Uber Eats orders for the first time on Wednesday, with the cactus-filled desert locale as its first location. The autonomous vehicle company selected restaurants to work with in Chandler, Tempe, and Mesa for deliveries to start, including Princess Pita, Filiberto's, and Bosa Donuts.
Uber Eats customers will be notified as they're placing their orders if a Waymo car is selected to deliver their food, but it's possible to opt-out and get a human driver instead. When the food arrives, customers will have to take their phone with them and follow its instructions to get the Waymo car's trunk to open to retrieve their orders.
Uber and Waymo first said they'd be working together in Phoenix back in May last year, so these first deliveries have been nearly a year in the making.
While some believe Waymo (and any autonomous vehicles, for that matter) pose safety concerns, Waymo wants you to get used to robotaxis. "In terms of trust, the most important thing is experiencing the vehicle,” Waymo Director of Safety Incident Management Matt Schwall said at an event in Washington, D.C. last month.
Meanwhile, a different autonomous driving startup, the OpenAI-backed Ghost Autonomy, shut down entirely this week. In a statement on its website, the Ghost team says that its "path to long-term profitability was uncertain given the funding climate and long-term investment required" for it to develop self-driving vehicle software.
Ghost Autonomy received $5 million from OpenAI just five months ago to integrate large language AI models into its tech. Ghost Autonomy had $217 million in total funding, while Waymo, which is a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, has an estimated $5.5 billion in funding, per Crunchbase data.