Autonomous rideshare rivals Waymo and Cruise have both reportedly applied for permits to charge passengers for self-driving rides in the San Francisco Bay area. Some of the applications are still under review, but it could be a major step toward autonomous rideshare vehicles operating as commonplace soon.
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After ordering thousands of Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans in January, Waymo is drastically expanding its self-driving fleet with an 62,000 more vehicles. It comes ahead of the Alphabet division’s first ride service this year, while the company is also in discussions to allow others to sell cars that feature its autonomous technology.
In October, we got our first look through spy shots at the Chrysler Pacifica minivans that Google has been outfitting with its self-driving technology. Today, Chrysler and Waymo, the new Alphabet company created out of Google’s self-driving effort, have officially unveiled the final design of a Chrysler Pacifica with self-driving hardware.
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After a rare step into electrification with a so far well-received plug-in hybrid version of the Pacifica minivan, Chrysler is reportedly ready to move to an all-electric version of the vehicle or at least an all-electric vehicle based on the same platform. The new vehicle is expected to be unveiled at CES in Las Vegas next month.
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If you want a minivan and don’t want to burn fossil fuels to get around, your options are extremely limited currently. You could obviously buy a very expensive Tesla Model X which ticks off a lot of the minivan features and adds a bunch of sports sedan goodies. But that sticker price of $75K is going to eliminate a broad swath of the population. From there, your options are all but nothing. You could squeeze into a Kia Soul EV which seats 5 and is a little higher off the ground than a typical car but at this point, you’d be better served to (head to the West Coast) and buy a Chevy Bolt with its 238-mile range.
This is where the Chrysler Pacifica steps in. Introduced almost a year ago from the inventor of the minivan comes a Plug-in Hybrid version of the popular Pacifica high end mini-van. This hybrid was touted as having 30 miles of range on electric only before its 500+ mile range with ICE kicked in.
Some good news on that front…
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While Tesla’s fleet recently reached 222 million miles driven on Autopilot in about a year, Google’s fleet of self-driving cars just passed the 2-million miles mark last month after 7 years on the road. As we previously discussed, Tesla’s Autopilot miles are not really equivalent to Google’s self-driving miles, but it still gives us a good indication of the speed at which each company is deploying their semi-autonomous and autonomous programs.
Now Google is about to speed up its effort by deploying a lot more vehicles through its partnership with Fiat-Chrysler to build a fleet of self-driving Pacifica, Chrysler’s new plug-in hybrid minivan. The first few prototypes were spotted in Mountain View over the weekend.
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