By Steven Symes 
After years of waiting, people in the Seattle area might be able to finally hail a Waymo robotaxi ride in the city. A new announcement from the self-driving car service says its has returned after a testing hiatus, intent on offering driverless rides to people, eventually.
Jaguar Land Rover has been hacked, bringing production and many sales transactions to a sudden halt.
But there might be some snags in the plan. As we covered before, the city of Seattle has been erecting a dizzying architecture of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies for robotaxi services to follow. In other words, Waymo and others will have to jump through the ever-evolving hoops of wokeness to operate there.
That factor has been blamed for why Seattle hasn’t already become a utopia of robotaxis ferrying people wherever they need to go. One would think San Francisco would be more of a regulatory hellscape, but that apparently isn’t the case.
Waymo showed up in Bellevue, an affluent suburb of Seattle, to test out its self-driving cars about three years ago. Then nothing more happened. Some residents in the area thought that meant they would be hailing robotaxis by now.
Even though Waymo is returning to the Emerald City, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be offering its service anytime soon.
Waymo is supposed to have Jaguar I-Paces and some EVs from Chinese brand Zeekr trolling the city right now. However, they will hardly be without drivers, as has been the case when Waymo has entered other new markets.
Human drivers who are ready to take over at any time will be there, just in case. Since robotaxi services have mostly been operating in the Sunbelt, Seattle’s famous rainy climate might pose a significant challenge.
It remains to be seen what activists in the city government and elsewhere might do to throw up roadblocks for Waymo and others who want to operate robotaxi services in the area.
The other city Waymo announced it’s expanding to is Denver, Colorado. We’ll see if activists there put up as much of a fight as they have been in Seattle.
Image via Waymo
Mike Johnson