The State of the Self-Driving Car Race 2020

If a driverless car is ever to become more than a novelty, it will require an abundance of experience or money. Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Alphabet Inc., has had scads of both since it emerged as a Google skunkworks project 11 years ago. Today, if you want to pay to ride in a truly driverless car, there is only one place in the country to do it: suburban Phoenix, where Waymo carries fares with no safety drivers in a handful of the Chrysler Pacifica vehicles. The general consensus in the industry is that Waymo remains ahead of the competition by a year or more, based on several milestones. In early March, the company announced that it had raised its first capital from outside investors--$2.3 billion from a smattering of institutions, including venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz and AutoNation, the country's largest car dealer.