Last month, Waymo launched its first self-driving taxi service -- Waymo One -- in Phoenix, Arizona, but you would hardly know it by scrolling through your feed. We don't know how many people are using the Google offshoot's self-driving minivans (Waymo won't say), but the ones that are have been surprisingly mute on social media. One exception is Shawn Metz, a 30-year-old HR manager who lives in Chandler, Arizona. Since he was invited to use Waymo One in December, Metz has posted at least a dozen videos on Instagram and YouTube, documenting his experience using Waymo's self-driving minivans. He's become the hero of AV enthusiasts on Reddit for his willingness to answer questions and post unedited videos of his rides.

Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car unit, is set to buy thousands more Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans, the companies announced today. The deal, made between Google's parent company Alphabet and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, is set to expand Waymo's fleet, with first deliveries beginning at the end of 2018. The self-driving, ride-hailing service says the additional vehicles will support Waymo as it expands to more cities across the US, with its first publicly-offered service set to launch in Phoenix, Arizona later this year. Waymo recently unveiled a self-driving minivan that it hopes could revolutionise the way we travel. It showed off the technology at the closely-guarded'fake town' dubbed The Castle, 120 miles southeast of San Francisco The number of purchased vehicles has not been disclosed by either party, nor has the value of the deal, but since Fiat Chrysler's recommended starting retail price for the 2018 Fiat Chrysler hybrid is set at $39,995, and if Waymo's order is in the 1000s, the deal is worth at least $40 million.

It's 2018, and Waymo is doing it live. Two months after the Alphabet self-driving car spinoff announced it would start running a truly driver-free service in Phoenix this year (as in, cars romping about with no one at the wheel), the company now unveils how it will do it: with the help of thousands more Chrysler Pacifica hybrids. The vehicles, built by Fiat Chrysler in Canada, will eventually make their way to the cities where Waymo is currently testing driverless tech. Waymo already uses 600 of the minivans to test its driverless software. The details are a bit sketchy.

The auto maker had previously provided 600 Pacifica minivans to Waymo, which has equipped cars with its driverless technology in 25 U.S. cities, including most recently in Atlanta, for testing. Since October, Waymo has tested the minivans without people behind the steering wheel in suburban Phoenix, where the weather is sunny and in a state receptive to the technology. The company announced in November plans to begin giving rides to select residents as part of a public trial. On Tuesday, Waymo said it expects to open the ride-hailing service to the general public in the Phoenix area this year as a commercial service. During a demonstration in October, the minivans had screens welcoming customers aboard and instructing them to push a blue "start ride" button on the ceiling.

Waymo--the Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet--said Monday it's using Intel chips as part of a compute platform that allows its self-driving Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans to process huge amounts of data so it can make decisions in real time while navigating city streets. It was the first time both companies acknowledged the collaboration, a revelation that gives new insight into Waymo's approach to self-driving vehicles. It's also a win for Intel, which has been pushing into the autonomous vehicle space with its $15.3 billion acquisition of Mobileye and alliances with BMW and Fiat Chrysler. Until recently, Intel has been viewed as a laggard behind rival Nvidia, a graphics processing chipmaker that is rapidly expanding into artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and self-driving cars. Waymo has prided itself on designing every aspect of its self-driving vehicles, particularly their eyes, ears, and brains. Waymo designed the entire suite of sensors that allows its self-driving minivans to see and hear the world around it.

After spending nearly a decade quetly working on self-driving cars, Google finally wants to take people for a ride. Its autonomous spin-off, Waymo plans to add 500 Chrysler Pacifica minivans to the 100 already roaming the roads of Phoenix, and inviteds locals to sign up for free rides to school, work, soccer practice, or anywhere else they need to go. Waymo almost certainly possesses the most sophisticated autonomous technology in this increasingly crowded field. After three million miles on the road, its cars can drive thousands of miles without human intervention. But delivering the technology to consumers requires more than developing the right algorithms and hardware.

While Alphabet's legal battle with Uber continues to rumble on, its Waymo self-driving initiative is going from strength to strength. Its laser-mounted white minivans are consistently proving their reliability on the roads and besting their rivals, so much so that the company now wants humans to get involved. In a blog post, the company today announced that it's expanding its test program in Phoenix by allowing families to register for its early rider program. "Over the course of this trial, we'll be accepting hundreds of people with diverse backgrounds and transportation needs who want to ride in and give feedback about Waymo's self-driving cars," said John Krafcik, Waymo CEO. "Rather than offering people one or two rides, the goal of this program is to give participants access to our fleet every day, at any time, to go anywhere within an area that's about twice the size of San Francisco."

Google's self-driving car spin-off, Waymo, is opening up its vehicles to members of the public for the first time. Residents of Phoenix, Arizona, are being invited to apply to join the trial, which will see "hundreds" of participants being given full-time access to the fleet of600 self-driving minivans that Waymo intends to operate in the city. "Over the course of this trial, we'll be accepting hundreds of people with diverse backgrounds and transportation needs who want to ride in and give feedback about Waymo's self-driving cars," Waymo's head, John Krafcik, said in a blogpost. "Rather than offering people one or two rides, the goal of this programme is to give participants access to our fleet every day, at any time, to go anywhere within an area that's about twice the size of San Francisco." While Waymo's head office is still in Google's hometown of Mountain View, California, the state of Arizona has been aggressively courting self-driving car researchers, lowering regulatory burdens and even embarking on Twitter campaigns aimed at wooing companies from Silicon Valley.

Last month, Google's newly-renamed self-driving division Waymo unveiled its newest test model, the Chrysler Pacifica. Today, during the North American Auto Show's Automobili-D conference, the CEO John Krafcik revealed that it built a full sensor suite expressly for its autonomous minivans. Not only did the company's extensive R&D lead them to create entirely new LiDAR sensors, but also cut down the expense of individual sensors, which will likely drive down the cost of sensor setups across the autonomous driving industry. This year's CES had plenty of self-driving concepts from traditional automakers, but it also saw non-automotive tech companies start inserting themselves into the autonomous vehicle game, like Nvidia lending its self-driving computing setups to both Audi and Mercedes. But by focusing on in-house development instead of using lent tech, Waymo can more tightly integrate its sensor hardware, software and image recognition.

Waymo, Google's self-driving car division, will start testing its new fleet of minivans on public roads in California and Arizona this month. The minivans, built in collaboration with Fiat Chrysler, are Chrysler Pacifica hybrids outfitted with Waymo's own suite of sensors and radar. In a speech at the Detroit auto show Sunday, Chief Executive John Krafcik revealed that Waymo built the sensors, radar and software for the new minivans in-house. Krafcik said the company felt the system would work better if it was developed specifically for self-driving instead of using off-the-shelf parts. He said Waymo was also able to significantly lower the cost of the system.