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Certification documents show a single rear-mounted electric motor producing 268 horsepower and hooked up to a 93-kWh battery.

Wow, that seems like a lot of horsepower.

All my support for carpools and shuttles in the US. We need this more especially in SF
>San Francisco and then expanding last year to Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta.

"The Waymo Ojai Will Soon Offer Autonomous Rides Around the Southern U.S. in areas where there is no snow."

They need to have a service that allows for pets. It is the only reason I still use Ubers!
I wonder what loophole Waymo used here:

Bonelli said that the Ojai is not affected by the U.S. government's regulations that aim to prevent Chinese cars from being sold to customers in the U.S.

Possibly the Ojai is not fully assembled (therefore, not a car), or Waymo does not count as a consumer.

Also, I hope they're more comfortable than the current Jaguars. I was stuck in traffic in the back of a Waymo for almost an hour and it wasn't great. If Waymo is expanding their range, longer rides might be more common.

"Bonelli said that the Ojai is not affected by the U.S. government's regulations that aim to prevent Chinese cars from being sold to customers in the U.S."

How does this get around the regulations? That's a massive loophole that will absolutely get abused by both China and domestic companies. Trucking, delivery vehicles, etc. will all get slammed by this.

I'm not a fan of protectionist regulations like the ones keeping Chinese automobiles out of the US, but if you're going to have them, at least make them effective.

Waymo, being an Alphabet subsidiary, must be funneling rider data to the Google Ads business.

Does anybody know the general shape of it?

Oh man I misunderstood that headline at first. I thought it was along the lines of "Waymo will start offering long-distance autonomous roadtrips across the US" but it's really "Waymo is still geoboxed in a handful of cities but is adding a second model of car to its fleet".

I've taken a handful of sightseeing roadtrips in the US where the pattern tends to be hike/sightsee during the day, then hop in the car in the evening and drive for a few hours to get close to tomorrow's destination. It'd be great to be able to do that, except outsource the driving (and skip the hotel) by sleeping through the drive. Similar to night train travel in Europe.

Small thing, but the article should have added how to pronounce Ojai. It sounds like “oh-hi”