Waymo purchases Apple’s self-driving car proving ground

Waymo LLC – Alphabet Inc.’s autonomous driving technology company and leading commercial operator of driver-less robotaxis in the United States – acquired a new, 5,500 acre proving ground near Wittman, Arizona on June 5 for the tidy sum of $220 million. The acquisition will boost Waymo’s ability to test and refine autonomous systems in controlled environments as it continues to expand its robotaxi services.

Interestingly, the proving ground was purchased from Apple, which had itself acquired the proving ground for $125 million in 2021 to support its own secretive self-driving “iCar” electric vehicle project (internally known as Project Titan). After reportedly spending billions of dollars, Apple officially canceled Project Titan in early 2024 to pivot its resources toward generative artificial intelligence.

Only two days ago, on June 24, it was separately announced that Ohio-based Transportation Research Center Inc. will manage day-to-day operations of Waymo's new Arizona proving ground facility.

The Arizona site includes a 115-acre mock city, a 35-acre vehicle dynamics area, a four-mile oval track, and freeway test courses designed for autonomous vehicle testing. According to Waymo, the facility will be used to simulate driving scenarios in a controlled environment to test and improve its autonomous driving system, called Waymo Driver. Testing at the site will include rider-only testing, motion control testing, and operational training workflows. Tests will encompass both mapping unseen environments and evaluation of fully autonomous robotaxi driving, which utilizes a combination of LiDAR, cameras, and radar sensing to build detailed, real-time models of surroundings.

The newly acquired proving ground becomes Waymo’s third closed-course testing facility in the U.S., which supplements the millions of miles of public testing and commercial robotaxi operations in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco. Waymo’s other two testing facilities are the Castle Proving Ground in Atwater, California and the Transportation Research Center in East Liberty, Ohio.

This news comes in the midst of Waymo’s rapid expansion of its fleet and coverage area. Waymo says it will soon cover more than 1,400 square miles across 11 cities. Waymo is also scaling up its robotaxi fleet, announcing earlier this year that it plans to expand production at its Phoenix-area factory to tens of thousands of vehicles per year. The newest version of Waymo Driver (the company’s sixth-generation autonomous driving system) is running in its new Ojai robotaxis – which are built atop base vehicles supplied by Chinese automaker, Geely.