Google’s self-driving taxi arm, Waymo, is coming to D.C. — but making some pit stops in Arlington along the way.
The company announced in March that it would start operating in the District in 2026. Before it starts picking up ride-hailing passengers, however, Waymo has been conducting tests on D.C. streets.
Curiously, the company’s fully autonomous cars have also been spotted in Arlington. Earlier this week, an ARLnow reader sent a photo of a white Jaguar with the distinctive Waymo branding and sensor arrays in the parking lot of the Safeway store in Maywood, along Langston Blvd.
But don’t get too excited — a spokesperson tells ARLnow that was just a routine stop and the car was not driving itself at the time.
“That vehicle was manually driven to [Virginia] for charging related to our DC testing,” wrote Waymo’s Katherine Barna.
Asked about whether the company was considering expanding its autonomous operations from D.C. into the Virginia and Maryland, Barna responded: “Nothing to share there!”
Waymo currently “provides more than 200,000 fully autonomous paid trips each week, helping riders run errands, connect with friends and loved ones, and experience San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin in a whole new way.” In addition to D.C., the company is currently expanding expansions to Atlanta, Miami and New York City.
This is not the first time that an autonomous vehicle — or at least what appeared to be an autonomous vehicle — turned heads in Arlington.
Eight years ago a seemingly driverless van made a big stir when it was spotted cruising the streets of Clarendon and Courthouse. Thanks to intrepid reporting by NBC 4’s Adam Tuss, it was soon revealed that the van was actually being driven by a hidden human and the whole thing was an experiment conducted by Virginia Tech and Ford intended to study the reaction of pedestrians and drivers.
