Waymo teamed up with Geely to debut its new purpose built autonomous taxi. | Photo by Abigail Bassett for The Verge
Waymo, the Alphabet-owned autonomous taxi company that currently operates in a small handful of cities, showed off a brand-new prototype vehicle made by Geely’s luxury Zeekr brand last week at a splashy invite-only event in downtown Los Angeles.
While Waymo has largely used production vehicles like the Chrysler Pacifica and Jaguar i-Pace to shuttle passengers around cities like Phoenix and San Francisco, this is the second ground-up design that Waymo has unveiled. The first was the Firefly, which was retired in 2017.
This time, the company partnered with Chinese automaker Geely to design a purpose-built, passenger-first autonomous vehicle. Geely owns automakers like Volvo, Lotus, and Polestar, as well as a stake in the luxury British…
