Sneak peek of new all-electric self-driving Jaguar

Waymo released images on Thursday of the first new additions to its fleet of self-driving cars in two years. The company says it has three Jaguar I-Paces, the British automaker’s hotly anticipated electric vehicles, driving around the Bay Area collecting design requirement data and developing durability tests, though the vehicles lack any self-driving hardware and software as of yet. They are the first on US roads outside Jaguar’s own fleet.

In March, Waymo and Jaguar Land Rover announced they had inked a deal to build thousands of new self-driving I-Paces to be used by the Alphabet unit as self-driving taxis. At the time, they said the first prototype I-Pace with Waymo’s self-driving technology will hit the road for public testing at the end of 2018 and officially become part of Waymo’s commercial ride-hailing service starting in 2020.

Waymo and Jaguar Land Rover’s engineers are working in tandem to build these cars to be self-driving from the start, rather than retrofitting them after they come off the assembly line. Long term, the companies say they plan to build up to 20,000 vehicles in the first two years of production, with the goal of serving a potential 1 million trips a day.

Waymo currently has around 600 Chrysler Pacifica minivans in its fleet, some of which are used to shuttle real people around for its Early Rider program in Arizona. The minivans are plug-in hybrid variants with Waymo’s self-driving hardware and software built in.

In May, Waymo announced a deal with Fiat Chrysler for an additional 62,000 minivans to be deployed as robot taxis. The two companies have also begun discussions about how to eventually sell self-driving vehicles to customers as personally owned vehicles. Waymo has said it plans to launch its first commercial ride-hailing service in Arizona later this year.

Waymo and Jaguar announced plans to jointly develop a large fleet of all-electric, self-driving luxury vehicles.

The announcement occurred a day before two media preview days at the New York auto show. The companies said that testing, using the recently launched I-PACE, would commence later this year.

“Up to 20,000 I-PACEs will be built in the first two years of production and be available for riders of Waymo’s driverless service, serving a potential one million trips per day,” the automaker and the autonomous-mobility division of Alphabet said in a statement.

Waymo used to be known as the Google Car project, which was started in 2009; the division was spun off in 2016.

It has been testing fully autonomous vehicles, requiring no human driver, in Arizona since 2017. The company has outfitted a fleet of Chrysler Pacifica minivans with laser-radars and other self-driving sensors.

General Motor’s Cruise division has been testing its own fleet of self-driving electric vehicles, while Tesla has been rolling out its Autopilot semi-self-driving technology with real-world owners. Uber has been testing its self-driving tech using Volvo SUVS, one of which was involved in a fatal accident in Tempe, Arizona on March 18.

The partnership between Jaguar — owned by India’s Tata Group, along with Land Rover — and Waymo is among the first instances of luxury brands combining with a tech company to push forward autonomous systems. The I-PACE will be incorporated into Waymo’s on-demand ride-hailing service, scheduled to launch later in 2018 in Phoenix.

“Our passion for further advancing smart mobility needs expert long-term partners,” Prof. Dr. Ralf Speth, Jaguar Land Rover CEO, said in a statement. “In joining forces with Waymo we are pioneering to push the boundaries of technology.”