Self-driving car company Waymo plans to more than double its Arizona operations this year with a new Technical Service Center in Mesa, which the company says will create hundreds of jobs once fully operational.

Waymo brought its self-driving vehicles to Chandler in 2016 and now has a 60,000-square-foot garage and operations center there, with hundreds of vehicles driving test routes and carrying passengers in the region.

The vehicles operate autonomously in a special "geofenced" area that includes portions of Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Ahwatukee.

The Mesa Technical Service Center will be larger than Chandler's at 85,000 square feet when it opens in a few months, which will more than double the company's presence in the cities east of Phoenix. The facility will be in an industrial center near Broadway and Dobson roads, Mesa Mayor John Giles said. The company declined to provide the location.

"Our new Mesa service center gives us the ability to expand our fleet and presence in the region," said Dezbah Hatathli, the local policy and community manager at Waymo. "The location will allow us to scale and act as another great dispatch location for Waymo One (a paid ride service using the self-driving cars)."

More than 20,000 people have signed up on the company's website to participate in the "early rider" program, which is used to test public interaction with the vehicles and the company's capabilities.

"In our early rider program, we are actively evaluating new territory to expand for our early riders," Hatathli said. "We not only rely on our riders to tell us where they might want to go in new territories, but we also depend on their feedback to better understand things like routing, pick-ups and drop-offs.

The company, which is owned by the same company as Google, doesn't disclose exactly how many vehicles operate in Arizona other than to say the majority of its 600 vehicles operating nationwide are here.

The "hundreds" of people expected to work at the Mesa facility will include self-driving fleet technicians and operations workers, she said.

"We offer competitive compensation packages at Waymo, including base salary and other perks," Hatathli said, declining to directly answer the average wages paid. When the service first launched in Arizona, test drivers were offered $20 an hour.

"Keep an eye on our careers site where we’ll post up specific job openings over weeks and months to come," she said.

Paid service expanding

In December, Waymo launched a paid ride service called Waymo One using its autonomous vehicles, which runs much like Lyft or Uber services, though safety drivers still sit behind the wheel in those vehicles most of the time. Now, the early rider and Waymo One services operate simultaneously.

Initially, the Waymo One service was only available to about 400 people who were prescreened by the company to participate as early riders, and then invited by the company to use Waymo One.

Company officials said the goal was to grow the service over time to become a national, and then international, service available to the broader public. Hatathli would only say the service now is available to "several hundred" participants in Arizona and has no date to expand beyond the state.

"As the service scales, we want to make sure Waymo One riders’ experience is excellent, which means continuing to fine tune our driving style, creating a customized rider experience, making routes more efficient, and streamlining pick-up and drop-off locations," Hatathli said.

"In addition to the learning from the millions of miles we’ve logged, we’ve received incredible feedback from our riders and the community to improve the experience for people inside and outside the vehicles," Hatathli said.

Arizona a good test ground

Arizona is a good place to expand for a variety of reasons, the company said.

"Metro Phoenix offers everything we've needed to build safe and reliable self-driving technology: a large area with broad, yet complex, city streets to practice on; a wide-spread suburban population that relies heavily on vehicle transport; and of course, lots of gorgeous sunny days to drive in while we also invest in further weather testing," the company announcement released Tuesday morning said.

"Most importantly, metro Phoenix is an innovation-minded region that shares our vision of improving mobility for all."

Self-driving cars were first welcomed to Arizona in 2015 through an executive order from Republican Gov. Doug Ducey. That order was updated last year to permit tests with no driver behind the wheel, which Waymo has done at times.

Waymo made its announcement one year and one day after a fatal accident with a self-driving vehicle operated by Uber in Tempe that, at least in the short term, cast a shadow over the industry. Uber no longer operates self-driving vehicles in Arizona, but has said it resumed tests in Pittsburgh.

Waymo vehicles have been involved in Arizona accidents caused by other drivers, but nothing like that fatal crash. After that happened, Waymo's CEO said his company's vehicles would have avoided the collision.

Giles, the Mesa mayor, said he's "comfortable" with the safety of the vehicles after having been on a ride in a self-driving car last year when Waymo showed off its technology at SXSW in Austin.

"It was interesting to see how the sensors identified objects and people, and I felt like I was really flying in a technologically advanced aircraft," he said. "At some point, you realize it's just a ride."

Giles said it could be weeks or months before the new Waymo site is fully operational.

Trump not a fan of the technology

The expansion announcement also comes a day after news site Axios reported that President Donald Trump called driverless cars "crazy" and pantomimed autonomous cars crashing. Axios quoted unnamed officials.

On Twitter, Trump also has criticized Google, which like Waymo, is owned by Alphabet Inc.

Reach reporter Ryan Randazzo at ryan.randazzo@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4331. Follow him on Twitter @UtilityReporter.

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