Waymo has acquired the Arizona proving ground that was once at the heart of Apple’s ill-fated self-driving car project.
Documents filed with Maricopa County reveal that the robotaxi developer paid $220 million to Route 14 Investments, a Delaware-listed company associated with Apple, for the facility in Wittmann.
Waymo already has testing and development hubs elsewhere, including a proving ground in California and a research center in Ohio, but Wittmann, about 60 miles north-west of Phoenix, is significantly bigger than both. It incorporates a 115-acre city course, a 35-acre dynamics area and a four-mile oval track. There’s also a freeway-style area designed specifically to assess autonomous driving.
Waymo confirmed the purchase in a post on X and said it would provide a dedicated environment “to validate software in a controlled setting before deploying on public roads.”
While the scale of the location has obvious appeal, its location does, too. Waymo is well-established in Arizona, having first started testing in Chandler, a Phoenix suburb, in 2017. It is now a fixture in the city, with a large fleet of adapted Jaguar SUVs offering commercial driverless rides.
Wittmann is a 90-minute drive from Mesa, the vast Phoenix manufacturing center that Waymo opened in October. The 239,000-square-foot factory, run in tandem with global automotive parts supplier Magna, will eventually churn out tens of thousands of robotaxis every year, including the recently launched Ojai. That robotaxi integrates the company’s sixth-gen AI-powered Waymo Driver tech with a vehicle platform based on a minivan from Chinese automaker Zeekr.
Wittmann’s proximity will enable easy assessment and validation of the Mesa assembled robotaxis, including the Ojai, plus the planned Hyundai Ioniq 5 unveiled in 2024. And the result, Waymo hopes, will be even speedier deployments.
The purchase of the facility marks another major step forward for Waymo, which has firmly established itself as the robotaxi market leader in the U.S., well ahead of Tesla and Amazon’s Zoox. Waymo, owned by Google parent Alphabet, was valued at $126 billion in February after a $16 billion funding round, and now runs more than 500,000 weekly rides across 11 cities.
The irony of Waymo buying Wittmann, though, will be clear to many, as the complex played such a key role in the development of Apple’s ultimately unsuccessful Project Titan self-driving car, which went through various iterations before being killed for good two years ago. Apple rented the Wittmann center for many years, before taking ownership in 2021.
