fact a secret for more than a year.

Why Google did this is not clear. Perhaps it was connected to a leadership change that was occurring at the time: from engineer Chris Urmson to auto-industry executive John Krafcik. Krafcik ultimately killed the Firefly car and focused on forging partnerships with automakers to add Google's technology to conventional cars.

In any event, Waymo's launch marked the start of the company's commercialization plan. In April 2017, Waymo announced its early rider program, which allows ordinary residents of the Phoenix area to ride in Waymo's vehicles—albeit with a safety driver and no money changing hands.

In November, Waymo announced that it would begin testing fully driverless cars on public roads. But it didn't switch to operating all vehicles in driverless mode or anything closeto it. A year later, many of Waymo's cars still have safety drivers.

This summer, Waymo announced a series of commercial partnerships. Waymo will transport customers to Wal-Mart to pick up groceries. It will also transport employees—and perhaps later customers—of the region's transit agency to and from local transit stops.

Around the same time, reports started to circulate that Waymo had begun showing customers potential prices for their rides—though it hadn't yet begun actually taking payments. Now we know that changed sometime between July and September—some customers are now paying Waymo directly for their rides in the self-driving cars.

But Waymo is still a few steps away from its ultimate goal of running a fully public, commercial, driverless service. Right now, the service is only available to hand-picked customers who have