Alphabet’s robotaxi venture Waymo lays off 8% workforce: report

Waymo, the robotaxi or self-driving car developer under Google’s parent company Alphabet, has laid off about 137 people in a second round of layoffs this year, resulting in a total of 209 people losing their jobs, tech publication The Information reported. This represents 8% of the company’s workforce, it reported.

The report cited an internal mail from the company’s co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov, which said the cuts will help the company invest in key engineering areas.

“This step, combined with the January reductions, allows us to ensure that we have capacity to further invest and grow in key engineering areas, which is critical to our success,” said the email cited by The Information.


The latest round of cuts primarily focused on engineers while the previous layoffs in January targeted general and administrative employees as well as some engineering and operational staff working on an autonomous trucking effort, said the report.

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The news came as Waymo announced it had passed the milestone of driving one million miles on public roads without a human safety driver. The company also revealed plans to begin testing its autonomous driving technology without a human safety driver in Los Angeles. These developments mark significant progress for the company in the field of autonomous driving technology.

Waymo laid off employees from its Waymo Via project in January, but denied rumours of it shutting down the programme, technology news site TechCrunch had reported last month.

Waymo parent Alphabet on January 20 announced that it was planning to cut about 12,000 jobs or 6% of its global workforce.

The layoff wave has swept not only startups and mid-sized firms, but also big tech companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta, among others.

So far, 428 tech companies have laid off 1,20,342 employees in 2023, according to tracking site Layoffs.fyi.