Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Tuesday, May 6th.

Today on Forbes, inside the Waymo factory building a Robotaxie future.

Step outside the main terminal at Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport to the ride chair zone on a hot spring day,

and you'll catch a glimpse of a fast approaching future, driverless Waymo

Robo taxis, queuing alongside human-driven Ubers and lifts to take waiting passengers to their

next destination.

The service just launched in Austin and continues to expand in San Francisco, Los Angeles,

and Silicon Valley, but Phoenix has been its home turf for years,

kicking off paid public rides there in 2020. And now, the region that helped perfect the AI-enabled

tech has quietly become Waymo's Robotaxy Production Hub. About 20 minutes east of Phoenix's airport

in Mesa, Arizona, is a 239,000 square foot factory

that opened in October. Every day, it turns out several battery-powered white Jaguar

iPase electric SUVs loaded up with the company's custom design computer, cameras, radar, and laser-lider sensors

on a single production line.

But the plan is to dramatically scale up the pace and automate output to keep up with growth

plans.

This, according to Kent U., Waymo's head of vehicle manufacturing, who previously managed

production operations for Apple

and General Motors. You told Forbes that this facility will, quote, need to be capable of

doing tens of thousands per year. That production scale is small compared to traditional

auto plants that make hundreds of thousands of vehicles a year. But the 1500 Robotaxies Waymo has provide more

than 250,000 paid rides a week, or about 24 a day per vehicle, vastly more than personal cars and

...