Waymo and Cruise lead the way in electrifying autonomous vehicles

Battery-electric vehicles alone accounted for 78% of total miles driven, largely due to Waymo’s fleet of Jaguar I-Paces and Cruise’s Chevrolet Bolts. — AFP Relaxnews

Autonomous vehicles are mostly electric so far. That’s one of the main conclusions of BloombergNEF’s just-published annual report analysing the state of AV testing programmes in the US and China.

California still is by far the largest autonomous vehicle test bed in the world, and 81% of the almost 1,000 AVs operating in the state last year either were fully electric or plug-in hybrid. That’s a big jump from 2020, when only 63% were plug-in vehicles. Non plug-in hybrids represented about 17% of the AV fleet last year, and traditional combustion engines were negligible at just 2%.