Three years after testing a handful of vehicles in Bellevue, self-driving car company Waymo plans to launch in the Seattle area.

San Francisco-based Waymo, owned by Google-parent Alphabet, announced Tuesday it's expanding to two cities — Seattle and Denver. It expects to deliver vehicles to the Seattle area this week, Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp said Tuesday.

Waymo has more than 1,500 vehicles across San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas.

In the Seattle area, the company will be testing Jaguar I-Pace SUVs and electric vehicles from Chinese automaker Zeekr.

But for those looking to eschew traditional rideshares and hail one of the company's robotaxis, they'll have to wait. Karp said once the vehicles arrive, they'll begin a validation process.

They'll begin with human drivers behind the wheel," she said. "Then we gradually transition them to autonomous mode with a human still in the car until it meets our safety thresholds."

There's no set timeline for when the cars will be ready to zip around the city without human intervention as Karp said Waymo uses safety to guide the process.

"It's different with each market," she said. "But as we expand to each city, the process gets faster and faster."

For challenges in the Seattle market, Waymo pointed out the "notoriously wet weather, in a blog post Tuesday. It repeats a statement from the company in 2022, when it said testing in Bellevue would help the technology gain real world experience driving in the rain.

Amazon-owned Zoox, an autonomous vehicle company based in California, also said in 2021 that it was testing an undisclosed number of cars in Seattle to gather data on driving in adverse weather.

General Motors-backed Cruise tested its autonomous vehicles in Seattle in 2023 before shutting down operations in 2024.

Waymo's autonomous vehicles drew scrutiny from federal regulators last year when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into more than a dozen minor crashes and five possible traffic violations. Reports said Waymo vehicles hit parked vehicles and other stationary objects, some of them shortly after unexpected behavior near traffic control devices.

The NHTSA wrapped up the 14-month-long probe in late July without taking any action. Waymo's recall of 1,200 vehicles led to the NHTSA closing the investigation, Reuters reported.

In May, before the investigation ended, Waymo released its own study that compared its autonomous vehicles to human drivers. The study said that over 56.7 million miles, Waymo vehicles had 92% fewer crashes with injuries to pedestrians and 82% fewer crashes with injuries to cyclists compared to human drivers.

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