Waymo to Launch New "Tour Mode"

Waymo has recently teased a new sightseeing feature on their Instagram page, posting a few images (shown below) along with the caption "All the sightseeing, none of the driving. 👀".

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A post shared by Waymo (@waymo)

What could this mean? Well, as it turns out, we think we have the answers already.

An anonymous source contacted us a while ago with some interesting information they obtained from decompiling the Android APK for Waymo One. In other words, they took a look inside the app and its assets to find things that are not displayed during normal usage.

In the "strings" of the APK, the following text was found:

"Tours are curated multi-stop trips exploring Waymo's cities"

Take a tour with Waymo
See the area’s best sights from the comfort of our car

We very much believe that the aforementioned Instagram post is in relation to this feature - laying dormant in the app for quite a while now.

What might these "tours" consist of?

Inside the app, our source also found some images (along with their filenames) that give us a clue as to some of the tours that might be offered.

The below "tours" seem to be specifically for Waymo's San Francisco territory.

In addition, there also seems to be some strings that relate to generating a random tour in a certain service area / city:

Generate a randomized tour in RO_0 territory

I’m Feeling Lucky

Perhaps Waymo will keep an internal list of points of interest in the area, and then allow you to generate a random multi-stop trip of these to visit.

This is a truly awesome feature, and we can't wait to see it rolled out! Let us know what you think down below.