2012. According to a Waymo report, as of March 2018, Waymo's self-driving technology had driven more than 5 million miles on public roads and more than 5 billion miles via simulation. Waymo's 25,000 virtual self-driving cars travel 8 million miles per day. By October 2018, Waymo had completed 10 million miles of driving on public roads and over 7 billion simulation miles, and by January 2020, 20 million miles of driving on public roads had been completed. By 2018, Waymo had tested its system in six states and 25 cities across the U.S over a span of nine years. In March 2018, Waymo announced its plans to build additional real-world self-driving experiments with the company's self-driving trucks delivering for sister company Google's data centers located in Atlanta, Georgia. , Waymo was waiting for permits to test the cars in California, hoping to test in Los Altos, Mountain View, Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale. On October 30, 2018, the California Department of Motor Vehicles issued a permit for Waymo to operate fully driverless cars (i.e., cars without human safety drivers). Waymo was the first company to receive a permit, that allows day and night testing on public roads and highways in California. In a blog post, Waymo announced that its fully driverless cars would be restricted to Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, and Palo Alto — all communities close to parent company Alphabet's headquarters (Googleplex). In July 2019, Waymo was permitted by California regulators to transport passengers in its vehicles. In December 2018, Waymo launched the commercial self-driving car service called "Waymo One", allowing users in the Phoenix metropolitan area to use an app and request a pick-up. The service uses safety backup drivers who monitor the rides, with a smaller percentage of rides being provided in select areas by fully driverless vehicles. In November 2019, Waymo One was the first autonomous service worldwide operating without any safety drivers in the car. The service was paused in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a limited service restarted in June 2020. In September 2020, Waymo announced it had partnered with fellow Alphabet company Verily to provide COVID-19 testing to its front-line employees and partners. In 2021, Waymo expanded testing of Waymo One to San Francisco. In February 2021 the company started limited rider testing in San Francisco with Waymo employee volunteers. In August 2021, commercial Waymo One test service started in