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Waymo has begun charging passengers in Arizona for rides in its autonomous cars, making it the first self-driving car developer to launch commercial services.

Ruth Porat, finance chief at Google’s parent company Alphabet, which counts Waymo among what it calls its “other bets”, revealed the milestone on Thursday’s earnings call.

Ms Porat said that Waymo had expanded the number of people participating in its “early rider” programme during the third quarter, and is “beginning to test pricing models” in the Phoenix suburbs, where it has been piloting autonomous vehicles since 2016.

“We moved into very early days of commercialisation, we do now have people paying for rides,” she told analysts, while adding that the venture was still in the “very early days”.

The development marks a win for Waymo as it races against rivals including Uber, General Motors’ Cruise and Zoox to bring a long-awaited “robo-taxi” service to market.

Investors have become increasingly interested in Waymo’s commercial potential, after nearly a decade of development — the business started out as Google’s self-driving car project within its experimental X lab in 2009.

Thursday’s news will also come as a boost to advocates of self-driving systems, who claim the technology can save lives and improve access to mobility services, at a time when doubts have grown about its reliability and slow progress towards commercialisation.

Incidents such as an autonomous Uber vehicle’s fatal collision with a pedestrian in nearby Tempe, Arizona, have raised questions about whether self-driving cars can live up to their early hype, despite billions of dollars of investment across the automotive and technology industries.

Waymo began offering passengers rides in its self-driving cars in April 2017. In and around Phoenix, hundreds of families can use its app to hail a robo-taxi — many of which still employ a safety driver as a back-up — to destinations in a 100-square-mile testing zone. It is also testing its autonomous systems in 24 other US cities, including the San Francisco Bay Area.

Ride-sharing is the “perfect first use case” for autonomous cars, Waymo chief John Krafcik said in a recent interview with Condé Nast Traveler. “It will enable more people to try the technology more quickly when you can buy just a little slice of transportation for $6.”

Waymo announced earlier this month that its autonomous vehicles had driven more than 10m miles on public roads, up from 5m in February. It took until 2015 to clock up its first 1m miles. Almost 7bn miles have also been driven in computer simulations to help refine its algorithms.

But until now, those services has not generated meaningful income for Waymo. Wall Street analysts have only recently begun to assess Waymo’s potential value, with some estimating that it could be worth tens of billions of dollars to Alphabet in the coming years.

Alphabet’s “other bets” — which also include Verily, its life sciences unit, and biotech researcher Calico — brought in revenues of just $117m in the third quarter, up 25 per cent on the same period last year, the company said on Thursday. Operating losses from “other bets” increased by 12 per cent, to $727m, in the three months ending in September.

Those businesses will become increasingly important to Alphabet as growth at Google slows. Youssef Squali, analyst at SunTrust Robinson Humphries, said that Waymo would be “the next exciting story they’re going to roll out” for investors.

ARK Invest, a research group, has predicted that two out of every 1,000 miles driven in US urban areas could be in a Waymo autonomous car by 2020. Waymo has already struck deals with automakers such as Fiat Chrysler and Jaguar to deploy tens of thousands of self-driving cars. It has also entered local partnerships around Phoenix with businesses including Walmart and Avis to deliver customers to their stores.

“Once all 80,000 vehicles hit its fleet, Waymo could address half of Phoenix’s travel needs, or 0.3 per cent of US urban vehicle miles travelled,” ARK wrote in a research note earlier this year.

While Waymo is still deciding how much it ultimately plans to charge consumers for its rides, ARK has estimated that robo-taxis might cost 35 cents per mile, include 5 cents to cover the cost of remote operators who monitor the vehicles and intervene when something goes wrong.

Edit: to the nerd who reported my comment to me for "copywrite (sic) infringement", snitches get stitches.