Waymo’s Robotaxis Can Now Use the Highway, Speeding Up Longer Trips
When Google autonomous driving The car project began testing in the Bay Area in 2009, with its engineers focusing on highways by sending its sensor-laden vehicles down Interstate 280, which runs the length of the Silicon Valley peninsula.
More than 15 years later, cars are back on the highway, this time without a driver. On Tuesday, the project, now a subsidiary of Alphabet that we all know as Waymo, announced that its robotaxi service would now run on highways in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and Phoenix.
The new service marks another technical breakthrough for Waymo, whose robotaxis currently serve five US metros: Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix and the San Francisco Bay area. The company says it will launch in several more U.S. and international cities next year, including Dallas, Miami, Nashville, Las Vegas, Detroit and London.
Waymo also announced Wednesday that it would launch a curbside pickup and drop-off service at San Jose Mineta International Airport, allowing riders to travel autonomously, in theory, from San Francisco to San Jose, a service area of about 260 square miles. Waymo has offered its autonomous taxi service on area feeder roads since summer 2023, but the new highway service could cut in half the time it takes a robotaxi to travel from San Francisco to Mountain View, said Naomi Guthrie, a user experience researcher at Waymo.
“Highway driving is one of those things that is very easy to learn, but very difficult to master,” Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov told reporters last week. Highways are predictable, with (mostly) clear signs and lane lines, and a limited set of vehicles and actors (trucks, cars, motorcycles, trailers) that a vehicle’s software must learn to recognize and predict. But Waymo executives said that despite a year of employee- and guest-only highway testing, safety emergencies on highways are relatively rare, so the team hasn’t been able to collect as much real-world data as it needs to train its vehicles to travel safely there. Complicating the project was the fact that high-speed highway crashes are subject to the laws of physics and are therefore more likely to maim or kill.
To prepare for highways, Waymo executives say, engineers supplemented real-world driving data and training with data collected on private, closed courses and data created in simulations. Two onboard computers help create system “redundancies,” meaning vehicles will have a computer backup in case something goes wrong. The vehicles have been trained to exit highways in an emergency, but will also be able to stop. Waymo executives also say they have and will work with law enforcement and first responders, including highway patrol, to create procedures for vehicles and riders stranded on highway shoulders, where hundreds of Americans are killed each year.
