After years of testing its autonomous vehicles on city streets without a human engineer behind the wheel, Waymo is taking a big step forward by sending its fully driverless cars onto freeways for the first time.
The Alphabet-owned company made this announcement on Monday in a blog post, marking a significant expansion of its driverless car program. While Waymo has been offering robotaxi rides to regular folks through its Waymo One ridesharing program in cities like Phoenix and San Francisco, the initial freeway rides in Phoenix will be limited to Waymo employees.
The company believes it’s ready for fully driverless highway rides due to “years of safe and proven experience operating fleets of rider-only vehicles on public roads in California and Arizona,” coupled with millions of miles of freeway driving with a specialist present. Once they’re confident that the freeway service is safe and comfortable, regular Waymo One riders will be able to book freeway rides through the app, just like usual.
Waymo emphasizes that freeway use will be crucial as they expand operations to other cities. They are particularly focused on freeway ride-hailing tests because putting robotaxis on highways can significantly speed up trips, potentially cutting travel times by up to 50% by avoiding slower city streets.
Initially, Waymo’s cars had a human engineer behind the wheel to monitor their performance and take control if needed. After receiving a permit to operate without anyone in the driver’s seat, Waymo began testing the cars on freeways with a backup driver present. Now, they are ready to go fully driverless.
The company understands that both regulators and the public will closely watch how these autonomous vehicles perform on faster roads. This heightened scrutiny comes especially after a serious incident late last year involving a driverless car operated by Waymo’s competitor, Cruise. In that incident, a Cruise car came to a stop on top of a woman who had just been hit by a human-driven car in San Francisco. As a result, California regulators revoked Cruise’s permit to test driverless cars in the state, and shortly after, Cruise pulled all its robotaxis from public roads across the U.S.
In November, both the CEO and CTO of Cruise stepped down, and the company laid off 900 employees, about a quarter of its workforce. Despite these setbacks, Cruise insists that their work isn’t over and anticipates resuming testing sometime this year.