Waymo is expanding driverless rides to freeways. Starting Wednesday, passengers in San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles can get to their destinations more quickly as the self-driving company opens up freeway routes to the general public.
Waymo, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet, currently operates its robotaxi service in five cities, with several more to come. Until now, those fully autonomous rides — which happen aboard the fully electric Jaguar I-Pace — were restricted to surface streets, meaning potentially longer routes. But freeway trips could give passengers a more direct and speedy route to their destinations. Waymo has been testing freeway rides with employees for over a year, and in May 2024 shared an exclusive video with CNET of one of those rides in action.
Initially, only customers who’ve opted into early access to Waymo’s latest services and features will be able to hit the freeways. From there, the capability will gradually roll out to more people taking rides with the service. You can indicate interest in being among the first to take a freeway ride in the Waymo app.
Watch this: Waymo’s Driverless Cars Can Now Navigate Freeways
I took an early freeway ride last week near San Bruno to see firsthand how Waymo handles that high-speed terrain. The vehicle seamlessly navigated on and off of ramps, changed lanes and kept pace with the human-driven vehicles around us. In fact, I soon forgot I was experiencing something extraordinary, and it just felt like another standard rideshare journey.
Once the feature becomes available to you, Waymo’s self-driving technology will determine the best route to your destination based on factors like congestion, timing and construction.
“If taking the freeway makes your trip meaningfully faster, that is the route that you’ll be offered,” Naomi Guthrie, a Waymo UX researcher, said during a briefing. “Over time, we will gradually roll this out to more and more riders across our cities.”
Waymo will roll out to freeways in San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles.
The unique challenges of autonomous freeway driving
Driving on freeways is technically nothing new for Waymo. In fact, it’s been doing so since its earliest days, back when it was known as the Google self-driving car project.
“When we started back in 2009, our very first autonomous test miles were on freeways,” Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo’s co-CEO, said in the briefing, noting it was the easiest way to get started at the time. “Freeway driving is one of those things that’s very easy to learn, but very hard to master when we’re talking about full autonomy, without a human driver as a backup and at scale. So it took time to do it properly with a strong focus on system safety and reliability.”
An autonomous vehicle navigating such massive roadways might be unsettling to some passengers — and drivers — but Waymo says there’s a key advantage to its self-driving tech.
“The Waymo Driver does not get tired, does not lose focus and does not make emotional decisions behind the wheel,” said Jacopo Sannazzaro, group product manager at Waymo.
That doesn’t mean there weren’t challenges to getting the tech ready for bigger roads.
“On freeways, critical events happen less often, and that means that there are fewer opportunities to expose our system to real scenarios,” said Pierre Kreitmann, a Waymo principal software engineer. So the company used a combination of closed-course driving and simulation testing to stage everything from merging onto a freeway to more drastic events like another car flipping over, and then ran those scenarios over and over again. That way, it could train the system to react to anything it might encounter in high-speed situations that it may not see on slower roads.
Waymo freeway rides are available 24/7. But there may be instances such as heavy rain in which Waymo opts to take surface streets instead of the freeway. The vehicles will only drive up to the posted speed limit, the company says — perhaps one factor that sets these autonomous rides apart from many human-driven vehicles.
Waymo’s expanded service area in the San Francisco Bay Area now covers more than 260 square miles.
Additional expansions in the Bay Area
Along with adding freeway rides, Waymo is also expanding its availability in the San Francisco Bay Area. The company’s service area now stretches across more than 260 square miles in the region and includes San Jose Mineta International Airport.
Riders can access 24/7 curbside pickup and drop-off at SJC, at Terminals A and B. Similar to traditional ridesharing, there’s a service fee for rides to and from the airport.
This is the second international airport at which Waymo operates, following Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. In September, Waymo also received a pilot permit to begin commercial operations at San Francisco International Airport. That rollout will include three phases, starting with an onboard safety driver, followed by tests without a human driver with Waymo and airport employees, and then, finally, commercial operations.
“We are actively coordinating with the SFO airport officials to start scaling operations in phases over there,” said Pablo Abad, group product manager at Waymo.
With Waymo’s freeway and service area expansion, more roads continue to open up for the robotaxi service. But it’s increasingly sharing those roads with other self-driving companies including Nuro and Amazon-owned Zoox, which launched public rides in Las Vegas in September. It’s only a matter of time before autonomous vehicle competitors expand to more cities and roads, too — though given how long it took Waymo, it’s likely the others won’t be hitting freeways just yet.