Waymo is bringing fully autonomous driving to five more cities

Before Waymo was Waymo, it was Google’s self-driving car project. Starting in 2009, the effort spent many years in test mode—with humans in the driver’s seats ready to take over, just in case—that its vision of vehicular autonomy often felt far from practical reality.

Since last year, however, Alphabet’s robotaxi service has begun to scale up quickly. It’s now fully open to the public in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area. And today the company is announcing that it’s testing fully autonomous trips, sans human driver, in Miami, and plans to do so in Orlando, Florida; Dallas; Houston; and San Antonio in the coming weeks.

For now, the only passengers will be Waymo employees. But the news is one of the final big milestones before the company offers rides to the public in those five cities, which it says it expects to do next year once all the necessary logistics are in place. In most of the cities, Waymo began driving with an in-car supervisor late last May. (Remote human monitoring and control remain part of the system in all service areas.)

By autonomy standards, taking the human out of the driver’s seat in five cities over such a short period is a one-fell-swoop sort of move. According to Waymo Chief Product Officer Saswat Panigrahi, the 10 million driverless rides the company has already completed helped it reach this point.

“Having dealt with high-speed roads in Phoenix and very narrow corridors in San Francisco, L.A. was faster,” he told me. “Austin was faster than that. Atlanta was faster than that. So this is just the next step.”

The five cities that are part of today’s announcement represent only a portion of those where Waymo has announced its intention to add service. Seven more—Denver, Detroit, Las Vegas, London, Nashville, San Diego, and Washington, D.C.—are “coming soon” but not yet ready to do without a human driver aboard. Yet another seven—Boston, Buffalo, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Tokyo—are in an earlier stage, where the company is driving and collecting data.

That’s a lot of places that are at least partway down the road to being Waymo cities. Each is different when it comes to their roads and the challenges they present. As Panigrahi notes, even specific intersections can present idiosyncrasies that the company’s Waymo Driver platform must map out individually. But he says that localities that might at first blush seem quite different can boil down to similar problems for the Waymo Driver to solve.

“You can imagine how when we’re serving the civic center in San Francisco, [after] a Warriors game,” he says. “It’s not that dissimilar to a whole host of pedestrians coming from the beach and crossing over in Miami Beach.”

Panigrahi adds that Waymo highway driving—which came to Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area last week, after years of anticipation—should also scale up to new markets more quickly.

“Highway is a super hard technical problem, and that’s why we took our time to build it and validate it over multiple years,” he says. “But once you do get that, then the highways do look much more similar across states. There are more nuances in surface streets.”

Waymo’s time as the only company offering a fully commercialized robotaxi service in the U.S. may be winding down. When I tried Tesla’s robotaxi service last month in San Francisco, a human attendant was in the driver’s seat, greatly reducing the amazingness of the experience. But Tesla plans to offer truly autonomous rides to the public by the end of this year, at least in Austin. Earlier this month, the company said that it also plans to deploy robotaxis in Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Miami, and Phoenix, portending eventual head-to-head competition with Waymo in all those areas.

Tesla also says it intends to begin mass production of its two-seater Cybercab in April and is rethinking its original plan to remove the driver’s seat and steering wheel altogether.

Meanwhile, Amazon-owned Zoox just announced that it’s begun Zoox Explorers robotaxi service in San Francisco. That means it’s allowing waitlisted members of the public into its app and giving them free rides in return for feedback. Zoox is already in Explorers mode in Las Vegas.

Should a critical mass of American cities grow thick with driverless Waymo, Zoox, and Tesla robotaxis, it might turn autonomy from a futuristic novelty into mundane workaday transportation. That exposure could boost the technology’s reputation, which still isn’t great among people who haven’t been for a ride. For example, a February AAA study reported that only 13% of respondents said they trusted self-driving vehicles.

In Waymo’s home turf of San Francisco, its cars are omnipresent and public attitude toward self-driving vehicles has been on the rise. Yet the recent death of a bodega cat who was struck by one of its vehicles sparked more of an uproar than the hundreds of animals who are killed by human drivers in the city each year. Waymo’s own data, based on 96 million passenger-only miles its cars have driven, shows its record is dramatically safer than that of humans. For instance, cars have been in 92% fewer crashes that caused pedestrian injuries.

Panigrahi argues that merely seeing Waymos driving carefully reassures pedestrians and cyclists. After they’ve taken a trip in one, it’s a lot harder to hate them. (In August, The Information wrote that 99% of the 69% of its subscribers who’d been in a self-driving car were satisfied with the experience.)

“Pedestrians notice that we stop to give them that confidence that they can cross and not play a game of chicken,” he says. “Even skeptical or on-the-fence folks, once they take their first ride, that magical experience changes their heart.”

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