Waymo hits the highway, but can it handle the speed?

Waymo is finally ready to hit the highway. Starting today, the company’s robotaxis will gradually begin including more highway trips on their routes in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Additionally, Waymo’s Bay Area service extends south to San Jose, including 24/7 curbside access at both stations at San Jose International Airport – the company’s second airport service after Phoenix.

Since their inception, Waymo’s robo-taxis have typically avoided highways, opting instead for longer routes that stick to local roads when transporting passengers. This has not gone unnoticed by customerswho often notice that their trips may take longer because vehicles are prohibited from using highway roads. But after years of testing, including on public highways with employees as well as on indoor training courses and in virtual simulations, Waymo says it’s ready to start offering highway rides to many more people.

“Highway driving is one of those things that is very easy to learn, but very difficult to master when we are talking about full self-driving without a human driver as a backup,” Waymo co-CEO Dmitry Dolgov said at a press conference. “And at scale. So it took some time to do it right with a strong focus on system safety and reliability.”

Waymo will start making freeway rides in Phoenix, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Initially, only early access users — those who have chosen to test Waymo’s new features — will be able to take trips that include highway travel. Over time, the feature will gradually expand to include more passengers as performance data and feedback are collected. From the passenger’s perspective, the experience will remain familiar. Users hail the ride via the Waymo app, display an estimated time of arrival and preview the route, and if a highway route is significantly faster, the system will automatically select it.

Waymo hopes riders will reward the service with higher ratings, as freeway routing can make trips up to 50 percent faster, such as from San Francisco to Mountain View, while also helping connect riders more efficiently to public transit, improving “first-mile” and “last-mile” mobility.

The challenges of driving on highways are many. Higher traffic speeds mean Waymo’s self-driving vehicles will have less time to make important decisions. Any error could carry a higher degree of risk. The company’s engineers say their hardware suite, which includes lidar, camera and radar, has a 360-degree view and can “see” objects up to three football fields away.

Because highways can be more difficult, Waymo has built more redundancy into its systems to account for a variety of edge situations, including simulating a complete power outage to one of Waymo’s dual on-board computers. In this scenario, the system immediately activates its backup, allowing the vehicle to maintain control and safely navigate to the nearest highway exit. Pierre Kreitmann, the company’s principal software engineer, likens this to a person suddenly losing half of his vision and mental ability but still driving safely.

When Waymo vehicles need to stop, the company says it has well-established protocols to keep passengers safe and ensure their journeys continue. Waymo coordinates closely with the Arizona Department of Public Safety, California Highway Patrol, and other regional safety authorities to ensure preparedness and alignment with local rules and regulations.

Highways have been a major target for Waymo For many years now. Critics have cited Avoiding highways is evidence that autonomous vehicles are not ready for the reality of long-distance driving. Self-driving truck companies have largely stuck to highways in their testing, though with safety drivers in the front seat.

Waymo is unique in that it is one of the only robotaxi companies to offer rides in fully self-driving cars. Tesla operates a “Robottaxi” service in California with safety drivers behind the wheel and is only available to select riders. Which apparently includes highways.

Expanding Waymo’s service area to San Jose, including the city’s airport, has been in the works for months. The company still does not provide commercial service to San Francisco International Airport (SFO), making San Jose’s Mineta Airport the company’s first official airport in California.

There will be designated curbside pickup and drop-off areas in both Terminals A and B. Meanwhile, SFO is still in the early pilot phase. Waymo received permission to begin commercial operations at SFO in SeptemberBut it is still coordinating with airport officials to begin operations gradually. The company has been in negotiations with the SFO for several years as it seeks to reassure regulators that its vehicles can handle their chaotic environments, where thousands of cars, taxis, shuttles and passengers constantly mix each day.

Airports and highways are closely linked, with most airports reached by driving on highways. It’s also a huge cash cow for transportation companies, accounting for an estimated 20% of human-driven services like Uber and Lyft. Waymo will need to master both airports and highways if it wants to successfully compete with traditional transportation services, let alone turn a profit.