Waymo’s robotic vehicle can now use the highway, speeding up long trips

When Google is self-driving The car project began testing in the Bay Area in 2009, and its engineers focused on highways by sending sensor-laden vehicles cruising Interstate 280, which runs along Silicon Valley peninsula.

More than 15 years later, cars are back on the highway, but this time without drivers. On Tuesday, the project was now a subsidiary of the Alphabet we all know Waymoannounced that its robotaxi service will now drive on highways in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.

The new service represents another technological leap for Waymo, which robotaxis It currently serves five U.S. metros: Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The company says it will launch its services in several other American and international cities next year, including Dallas, Miami, Nashville, Las Vegas, Detroit and… London.

Waymo also announced Wednesday that it will begin curbside pick-up and drop-off service at San Jose Mineta International Airport, allowing passengers to, in theory, travel autonomously all the way from San Francisco to San Jose — a service area of ​​about 260 square miles. Waymo has been offering autonomous taxi service on area service routes since the summer of 2023, but the new expressway service could cut in half the time it takes a robo-taxi to travel from San Francisco to Mountain View, says Naomi Guthrie, a Waymo user experience researcher.

“Highway driving is one of those things that is very easy to learn, but very difficult to master,” Waymo co-CEO Dmitry Dolgov told reporters last week. Highways are predictable, with (mostly) clear lane markings and lines, and a limited set of vehicles and players (trucks, cars, motorcycles, trailers) that the car’s software must learn to recognize and predict. But Waymo executives said that despite a year of highway testing for employees and guests only, 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 operate safely there. The project is further complicated by the fact that road accidents, which occur at high speeds, are subject to the laws of physics and are therefore more likely to maim or kill.

To prepare for the highways, Waymo executives say, engineers supplemented real-world driving and training data with data collected on private, closed courses, and data generated in simulations. Two on-board computers help create “duplicates” of the system, meaning the vehicles will have a computer backup in case something goes wrong. The vehicles have been trained to exit highways in emergency situations, but will be able to stop as well. Waymo executives also say they will work with law enforcement and first responders, including the highway patrol, to create procedures for vehicles and passengers stranded on highway shoulders, where Hundreds of Americans are killed every year.