Waymo’s robotic car can now take the highway and speed up long trips
When Google becomes self-driving The Bay Area pilot car project began in 2009, with engineers focusing on highways by sending sensor-laden vehicles down Interstate 280, which runs the length of the Silicon Valley peninsula.
More than 15 years later, cars are back on the highway, but this time without a driver. On Tuesday, the venture, now a subsidiary of the Alphabet company we all know as Waymo, announced that its robotaxi service will now run on highways in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.
The new service represents another technological leap for Waymo, whose robotaxis currently serve five US 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 launch pick-up and drop-off services at San Jose Minta International Airport, theoretically allowing travelers to drive autonomously all the way from San Francisco to San Jose — a service area of about 260 square miles. Waymo will offer self-driving taxi service on regional service routes starting in the summer of 2023, but the new freeway service could cut the travel time for a robo-taxi from San Francisco to Mountain View in half, says Naomi Guthrie, a user experience researcher at Waymo.
“Highway driving is one of those things that is very easy to learn but very difficult to master,” Waymo CEO Dmitry Dolgov told reporters last week. Highways are predictable, with (mostly) defined lane markings and lines, and a limited set of vehicles and players (trucks, cars, motorcycles, trailers) that the vehicle software must recognize and predict. But Waymo executives say that despite a year of testing highways only for employees and guests, safety emergencies on highways are relatively rare, so the team hasn’t been able to collect enough real-world data to train its vehicles to operate safely there. The project is further complicated by the fact that highway accidents, at high speeds, obey the laws of physics and are therefore more likely to cause disability or death.
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. Having two on-board computers helps make the system “redundant,” meaning the cars have a backup computer in case something goes wrong. These vehicles are trained to exit highways in emergency situations, but they can. Waymo executives also say they will work with law enforcement and emergency responders, including the Highway Patrol, to develop procedures for vehicles and passengers stuck on highway shoulders, which kill hundreds of Americans every year.
