"Waymo, the self-driving car startup owned by Google's parent company, recently started testing driverless rides on freeways in Phoenix, using employees as passengers.
It's a crucial step for the industry. Enabling cars to take freeway routes can cut ride times by as much as half, Waymo has said, and could help the company scale operations. Robotaxi outfits have poured billions into developing this technology and, if they can't offer routes such as airport rides, their path to profitability becomes more uncertain.
Freeway rides would likely be most useful in ferrying passengers to and from airports, as well as driving in cities such as Los Angeles, where freeways are integral to getting across town. The stakes are higher than ever, and patience is running thin for mistakes. It has taken 15 years for Waymo -- one of the earliest entrants to the self-driving space -- to take this step. Driving on freeways will significantly increase the riskiness of its operations.
Cruise, another self-driving car company, majority-controlled by General Motors, lost its permits to offer driverless rides in San Francisco last fall after one of its vehicles dragged a woman -- who had been hit by another car -- about 20 feet. The firm paused all operations nationwide shortly thereafter.
Waymo views Los Angeles, a city dense with freeways, as a potentially $2 billion market, co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said at a recent tech conference. This month, the company gained approval from California regulators to start charging for driverless rides on freeways in the Bay Area and parts of Los Angeles.
"You're seeing us make the moves that you have to make to build a profitable business -- long-term, sustainable profitable business," Mawakana said.
For now, Waymo is limiting its driverless rides on the freeway to Waymo employees to work out any kinks ahead of an expansion to the public. The company declined to say when that expansion would be.
Aurora, an autonomous-technology company focused on trucking, plans to put driverless trucks on freeways in Texas this year.
"That speaks to their confidence," said Raj Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in self-driving cars. Waymo and other self-driving car companies still have to deal with risks around uncommon freeway driving scenarios, he added.
Waymo has trained its vehicles for different scenarios they might face. But it is difficult to anticipate every obstacle. On city streets, the cars have faced unexpected hazards, such as people who deliberately run out in front of the self-driving cars to see whether they'll stop.
Public opinion on robotaxis in San Francisco has been mixed, with people quick to criticize the vehicles for mistakes such as stalling and causing traffic jams.
One bad accident could call into question Waymo's or Aurora's entire operations, as it did recently with Cruise and with Uber years before that. Uber sold off its entire self-driving business after one of its cars going 40 miles an hour struck and killed a woman during testing near Phoenix in 2018. Last month, Waymo issued its first-ever recall over a software problem after two of its cars in Phoenix collided with a pickup truck that was being towed backward.
In some ways, autonomous driving on freeways is actually easier than on city streets, industry experts say. There aren't as many pedestrians to deal with or intersections to navigate.
"Driving on freeways in this country -- even for humans -- is some of the safest driving there is," said David Zuby, chief research officer for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. "But because of the high speeds when crashes occur, the consequences are more severe."
One of the biggest challenges for the vehicles is merging on and off freeway ramps. It requires them to run several calculations at once and make a quick decision while their surroundings are continuously changing -- similar to the situation the robotaxis faced making unprotected left-hand turns on city streets.
The rollout on freeways in Phoenix has largely been without trouble so far, Waymo says. The cars have been able to successfully navigate on and off ramps and haven't come to a halt in the middle of the freeway -- another issue that occurred on city streets.
When the cars got confused or encountered a problem, they would sometimes stop where they were on the road, backing up traffic and frustrating other drivers who couldn't communicate with the car.
Sugandha Sangal, a product manager at Waymo, says they have built-in redundancies to prevent that from happening on fast-moving freeways. If one sensor system fails, there is another in place to help.
Over the past year, Waymo vehicles in testing have been involved in a handful of incidents on freeways. Last March, one of the cars in San Francisco hit some tire scraps while transitioning from Interstate 280 to Interstate 380, causing damage to the car, according to state records.
In another incident the same day, a Waymo was driving itself on Bayshore Boulevard in San Francisco when a safety driver -- someone who sits in the driver's seat of the car and can take over in the case of an emergency -- crashed into another car that was stopped in the rightmost lane. Both vehicles sustained damage." [1]
If Alphabet, the parent company of Google and Waymo, overtakes Musk here with his Tesla, Musk will have to go to Mars in shame and continue living there. Tesla's stock is so expensive because people expect its cars to win the autonomous driving competition.
1. EXCHANGE --- Self-Driving Cars Enter the Next Frontier. Bobrowsky, Meghan; Kruppa, Miles. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 16 Mar 2024: B.9.
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