- Waymo opened up driverless rides in three more cities: San Diego, Tampa, and Denver.
- The last one is the most notable, since it’s Waymo’s first commercial deployment in a snowy area.
- So far, autonomous vehicles have mostly operated in the West and South, in cities with temperate climates.
Waymo expanded its robotaxi service to three new cities on Tuesday, marking a new phase in its ongoing, aggressive expansion phase. Select riders will now be able to hail fully autonomous Waymos without safety drivers in Denver, San Diego, and Tampa, Florida, the company says.
This is a playbook we’ve seen before. The company usually starts with an invite-only period, followed by a relatively quick ramp to fuller service. But it’s far from a first move: I live in San Diego, and have been consistently seeing the Zeekr Ojai vans in my neighborhood since they first began testing last fall. (I even wrote about it, back before the name “Ojai” was even announced.)
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Source: Mack Hogan/InsideEVs
The big news isn’t the expansion—though it’s noteworthy that Waymo continues to rack up new cities as Tesla races to catch up. It’s the new challenge that Waymo is taking on. All Waymo deployments thus far have been in cities that do not or rarely experience snow. Nashville, Tennessee, is the coldest, and it gets less than 5.0 inches of snowfall in an average year. Denver gets far more. It receives around 56 inches of snow per year on average, according to the National Weather Service.
Waymo’s announcement did not explicitly say whether the robotaxis would operate in snowy weather. The company can and does pause operations during severe weather events, like heavy storms in Miami or dust storms in Arizona.
Photo by: Waymo
“If weather conditions deteriorate to the point that we believe it would affect the safe operation of our cars, Waymo vehicles are designed to come to a safe stop until conditions improve—just like a motorcyclist might stop under an overpass in heavy rain,” a post in the company’s safety blog says.
But there’s reason to believe that Waymo is getting closer to offering service in the snow. The company has done snowy testing in Novi, Michigan, outside of Detroit, and Buffalo, New York, which gets absolutely hammered by winter storms. The company announced last year that service would also come to Detroit and New York City, although the New York plan was kiboshed by local regulations. These aren’t cities you’d target if you were afraid of snow.
I’m excited to see how Waymos handle snowy conditions at scale. While it poses a driving challenge that is, for humans, an order of magnitude more difficult, it is also an environment where I think autonomous technologies will provide their biggest advantage.
San Diego and Denver are the first cities to exclusively receive the new Zeekr Ojai taxis. They run on the company’s latest hardware and software stack.
Photo by: Waymo
Growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, driving mostly front-wheel-drive cars on all-seasons through my fair share of multi-foot snowstorms, I learned a bit about how people drive in the snow. The key takeaway: Humans are not very good at it.
The combination of impaired visibility and far lower grip makes it much harder to react in time. Reactionary, quick inputs often lead to slides and collisions. Human drivers seem to consistently underestimate and misunderstand this risk, driving too fast for conditions, or applying the throttle midway through a corner and pirouetting. The only thing that consistently saves them is their vehicle’s stability control system, which reacts nearly instantaneously, and prevents them from spinning out.
An AV that can apply that sort of instantaneous control logic to every driver input—plus see in low-visibility conditions using lidar and understand where buried road features are using HD maps—could be a lot safer. Getting to that point will require a lot of testing and problem solving. But based on today’s news, we’re getting closer.
Contact the author: Mack.Hogan@insideevs.com
