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SAN BRUNO, Calif. — The self-driving car company Waymo said Wednesday it would begin offering rides on freeways for robotaxi customers in Los Angeles, Phoenix and the San Francisco Bay Area in a significant step forward for autonomous vehicles.

Previously, Waymo has limited its robotaxis to city streets, saying it wanted to be sure its technology was safe before deploying it at the faster speeds of freeways. But after years of testing, the company said it now believed it was ready.

The ability to travel on interstate highways and expressways has been one of the missing puzzle pieces for self-driving technology since scientists began working on it decades ago, alongside such challenges as snowy weather and vandalism.

“This has been a long time in the making,” Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov said in a briefing with reporters.

“Freeway driving is one of those things that’s very easy to learn but very hard to master when we’re talking about full autonomy without a human driver as a backup, and at scale. So, it took time to do it properly,” he said.

Waymo, a spinoff of Google, appears to be the first company to offer fully autonomous freeway rides, without a human specialist in the car, to fare-paying riders in the United States, company spokesperson Sandy Karp said.

Wendy Ju, an associate professor of information science and design tech at Cornell University, said that freeways are a more controlled environment in some respects — fewer pedestrians, for example — but also riskier in other ways than city streets.

“The higher speed does pose a much higher risk,” she said. “In order to predict what’s going to happen 10 seconds from now, the car has to sense what’s happening much farther down the road.”

Ju, who has worked as a consultant in the past for autonomous vehicle companies but not for Waymo, said she has “guarded optimism” about the safety of the company’s technology.

In a 40-minute test ride with an NBC News reporter last week, a Waymo robotaxi traveled up and down freeways in Northern California without incident: merging on and off, obeying the speed limit, following at a safe distance and handling congestion slowdowns. At one point, it avoided a human driver who tried to cross a solid white line at an exit ramp.

The competition to deliver robotaxi services is heating up. This summer, Tesla began offering rides in Austin and in the San Francisco Bay Area with a prototype of its self-driving software. And although Tesla still has employees in each of its cars, CEO Elon Musk has said he plans to offer a rider-only service soon — something Waymo did in 2019.

Zoox, a self-driving subsidiary of Amazon, has a rider-only service in Las Vegas that serves a set of fixed pick-up and drop-off locations, with plans to expand. And several Chinese tech companies are racing ahead with robotaxi projects of their own.

Waymo’s decision to start using freeways coincides with major expansion plans. The company has announced plans to more than double the number of cities it operates in, with some cold-weather cities, such as Denver and Detroit, on its list. The company said Wednesday it would begin curbside service at San Jose’s airport, the second major airport to accept Waymo after Phoenix. The company is preparing to add a new van to its fleet called the Zeekr RT to supplement the Jaguars that it uses. And earlier this year, Waymo signed a partnership with Toyota to explore putting Waymo’s technology into personally owned vehicles.

Robotaxi services such as Waymo’s and Tesla’s work much like ridehailing from Lyft or Uber, with customers ordering a ride on a smartphone app by entering a destination and accepting a fare determined up front. But instead of humans behind the wheel, software generally drives the vehicles aided by cameras and, in the case of Waymo, other sensors such as lidar.

But safety concerns remain paramount. Cruise, a former subsidiary of General Motors, has stood as a cautionary tale since 2023 when California revoked its permits to operate a fleet of robotaxis, following a crash in San Francisco in which one of Cruise’s cars dragged a pedestrian for 20 feet while she was pinned underneath the vehicle. A Waymo recently struck and killed a cat in San Francisco, and its vehicles have sometimes been sitting ducks for arson or vandalism.

Waymo has not had a human fatality, and in July, the company said it had passed more than 100 million miles without a human behind the wheel.

Srikanth Saripalli, the director of the Center for Autonomous Vehicles and Sensor Systems at Texas A&M University, said he thinks Waymo’s technology is as good as a human driver and he praised the company’s safety record. But he said Waymo still needs to prove that it can safely handle situations outside California and the Sun Belt.

“Their safety record among all autonomous companies is amazing, but when you compare them to humans, they’ve been very careful about the kind of cities they want to drive in,” he said.

“In Phoenix, the roads are all perpendicular, the roads are nice, the weather is nice, and it still took them almost a decade to get to a freeway,” he said. He has worked as an industry consultant but not for Waymo.

About 18% of all traffic fatalities occur on interstate highways or other freeways and expressways, according to data compiled by federal safety regulators.

To tackle highways, Waymo said it had studied hazards such as aggressive cut-ins, construction on shoulders, hydroplaning and high-speed collisions. It said it has been giving freeway rides to employees and their guests for more than a year. And even now, the company said it would expand its use of freeways gradually as it watches for how the vehicles respond, rather than making it available to all of its customers at once.

The company said its robotaxis would stick to the speed limits on freeways, as they do city streets, even if human drivers around a vehicle are breaking the speed limit.

“The Waymo driver goes up to the posted speed limit. So, for example, if the speed limit is 65, that’s the maximum speed limit, and it does not exceed it, unless in extraordinary circumstances,” said Jacopo Sannazzaro, a product manager at Waymo.

Freeway capability is an important part of a car service, especially in cities such as Los Angeles and Phoenix, where it’s common for daily car trips to include at least some time on an interstate. Sticking to local streets often means a longer ride.

And while some traffic regulators and city-dwelling critics have braced for the possibility that robotaxis will add to traffic congestion, Waymo said it believes those concerns are unfounded.

“We do not expect Waymo to make congestion worse on the freeways,” said Pablo Abad, a Waymo product manager. He said the company had “not seen any impact on the congestion in the service areas where we operate.”

Reuters

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