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Waymo is sending autonomous vehicles to 10 new cities in 2025, starting with Las Vegas and San Diego, the company shared exclusively with The Verge.
The vehicles will be manually driven, and the testing operations are not necessarily a precursor to the launch of a commercial robotaxi service. (They’re also not precluded from launching a service, either.) Rather, the Alphabet-owned company views these “road trips” as an opportunity to see how well its self-driving system adapts to new locales with varying weather conditions and regional driving habits.
“So what we’re looking for is places that are going to challenge our system and look very, very different,” said Nick Rose, product manager for Waymo’s expansion efforts. “Las Vegas is pretty interesting because, I mean, if you’ve ever been to Vegas, it’s pretty unique among a lot of US cities.”
“What we’re looking for is places that are going to challenge our system”
Las Vegas is known for its dense traffic and chaotic drop-off zones outside of hotels and popular casinos along the Strip. The streets also have what’s known as Botts’ dots, instead of painted lane lines, and the street layout is often derided as an absolute mess. Several autonomous vehicle operators have already set up shop there, including Amazon’s Zoox, which plans on launching a public rideshare service later this year.
San Diego, in comparison, is similar to the cities where Waymo already operates, Rose said. “What we wanna validate is that the system performs well in San Diego without having a ton of prior driving information there,” he added.
Waymo has said it plans on launching robotaxi operations in Austin, Atlanta, and Miami in the near future. Last year, Waymo sent vehicles to a variety of locations, including Truckee, California, upstate New York, and Michigan, in search of winter weather conditions in which to stress test its robot cars.
This year, the theme is “generalizability”: how well the vehicles adapt to new cities after having driven tens of millions of miles in its core markets of San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. Ideally, the company is trying to get to a point where it can bring its vehicles to a new city and launch a robotaxi with a minimal amount of testing as a preamble.
“When we go to a brand new city in the US, there are things that are subtly different,” Rose said. “And we want to see how well the driver performs on those things out of the box without having to retrain or make adjustments.”
One example is the way Waymo’s vehicles perceive emergency vehicles. Fire trucks in San Francisco look subtly different from fire trucks in Austin or Los Angeles, Rose said. These trips are an opportunity to update the perception system to account for these subtle differences in emergency vehicles as well as other local quirks. (Waymo vehicles have occasionally blocked intersections or impeded emergency vehicles, but the company recently passed an independent assessment that found it was adept at detecting and responding to emergency situations.)
Waymo plans on sending less than 10 vehicles to each city, where they will be manually driven around for a period of a couple months. The vehicles will stick to busy commercial districts, as these are the areas where Waymo robotaxis are most likely to operate.
Waymo is reaching out in advance to officials in each of the cities in which it plans to test vehicles, Rose said. He wouldn’t disclose the names of the additional cities or how many miles Waymo will try to rack up in each. But he said that it would be enough to make these trips useful.
“The general theme is to collect enough experience to where we can get a pretty statistically significant sense of how well we’re generalizing, especially these perception things,” he said.
