Autonomous vehicles are nothing new to Valley residents. Waymo has been operating driverless taxis in the Valley since late 2020.
The company announced Monday that it plans to expand services to Arizona’s freeways, beginning with employee-only rides before fully rolling out to the public.
Up until now, its vehicles have been confined to surface streets, and Waymo notes operating on freeways will improve travel times.
This will be the first time driverless vehicles have been allowed on U.S. freeways.
The Show spoke with Andrew Hawkins, transportation editor at The Verge, about this.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: How significant is this for Waymo that it'll start testing on Valley freeways and eventually the company hopes to be able to incorporate freeways into their routes?
ANDREW HAWKINS: Yeah, it's certainly a milestone. I think its service in Phoenix is a lot more convenient for its customers. Before when the company was just sticking to surface roads and avoiding highways, a trip could take upwards 50, 60 minutes, and now they're saying that the same trip will take around 25 minutes or so, roughly half the time they did if they just stuck to surface roads.
It's a big win for customers when they eventually get a chance to try it out and it's a win for the company because obviously their goal is to become more convenient and more useful to their customers, but while approaching things safely and conservatively as they do in order to avoid rushing things too much.
BRODIE: What do you see and what do folks in the industry see as some of the biggest challenges to get these vehicles driving safely on freeways, which, as we know, is a different driving environment than surface roads.
HAWKINS: Yeah, it's actually, it's a great question because I think, somewhat ironically, you would think that a driverless car would be able to operate better on a highway than it would on a residential street because there's just a lot less complication. There's not intersections, there aren't traffic signals. There are pedestrians and cyclists and all of these things that tend to come up as complications in the environment around self-driving cars.
But at the same time, I think what we wanted to demonstrate was that it could handle these more complicated environments such as residential roads and surface streets, before it tackled highways, I think it's a way to prove to people that its technology was able to handle these complex environments before it tried to tackle less complex environments. Now that said, that's not to say that highways aren't complex. There's obviously a lot of risk involved in driving on highways, especially when you start to consider the speeds that you are required to travel to keep up with traffic. And I think what we are trying to say is, “Yes, there are risks involved, but we wanted to demonstrate that we can handle these more complex environments first.”
It won't be an entirely risk-free environment. I think a lot of the crashes that Waymo vehicles do get involved in tend to be rear-ending crashes, human drivers crashing into the backs of Waymo vehicles because the Waymo cars tend to drive a lot more conservatively than human drivers do. At a highway, that becomes a little bit more of a risk because you're crashing into someone and, if it's a rear-end crash, that could be at highway speeds involving injuries and possible fatalities. So I think Waymo is going to have to be careful as it expands its service area to include highways.
BRODIE: Well, I'm also curious, you mentioned speed and for a lot of folks on on freeways, especially if they're not super crowded, to drive at the speed of the flow of the traffic around you, which, let's be honest, is not always 55 or 65 miles an hour, depending on what the speed limit actually is. So how does Waymo try to adapt to that, keeping in mind that they tend to stick to the speed limit and as you say, drive more conservatively than a lot of humans do?
HAWKINS: Well, I think hopefully for folks that do drive on highways, maybe the Waymo vehicles will tend to stick to the right lane, but we'll have to see how that actually unfolds. But yeah, it's definitely going to be something that Waymo is going to have to take into consideration because if there's any perception that they're going beyond what the law allows, then I think that they're gonna open themselves up to criticism. I think that driverless cars are held to a different standard than human-driven vehicles. I think it's something that we're learning as this experiment plays out in public.
And I think that Waymo needs to be able to, needs to prove its safety, to the public because there's still a lot of skepticism around self-driving cars, and I think we've seen polls and surveys, say that people are still somewhat trepidatious when it comes to the technology that they need to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that they're safer. But that said, if they can't seem to operate in an organic fashion in a way that is commensurate with the way the drivers operate, too, then they'll put themselves a bit on the outside and I think that that could also open themselves up to criticism. They drive too slowly or maybe they're holding up traffic or other things that you start to see some of the same similar criticisms leveled at them in some of these urban environments which they operate.
There's a lot of risk, there's a lot of concerns about how this is going to unfold, but I think Waymo has a track record of operating safely. They've released a lot of data in the past few years to show how their vehicles are involved in way fewer crashes than human-driven vehicles and in fact, avoid crashes completely. I think that there is a lot of hope that perhaps they can bring that same sort of standard of safety to highways as they do to residential streets.
BRODIE: Yeah. In terms of the industry overall, how big of a deal is it that Waymo is looking to expand the freeways? And I'm wondering, let's say that it is successful, how big of a deal could that be for the industry moving forward and expanding, you know, either Weymo or other companies expanding to other markets as well?
HAWKINS: Yeah, I think it's a huge deal because I think, ultimately, beyond the questions surrounding the technology and does it work and does it not work and will people want to use it. There's a question about the market. What the market will dictate and what Waymo needs to demonstrate in order to remain competitive and also a revenue-generating project.
Right now they're propped up by the largess of their parent company, which is Alphabet, which owns Google because it's not a company that is really, in the business of making money or even generating a profit at this time. And sure, yes, they do have a commercial service and they do make some money, but it's not anywhere close to what they need in order to, begin to, break even. so I think in order for it to be, a profitable service for something that's going to work as a business in the future and not be some wacky science experiment that we've all been sort of watching play out, they're going to need to be something that's a lot more convenient and useful to people. And right now, the standard that a lot of people hold them to is, it's not Uber or Lyft. An Uber or Lyft vehicle can take you anywhere you need to go. They have a human driver, so there's no limitations. There's no geographic service area, whatnot. You want to drive all day and all night, you can.
But with the Waymo vehicle, there's all these restrictions and I think for the average consumer, they're not really thinking about restrictions. There's always going to be enthusiasts, people who want to use it because it's new and futuristic and it's interesting to drive in a vehicle without anyone in the front seat, but beyond those enthusiasts, that's not enough to really keep a prop up a commercial service, and I think that Waymo is obviously thinking about that next phase, as it starts to open up, these new roads and these new geographic areas for itself, how is it going to stay in business in the future?
