Would you ride on a Phoenix freeway in a Waymo? This journalist is betting on it

Waymo autonomous vehicles are now driving on Valley freeways. The company announced it’s expanding its service in Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco to certain riders who want to take the highway.

Waymo says this comes after a year of testing on freeways. It also comes as Tesla has started offering autonomous vehicle rides in Austin, Texas.

Andrew Hawkins, transportation editor at The Verge, joined The Show to talk more about it.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: So how big of a deal is this for Waymo?

ANDREW HAWKINS: I think it's a really big deal. I think this is, you know, Waymo has been kind of locked into small service areas, local roads and hasn't really been able to act like a real ride hailing, taxi service for years now. And this is really kind of like a first step towards competing on the same level playing field as Uber and Lyft and other taxi services. right.

Like, this is going to meaningfully change the way that people use the service and I think will kind of open them up to a broader section of customers as they start to roll out more highway and freeway driving in the cities that they serve.

BRODIE: Yeah, I mean, one of the criticisms and you've written about this is that, you know, sometimes the routes that Waymos take are a little, maybe not the routes one would take if they were driving themselves. Does the company think that this will, like, be vastly expanding their business and maybe, as you referenced, expanding the number of customers who might want to use this?

HAWKINS: Yeah, they don't really frame it that way, right. They still sort of talk about it in terms of, you know, this is the, you know, how we're approaching these safety cases and how we are sort of gradually expanding our, our service area.

They don't talk about it really in terms of, you know, the types of customers that they get, but they do talk about, you know, the time that they're going to be able to save people, right, that you could really slash a trip, the time that it takes to drive a trip in half, potentially, by taking highways.

So I do think that they do see this in terms of saving people time, and that obviously will, I think, attract more customers and make this a more usable service for a lot more people.

BRODIE: Yeah. Now, I mean, anybody who's driven can tell you that driving on a freeway is a lot different than driving on surface streets. Like, how robust has the testing been? How different is this for a Waymo vehicle to drive on a freeway than it is to drive on a surface street?

HAWKINS: Yeah, in some ways it's easier, right? You don't have intersections or traffic signals or pedestrians and cyclists to deal with. But in some other ways, it's a lot riskier. You're dealing with a lot faster speeds.

And so the decisions that get made need to happen a lot quicker than they would they might normally on a local road, because the consequences could be a lot more deadly if something goes wrong.

So Waymo seems to be taking this, I think, a lot, you know, sort of gradually. They're aware of the safety risks and they talked about how, you know, for over a decade now, they have been testing on highways, right. This is just something that they've started offering to their, to their customers.

But they've been doing this testing on public highways and closed courses, in simulation, where they can simulate certain edge cases where, you know, something random might occur that you might not think about normally occurring on a freeway.

And I think that that's how they sort of, they feel like that they've reached the point now where they're ready to start inviting members of the public onto, into their vehicles on these, on these roads.

BRODIE: Yeah. Do you get the sense that riders are comfortable with this? And I asked, because this is a very unscientific survey, just anecdotally asking some friends over the weekend who have taken Waymos and enjoyed it, how they would feel about riding on a freeway. And more than half were like, I'm not so sure.

HAWKINS: Yeah, I think that's an interesting question because I think that that would be the same probably reaction you would get from someone who has never ridden in Waymo at all, right.

Would you feel comfortable getting in a car with no one behind the driver's seat? And I think a lot of people might say, you know, maybe not, but after they experience it and they see how it does operate safely in most cases, that it's, it's a pretty conservative driver for the most part. And also sort of the quirks that you get from riding in a robotaxi, you get to take selfies with it. It has that kind of novelty experience.

I think that, that, that really kind of has tipped the balance for a lot of people. And I think it's going to be the same with highways that you're going to start to see more and more people sharing their experiences riding in these vehicles in these situations. And then I think it'll, it'll grow from there.

BRODIE: And would you imagine that the plan would be to continue to expand the highway service to more riders, maybe, you know, roll it out in more cities as well at some point?

HAWKINS: Yeah, that's what Waymo is saying, that right now that they're limiting the trips to only the people who have opted in on the app, who say that they want to test out these early experiences. So it's not everyone's going to be offered a highway trip right out of the, out of the gate.

And it's only going to be select highways, I think as well. I think in Phoenix, they've said that it's going to be Route 60, Interstates 10 and 17 and Loop 202. And then I think we'll, we'll see as the map grows, we'll start to see more highways get invited, added in. And then, you know, it's only going to be the three cities as well.

They said Phoenix, LA and San Francisco. So that does not include Austin and Atlanta yet, which are also cities where they operate. So we'll start to see, you know, how the company approaches these other cities in these other markets as time goes on.

BRODIE: So, Andrew, before I let you go, I want to ask about this move by Waymo, sort of in the larger AV ecosystem. I mentioned Tesla starting offering autonomous vehicle rides in Austin. And you know, there's some other companies out there looking to do this as well. How significant is it for Waymo to start doing this sort of now, given where other companies seem to be with this technology?

HAWKINS: Yeah, you know, from what my, my observations, Waymo is still leading the pack. They're far, way out, far ahead of everyone else. You know, Tesla does offer its service in Austin as well as in the Bay Area, but this is with safety drivers in the vehicle. They have employees that sit in the passenger seat and sometimes behind the wheel itself.

They haven't gotten their permits in line yet. You know, as, as is typical of a, of a Tesla experience, they sort of launch first and then try to get their paperwork all in order afterwards. But yeah, I think that we're going to start to see more and more companies start to do this.

Uber has said that they want to, they've been partnering with a bunch of different third-party autonomous vehicle operators. Zoox, which is owned by Amazon, is starting to offer rides in Las Vegas, and they are also testing in San Francisco. So the competition is slowly increasing. But I think Waymo still is seen as being the leader of the packaging, given how long they've been doing this and the fact that they are doing it in vehicles without anyone behind the wheel.