Waymo is planning on bringing vehicles to ten new cities in 2025, according to a report by The Verge. This new testing phase starts in Las Vegas and San Diego. These won’t be pure robotaxis, as they’ll have a manual operator.
It’s basically a small-scale experiment by the company to collect data and see how the self-driving system adapts to new locations, regional driving habits and unique weather patterns. All told, the company will be sending around ten vehicles to each new city. “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.
To that point, Las Vegas is known for dense traffic and plenty of chaos surrounding drop-off zones near hotels and casinos. San Diego is similar to locations in which the Alphabet-owned company already operates, like Phoenix, but it wants to validate that the system performs well “without having a ton of prior driving information.”
It plans on bringing the service to Miami, along with Austin and Atlanta. Waymo hasn’t announced the remaining cities, but the system sure could use more testing in some of the colder parts of the country. The company has done some winter testing in upstate New York and Michigan, but that’s about it. It also recently announced it would start to test driverless cars in Tokyo, but we aren’t sure if that counts as one of the ten new cities.
It’s extremely important for the company to test in multiple cities. This is to account for unique traffic conditions and weather, of course, but also for inconsistencies that can trip up driverless systems. For instance, fire trucks and ambulances tend to look slightly different across cities and states. Waymo, after all, hasn’t always had the best track record when it comes to emergency vehicles.
This is just the latest move to ensure that driverless cars are ready for primetime. The company recently started bringing its robotaxis onto Los Angeles highways.
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