Add San Diego and Las Vegas to the list of cities getting the Waymo treatment. The company says those cities should see self-driving Waymo vehicles on the road soon as it launches service there in 2026.
Oh, and also the frequently icy streets of Detroit.
Even though Waymo’s cabs (the all-electric Jaguar I-Pace and Zeekr RT) will be in manual mode with a human driver controlling the car at first, the Google spin-off company will be gearing up for autonomous operations soon in those new locales. Waymo already has driverless operations in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, Arizona, and is driving with safety drivers in New York City and Denver and in partnership with Uber in Atlanta and Austin. Plans for more autonomous taxi trips include Washington, D.C. and more of the San Francisco Bay Area.
But if the mention of Detroit and Denver alongside the sun-soaked streets of Chandler, Arizona and Santa Monica, California seems out of place, well, it sure is. If Waymo can pull this off, it will be some of the first fully autonomous operations where the roads are slick with wet, slippery ice and visibility is terrible and dark for more hours of the day.
Tesla owners have access to Full Self-Driving mode in all of Tesla’s EVs, and have been a litmus test for autonomous driving in inclement weather outside of the winter-free zones Waymo (along with Amazon’s Zoox in SF and Las Vegas and the now-defunct General Motors-owned Cruise in SF, Phoenix, Miami, Nashville and several Texas cities) has historically operated. As Reddit forums have discussed for the past few years, once the weather gets rough, self-driving mode isn’t much help. As one user urged, “…don’t rely on a robot to drive you in the snow.”
Waymo anticipated concerns and doubts about driving in a place like Detroit known for its “harshest winter” and put out a blog post at the end of last month about driving in all types of weather. It claims its next generation driver tech has trained enough to handle snowy conditions.
Waymo says its AI can notice when there’s snow, slush or ice versus a normal, dry road and adjusts its behavior accordingly. “Each vehicle essentially acts as a mobile weather station, gathering data to inform its own driving decisions and share with the rest of the fleet in the city,” the post reads.
The need to conquer winter was inevitable. The robofleets can only drive around the same SF streets for so long battling the occasional sprinkle and late-night fog bank. Advanced imaging company Ubicept has been preparing imaging tech for more challenging conditions. And wondering when companies like Waymo would want to expand beyond the sun belt and coastal California. As Ubicept co-founder and CTO Tristan Swedish explained in a recent call, challenging scenarios like winter puts vision systems and sensor suites to the test.
“When you move to a more adverse weather scenario there are ways to overcome those challenges using advanced perception systems,” he said, contrasting the ease of summertime autonomous driving in “well-behaved environments” like SF and Vegas.
Swedish noted the trend to add more cameras, radar and LiDAR sensors to fight the limitations of seeing through things like nighttime fog and a snowstorm. But, “the more sensors you have the more likely you have to fail,” he said. “It makes the system less reliable, and more expensive.”
Companies like Ubicept want to deploy an AI-based solution: Software that can separate light from a headlight bouncing off fog or a snow bank versus the road. Humans can’t do that with the naked eye, but with an approach called gated imaging technology, reliable autonomous driving in more places is theoretically possible. “You don’t have to build a new sensor system,” he assured.
But more robotaxis in more places during more times of the year might not be what people want. After a Waymo struck and killed a neighborhood cat in San Francisco last month, a local supervisor introduced a resolution to give counties more say about robotaxi activity. In California companies like Waymo are regulated through the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and CA DMV, both state-level entities.
So while winter is coming, don’t expect the autonomous taxis (and the companies that run them) to be ready for it yet.
