Autonomous Revolution: Self-Driving Cars Conquer Freeways

Self-driving cars are revolutionizing transportation as they conquer freeways. This advancement signifies a major milestone in the autonomous vehicle industry, promising safer and more efficient travel on highways. The widespread adoption of self-driving technology on freeways marks a significant step towards a future dominated by autonomous vehicles.

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After expanding on local streets in San Francisco last year, the vehicles are starting to give completely driverless rides on freeways in Phoenix

PHOENIX—Last year, self-driving robotaxis took on city streets. Now, they are taking on freeways.

Waymo, the self-driving car startup owned by Google’s parent company, recently started testing driverless rides on freeways in Phoenix, using employees as passengers. 

It’s a crucial step for the industry. Enabling cars to take freeway routes can cut ride times by as much as half, Waymo has said and could help the company scale operations. Robotaxi outfits have poured billions into developing this technology and, if they can’t offer routes such as airport rides, their path to profitability becomes more uncertain.

Freeway rides are most useful in ferrying passengers to and from airports, as well as driving in cities such as Los Angeles, where freeways are integral to getting across town. Several companies are also moving forward with plans to deliver goods using self-driving trucks on freeways, a market that some executives think will produce a quicker return on investment.

The stakes are higher than ever, and patience is running thin for mistakes. It has taken 15 years for Waymo—one of the earliest entrants to the self-driving space—to take this step. Driving on freeways will significantly increase the riskiness of its operations.

Cruise, another self-driving car company, majority-controlled by General Motors, lost its permits to offer driverless rides in San Francisco last fall after one of its vehicles dragged a woman—who had been hit by another car—about 20 feet. The firm paused all operations nationwide shortly after that.

At a recent tech conference, Waymo views Los Angeles, a city dense with freeways as a potentially $2 billion market, co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said. This month, the company gained approval from California regulators to start charging for driverless rides on freeways in the Bay Area and parts of Los Angeles. 

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For now, Waymo is limiting its driverless rides on the freeway to Waymo employees to work out any kinks ahead of an expansion to the public. The company declined to say when that expansion would be. Aurora, an autonomous technology company focused on trucking, plans to put driverless trucks on freeways in Texas this year.

“That speaks to their confidence,” said Raj Rajkumar, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who specializes in self-driving cars. Waymo and other self-driving car companies still have to deal with risks around uncommon freeway driving scenarios, he added. 

Waymo has trained its vehicles for different scenarios they might face. But it is difficult to anticipate every obstacle. On city streets, the cars have faced unexpected hazards, such as people who deliberately run out in front of the self-driving cars to see whether they’ll stop and others who put cones on the cars’ hoods to interfere with their sensors. The passenger has no control over the car if there is an incident.

One bad accident could call into question Waymo’s or Aurora’s entire operations, as it did recently with Cruise and with Uber years before that. Uber sold off its entire self-driving business after one of its cars going 40 miles an hour struck and killed a woman during testing near Phoenix in 2018. Last month, Waymo issued its first-ever recall over a software problem after two of its cars in Phoenix collided with a pickup truck that was being towed backward.

One of the biggest challenges for the vehicles is merging on and off freeway ramps. It requires them to run several calculations at once and make a quick decision while their surroundings continuously change—similar to the situation the robotaxis faced making unprotected left-hand turns on city streets. 

The rollout on freeways in Phoenix has largely been without trouble so far, Waymo says. The cars have been able to navigate on and off ramps successfully and haven’t come to a halt in the middle of the freeway—another issue that occurred on city streets. 

When the cars got confused or encountered a problem, they would sometimes stop where they were on the road, backing up traffic and frustrating other drivers who couldn’t communicate with the car. 

Sugandha Sangal, a product manager at Waymo, says they have built-in redundancies to prevent that from happening on fast-moving freeways. If one sensor system fails, there is another in place to help.

Over the past year, Waymo vehicles in testing have been involved in a handful of incidents on freeways. Last March, one of the cars in San Francisco hit some tire scraps while transitioning from Interstate 280 to Interstate 380, causing damage to the car, according to state records. 

In another incident the same day, a Waymo was driving itself on Bayshore Boulevard in San Francisco when a safety driver—someone who sits in the driver’s seat of the car and can take over in the case of an emergency—crashed into another car that was stopped in the rightmost lane. Both vehicles sustained damage.

Waymo declined to provide more details on the incidents but said that building trust with the communities in which they operate is important to them.

Other competitors in the space say they are still years out.

Amazon-owned Zoox plans to launch public rides in Las Vegas this year with freeway driving in the very distant future. But even now, company executives recognize its potential. 

Cruise, before it lost its permits, wasn’t planning to get on the freeway soon, according to people familiar with the matter. The company’s immediate road map was focused on expanding to more cities, only on local streets.

Meanwhile in Phoenix, some residents are excited about the prospect of taking a Waymo on the freeway. 

—Sebastian Herrera contributed to this article.

Write to Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com and Miles Kruppa at miles.kruppa@wsj.com

Source: The Wall Street Journal

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