Waymo Hits 2 Million No-Driver Miles And Expands Phoenix Robotaxi Zone. Can It Replace Your Car?

Waymo has announced a major expansion of its Phoenix service area and modest expansions in San Francisco. It also announced hitting 2 million miles of operation with no safety driver in the car, just shortly after hitting 1 million. The company now covers a large contiguous area of Phoenix, Chandler, Tempe and Scottsdale, including airport service. They are now providing 10,000 trips every week to members of the public. These are all industry-leading numbers in the West.

Waymo’s expansion in Phoenix offers a path to some important milestones for a real-world robotaxi service. It’s now closer to meeting a decent fraction of the needs of some residents of the Phoenix area and a bit better in San Francisco with the addition of Fisherman’s Wharf and North Beach. In particular, it can do much better at a tourist’s needs. It’s still not quite enough — Phoenix is a sprawling, car-dependent city, and while there are San Francisco residents who live car-free and stick to the actual city, it is also part of a much larger metropolitan area.

This is important because for robotaxis to be the future of the car and justify their big investments, they must become car replacements. It is not sufficient to be a better or cheaper Uber, not even close. To be a car replacement, they have to handle a large fraction of a customer’s desired trips well and at a good price, and it must be possible to handle the other trips by other means (transit, Uber, carshare, car rental, ebike) with low hassle and cost. Nobody is there yet, though they could start getting there, particularly by artificial means to get going.

Waymo’s service in Phoenix doesn’t include the freeways. That’s a problem there as once you start doing the longer trips this new service area allows it can double the trip time to avoid the freeway. A trip from southern Chandler to western Phoenix can take over an hour on surface streets. While there are many attractions to a robotaxi ride, such as privacy and quality, they don’t compensate for doubling the trip time.

Good news is that Waymo is driving employees on freeways with a safety driver on board. They perhaps should consider taking the public, also with a safety driver. If a person in the new Phoenix area asks to take a trip where the freeway would significantly shorten the time, they can be allocated a car with a safety driver. If one is not available they would have to face the longer trip, which would annoy them but ideally this would be rare. Eventually, Waymo would find the confidence to remove that driver on those freeway drives.

There is a similar issue at the airport. Waymo only serves the SkyTrain stations, though they have added a new station on the west side. No matter how fast and frequent the SkyTrain is, people will prefer cars that take them directly to their terminal. It is important that the robotaxi service never be inferior to conventional service if it is to win the day.

Customers will be able to put 4 in the car for a ride now, which will help on bar-hops. Waymo is also hoping for more tourist business. Tourists, of course, do have cars and they might well use Waymo instead of a rental car or Uber style service. In Phoenix they will be able to do that right from the airport. Many tourists will likely do this for the novelty. It will be interesting to see how they adapt when the novelty wears off and they just consider it on equal weight with the alternatives. For that, they will need fast response times, the wide service area and good pricing. Waymo said they got a big boost with their Superbowl promotion and this boost has continued long after the promotion — even though the stadium was not in their service area. Tourists will have no problem if they have to use Uber style services for rare trips outside the now larger Waymo One area.

In San Francisco, Waymo still awaits permission from the California PUC to charge money for rides. It doesn’t need the money but it does want to learn from how riders interact with a service they are paying for. Some areas of San Francisco are only available to Waymo’s “Trusted Tester” beta riders. Those riders are not under NDA but are limited in number.

Fortunately within the city of San Francisco, while the freeway is nice on certain trips it’s a much more limited number. Once they want to start serving silicon valley or Oakland, the freeway is a must. Waymo actually began mostly on the freeways of silicon valley — this is very familiar territory for them, but the high speeds continue to increase the severity of any error.

The two million miles are impressive, but Waymo says they are going to start de-emphasizing their mile count, and are prouder of the 10,000 trip/week number. It is an interesting contrast with Tesla. Fans of Tesla FSD are still posting videos impressed with how it completes a single trip without an intervention, or perhaps does 2 or 3 in a row. Waymo is doing 10,000 in a week with nobody behind the wheel and where a need for a safety intervention would mean a crash. (They are still needing non-safety interventions in certain traffic situations and a few interactions with emergency vehicles.) Tesla is incredibly far behind on the quest for 10,000 in a row.

San Francisco is a more likely city for a car replacement service, and silicon valley is the home of Waymo headquarters. It’s a sign of the unfriendliness of the city of SF that Waymo is doing this expansion in Phoenix. On a sad note, the Waymo service area now includes the stretch of Mill Avenue in Tempe where an Uber test vehicle, badly monitored by an inattentive safety driver struck and killed Elaine Herzberg, a pedestrian, in 2018. This effectively ended Uber’s self-driving program. It won’t be long before somebody does a video driving that route.

Waymo also continues testing in Los Angeles, but is not ready to talk about deployment there. This is another sprawled and car-based city, so one hopes when they open there it will be with a large service area.