Waymo expands self-driving taxis to over a dozen cities with 88% fewer injuries

Waymo, Google’s autonomous vehicle subsidiary, is rapidly scaling its self-driving taxi service across major U.S. cities, with plans to expand to over a dozen metropolitan areas soon. The company’s progress signals a potential disruption to ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft, as Waymo demonstrates significantly safer performance than human drivers while processing 250,000 paid trips weekly.

The big picture: After 15 years of development and 71 million collective miles driven, Waymo has achieved the technological maturity needed for widespread autonomous vehicle deployment across American cities.

Safety performance: Waymo’s autonomous vehicles demonstrate substantially better safety records compared to human-driven trips.

• 88% fewer serious injuries than trips with human drivers.
• 79% less airbag deployment.
• 78% fewer injury-causing accidents overall.

Current operations: Vincent Vanhoucke from Waymo revealed the company’s existing scale and immediate expansion plans during a Stanford presentation.

• The service currently handles approximately 250,000 paid trips per week.
• Waymo programs are rolling out soon in San Francisco, Phoenix, Atlanta, Miami, and additional cities.
• “You’ll see Waymo in a neighborhood near you very soon,” Vanhoucke said.

Technical breakthrough: Waymo’s end-to-end system called Emma, built on Google’s Gemini AI platform, integrates multiple capabilities that were previously impossible to combine effectively.

• The system merges planning, understanding of surroundings, visual data interpretation, and higher-level reasoning into one framework.
• It features long-term memory, robust reasoning without hallucination, and accurate spatial reasoning.
• The technology handles “black swan” events and low-probability scenarios that require generalized responses.

In plain English: Think of Emma like a super-advanced driver’s brain that can see, understand, plan, and remember all at once—unlike older systems that had separate “modules” for each task. It can handle unexpected situations (like a ball rolling into the street) by drawing on its vast experience rather than just following pre-programmed rules.

Key challenges: Vanhoucke identified critical hurdles in autonomous vehicle development that Waymo has addressed.

• Building the driver system and validating its performance, with validation often being more difficult.
• Managing AI models’ tendency toward creativity: “They like to imagine new things that are not necessarily what exists on the ground.”
• Achieving mastery of complex physical environments while maintaining high performance and real-world computational accuracy.

Impact on ride-sharing: When questioned about potential job displacement for Uber and Lyft drivers, Vanhoucke acknowledged the transition but offered limited solutions.

• “It’s going to be one of those transitions,” he said, comparing it to how ride-sharing companies previously disrupted the taxicab industry.
• The development could significantly impact the income source for many Americans who rely on ride-sharing platforms.

What’s next: Vanhoucke emphasized that Waymo is entering a rapid scaling phase now that the foundational technology challenges have been solved, positioning the company to potentially reshape urban transportation across America.