Even if you haven’t hailed a ride in a Waymo before, you wouldn’t forget if you’d seen one rolling around Santa Monica or Downtown L.A. These white, electric-powered Jaguars are unmissable thanks to their arrays of radar and cameras, their spinning lidar crowns and, you know, the fact that there’s nobody sitting in the driver’s seat.
Now, there’s one more place you might spot them: the freeway. Though the 24/7 driverless taxi service has so far been limited to 79 square miles of L.A.’s surface streets, Waymo announced that its employees will begin testing fully autonomous rides on the city’s freeways.
“Freeways are an intrinsic part of the L.A. experience,” the Alphabet Inc. subsidiary wrote in a social media post. “To better serve our expansive 79-square-mile service area, we’re beginning to provide our employees with access to fully autonomous rides on L.A. freeways—a key step toward expanding this capability to all riders.”
Freeways are an intrinsic part of the LA experience. To better serve our expansive 79-square-mile service area, we're beginning to provide our employees with access to fully autonomous rides on LA freeways—a key step toward expanding this capability to all riders. pic.twitter.com/oWqVQ1hlJz
— Waymo (@Waymo) January 28, 2025
According to KTLA, testing will begin on the 10, 110, 90 and 405 freeways. That aligns pretty neatly with the taxi app’s current service area, which runs from the coast, through the Westside (as far north as Westwood and as far south as Playa Vista), along a slightly narrower band of Central L.A. and then into DTLA (between Chinatown and USC).
I’ve been spotting Waymo vehicles on the 10 since the company first rolled out its service here more than a year ago, but those always had a human driver behind the wheel—part of an extensive testing phase that precedes the service’s fully autonomous rides. There’s no announced date yet for when freeway rides will roll out to the general public.
Like plenty of Angelenos, I’ll be curious to see how the Waymo experience translates to the road rage-fueled freeways. During my rides on surface streets, I’ve found the autonomous vehicles to be more cautious and courteous than your average L.A. driver, but still assertive enough to squeeze in left turns during periods of high traffic. It’s not perfect: I’ve been in a car that clipped a curb and just barely got stuck in a crosswalk at a red light, and then there’s of course the recent video of a car driving in circles in Inglewood. But the company’s safety data reports 78% fewer injury-causing crashes than the average human driver across its 33 million miles logged in San Francisco and Phoenix (the service had registered just under two million miles in L.A. as of last September, so it’s yet to report any statistically significant data for SoCal).
Waymo first began operating its autonomous taxis (for free, on an invite-only basis) in select L.A. neighborhoods in the fall of 2023, and by a year later it had expanded to much of the northern L.A. Basin, with paid rides available for anyone in the general public.
The existing limitation to surface streets has meant that Waymo is best suited for short trips rather than crosstown treks. (At $3 to $4 per mile, a similar price to Uber and Lyft, you may prefer to stick to nearby destinations anyway.) But the addition of freeway access could fundamentally alter that. A Waymo animation shows a 60-minute ride from Santa Monica to DTLA dropping to 30 minutes by using the 10—and though your first thought may be, that’s cute, you optimistic little robot, that’s an admittedly plausible estimate outside of rush hour.