DENVER — Autonomous driving company Waymo, a subsidiary of Google parent company Alphabet, announced this week it is expanding service to more cities, including Denver.
No exact date for the driverless ride service to begin has been announced, but the company said in a news release it is coming to Denver this fall, starting with "an exploratory phase to understand Denver’s unique driving environment.”
Waymo currently operates in five U.S. cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Austin.
Downtown Denver resident Jasmine Waples recently took a ride in a Waymo in San Francisco.
“It got us there, but it's very strange to not have someone driving in the car,” she told Denver7.
Metropolitan State University Denver professor and transportation engineer Steve Long agrees — it’s an unusual experience at first.
“It was a little strange,” he told Denver7, recalling his ride in Phoenix. “You know, as it starts getting up to 45 miles an hour and you're kind of looking around, I thought it was going to go a lot slower than that, but, you know, pretty much flawless.”
There have been some high-profile crashes and mishaps involving the robotaxis.
But a Waymo study published in the Traffic Injury Prevention Journal this year, which compared human benchmarks to the autonomous cars over roughly 56 million miles, found Waymo vehicles reduced intersection crashes with injuries by 96%.
“The automation that goes into these vehicles is much more secure than the human reaction time that it takes,” said Long. “LiDAR [Light Detection and Ranging technology] is millions of points around you that can see and envision everything, and you combine that with a camera and traditional radar, you got a pretty tight system.”
That system will be put to the test during Denver's cold and snowy winters. Waymo's current markets are generally warm-weather cities, though the company also announced plans to expand to other colder climates like New York City and Seattle.
The California-based company announced it plans to operate in Denver using a mixed fleet of all-electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles and vehicles from the Chinese company Zeekr.
Waymo said the Jaguar will have the 5th-generation of Waymo Driver software.
In contrast, the Zeekrs will have a 6th-generation version of the software, which the company said “is informed by years of winter weather experience across Michigan, New York, and the Sierra Nevada.”
Still, there are questions about how the technology will perform during a Denver winter.
"I probably won't ride in it in the winter, honestly," said Waples. "Depending on your driver, they might not know exactly what to do in those situations, but I think I trust that a little more than an algorithm."
Long said he is "a little skeptical" because snow can affect the visual cues that the technology relies on.
"But they're not going to launch this without, you know, testing it and having drivers behind the vehicle here in Denver first," he said.
Even if it’s a smooth ride for the technology, riders like Jasmine are torn over the idea taking the keys from human ride-share drivers.
“In theory, there's the things that have come out with Uber talking about, like certain unsafe drivers,” she said. “There's not a driver [in a Waymo]. So in that aspect, it could be safer.”
She added, however, that she does not want society to become overly reliant on technology like this.
“I feel like there's other areas where we could implement technology that would be a little more helpful, instead of straight up swooping jobs away," she said.
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