Waymo’s testing doesn’t necessarily mean San Diego’s streets will be crawling with driverless cars anytime soon. When asked if this testing is a precursor to rolling out local service, Waymo said it is not announcing any new cities at this time.
The company announced recently that it will also be doing test drives in Las Vegas. Waymo plans to conduct test drives in at least 10 cities this year, but declined to name the others.
During these test drives, which are manually controlled by a person, Waymo will deploy fewer than 10 cars to each city, according to The Verge, which first reported the news.
The company, owned by Google parent Alphabet Inc., said it connected with city officials prior to conducting tests on local roads over the next two months. A spokesperson for the city of San Diego confirmed that Waymo presented its testing plans to staff members from the mayor’s office and transportation department.
Some San Diegans have already spotted the white, all-electric Jaguar I-PACEs on city roads. The cars are outfitted with Waymo’s logo and its fifth generation of sensors – on the roof and above each headlight and taillight.
A spokesperson for Waymo said the testing will be conducted on public roads in the following neighborhoods and on Interstate 5 and state Route 163:
- Bankers Hill
- Mission Hills
- Little Italy
- Balboa Park
- Cortez Hill
- East Village
- Marina District
- Sherman Heights
The company said that the test drives in San Diego will help improve Waymo’s algorithms and give developers an idea of how to refine it. For instance, it could help the technology more accurately identify an emergency vehicle based on its unique regional behavior, appearance and sirens.
“This testing will show us where we should further tune our perception models before expanding to new cities,” the spokesperson said.
Henrik I. Christensen, a professor and the director of robotics at UC San Diego, leads a team of researchers who study autonomous vehicles. The practical application of their work can be seen on campus via autonomous golf carts.
Christensen – who is not affiliated with Waymo – said that the company is using cameras and laser radar “to build sort of a 3-D model of the environment.” Then it’s a matter of detecting in real-time where other cars, pedestrians and cyclists come into the picture.
“That’s why they’re driving around, taking all of this data, using then some powerful computers to build a map that is much more detailed than what you see when you drive in your car,” he said.
The data feeds an artificial intelligence algorithm, which helps the computer make the best decisions and routes based on the variables it has collected.
“But the big burden is sort of to make sure that we know the rules of the road,” Christensen said.
Rather, some of those challenges are the unsaid, real-world rules of the road, which vary in different regions. One example he gave is the “California stop,” when drivers slowly roll through a stop sign instead of making a complete stop.
Though that is illegal, Christensen noted that it’s a common driver habit alongside pedestrians jaywalking in areas such as the Gaslamp District. Learning the “ethics of different neighborhoods” and traffic patterns — like how busy Balboa Park gets during December Nights — are all variables that aren’t necessarily easy for an algorithm to account for.
The road testing is regulated by the California Department of Motor Vehicles and the California Public Utilities Commission. The DMV issues permits to companies like Waymo to test on public roads and licenses to operate its commercial robotaxis in certain locations.
In turn, the regulated companies must also publicly report if the autonomous technology fails during testing and any collisions.
It hasn’t been an easy road for companies launching robotaxis and self-driving cars. The safety of the technology has been scrutinized, primarily in accidents involving pedestrians. Since 2014, the DMV has received 791 autonomous vehicle collision reports as of Feb. 7.
Plus, stiff competition in the market and the expensive cost to advance this technology has weighed on some firms. Cruise, an autonomous car company backed by General Motors, shut down in December after years of financial losses and operational challenges.
The DMV reported that companies with autonomous vehicle testing permits covered more than 4 million miles on the state’s public roads between Dec. 1, 2023, and Nov. 30, 2024. That is significantly down from the more than 9 million miles covered in the prior year’s period, presumably because some companies pulled out of the sector or failed.
At the end of last year, Waymo announced it will also be doing its first international test drives in Tokyo and expanding its robotaxi service to Miami. Currently, Waymo operates its 24/7 robotaxis in certain parts of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Austin, Texas.
© 2025 The San Diego Union-Tribune. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
