A Waymo autonomous vehicle navigates through the intersection of North Main and Evergreen streets in October. Passenger service resumed Thursday after a five-month shutdown.
Sam Owens/San Antonio Express-News
A Waymo robotaxi travels on the East Side of San Antonio in October. Passenger service resumed Thursday after a five-month shutdown.
Sam Owens/San Antonio Express-News
Waymo self-driving robotaxis restarted passenger service in San Antonio on Thursday, about five months after it was shut down following several incidents of the cars getting caught in floodwaters.
Service was to resume at 11 a.m. — but only for those who already had access on the Waymo app before the April shutdown.
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The California-based company said that during the pause, it continued testing and made upgrades to help the cars navigate water-covered roads.
Robert Chen, Waymo’s lead on helping the robotaxis deal with weather, said the company updated its operations, controls, data and software.
“What’s really changed in the past five months is the onboard software,” he said.
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The cars are now better equipped to deal with water on the road and potentially avoid situations like what they experienced during heavy storms across San Antonio in April, according to the company.
Three Waymos got caught in high water at separate sites on April 4 and another drove into floodwaters on an Interstate 35 frontage road and was swept away on April 20. Nobody was injured in the incidents.
Chen said his team’s upgrades to the company’s driving system that’s powered by artificial intelligence, known as the Waymo Driver, have it better prepared for such unpredictable weather.
“You want to be able to detect (standing water or flooding) and have an appropriate response to it — which is stopping beforehand and turning around and not driving through if it’s if it’s too deep,” he said. “So that’s really been the big improvement that has been made, in addition to many other improvements on the operational intelligence side.”
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The April 20 incident, he said, revealed a weakness in how the cars detect and respond to flooding.
The system “wasn’t as … comprehensive or (able to deal with) as many scenarios and situations as we were intending,” he said. His team found that the ‘software on its own was not able to fully mitigate’ the conditions the car was encountering.
In addition to halting service in San Antonio after the car was swept away, Waymo issued a software recall for its entire U.S. fleet of 3,800 vehicles. And in May, the company briefly shut down passenger service in its other Texas markets — Austin, Dallas and Houston — as well as in Atlanta and Nashville, because of impending severe weather.
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“We wanted to make sure that we actually took the time to look at it, understand it more fully, and then basically go through our entire development and validation process,” he said. “And that process, especially when there’s software improvements that are part of it, does take time.”
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Waymo said that through March, it had driven 220.6 million rider-only miles without a human driver. Company statistics say the automated driver system is more than 10 times safer than human drivers.
San Antonio’s resumed service will have dozens of the company’s white Jaguar I-Paces driving across a 60-mile service area roughly bounded by Interstate 10 on the south and west and Loop 410 to the north and east. The area includes downtown, several neighborhoods, the Arena District and San Antonio International Airport.
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“Riders will be notified by push notification from their Waymo app,” Waymo spokesman Chris Bonelli said. “We will continually welcome people from the remaining waitlist over the coming weeks before opening to anyone in the city later this year.”
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He encouraged those interested in trying out the service to download the Waymo app which will automatically add them to the waitlist. The company had been preparing to open service to everyone before the shutdown.
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The Google spinoff currently operates in 15 cities across Texas, California, Colorado, Georgia, Florida and Nevada.
It launched service in Las Vegas this week.