is transportation editor with 10+ years of experience who covers EVs, public transportation, and aviation. His work has appeared in The New York Daily News and City & State.
After years of testing and validation, Waymo announced today that it’s sixth-generation robotaxi technology is finally ready for passenger trips. The updated autonomous driving system will first be rolled out for employees and their friends in San Francisco and Los Angeles, with public customers to follow.
Waymo’s current fleet of Jaguar I-Pace vehicles runs on the company’s fifth generation technology, first rolled out in March 2020. But that vehicle has reached the end of its shelf life, after Jaguar discontinued the model at the end of 2024. The updated system is designed to work seamlessly across multiple vehicle types, starting with the Zeekr RT minivan (rebranded as Ojai) and followed by the Hyundai Ioniq 5. Waymo is in talks with other automakers, including Toyota, about future models.
Waymo says that its sixth-generation system is the smartest, most capable autonomous vehicle it’s ever designed, while also using fewer sensors to lower its overall costs. Its cameras are more powerful, its lidar are able to see things the cameras might miss, and its improved radar are able to tackle extreme weather conditions. But more importantly, its built for “high-volume production,” with Waymo’s manufacturing partners able to churn out “tens of thousands of units a year.” After proving that it can build a successful robotaxi business across multiple markets, Waymo is aiming to scale more rapidly, eyeing 20 new cities in 2026.
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1 / 4 Image: Waymo
“Designed for long-term growth across multiple vehicle platforms, this system’s expanded capabilities allow us to safely broaden our footprint into more diverse environments, including those with extreme winter weather, at an even greater scale,” Waymo VP of engineering Satish Jeyachandran said in a blog post.
Jeyachandran listed a number of metrics — developed over seven years, 200 million miles of testing in 10+ major cities — to bolster the case that the sixth generation is ready for the road. And in perhaps a veiled swipe at Tesla’s camera-only autonomous system, he explained how Waymo’s multi-sensor hardware stack provides the redundancy necessary to create the most robust picture of the environment around each vehicle, while also detecting even the hardest-to-spot objects and edge cases.
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