Waymo will begin fully autonomous operations with its 6th-generation Driver —an important step in bringing our technology to more riders in more cities. This latest system serves as the primary engine for our next era of expansion, with a streamlined configuration that drives down costs while maintaining our uncompromising safety standards. 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.
The 6th-generation Waymo Driver is the product of seven years of safety-proven service amassed from driving nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles across the densest cores of 10+ major cities and an expanding network of freeways. Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
By leveraging breakthroughs in AI and validating the system through our rigorous safety framework, we can now accelerate our journey to the road with unprecedented velocity and confidence. Today, we're lifting the lid on our 6th-generation Waymo Driver's sophisticated sensing technology delivering expanded capabilities at a lower cost.
Vision System
The Waymo Driver’s vision system goes far beyond the capabilities of human sight or standard automotive cameras. While it interprets the same semantic details we do, such as traffic light colors and road signs, it operates with a level of awareness no person can match. Our vision system can see everywhere at once and possesses a dynamic range that allows it to pull critical details out of deep shadows while being hit with the direct glare of high-beams or emergency vehicle lights.
Your web browser does not support this video. Compared to a traditional automotive camera (right), the 6th-generation Waymo Driver camera (left) delivers significantly higher resolution at cost parity, allowing the system to make better-informed driving decisions.
At the core of this system is our next-gen 17 megapixel imager, a breakthrough in automotive vision technology. This high-resolution sensor captures millions of data points for incredibly sharp images while offering exceptional thermal stability across automotive conditions. These imagers allow the Waymo Driver to see around the vehicle with fewer cameras than if we used 5 or 8-megapixel sensors. The result is a system a generation ahead of other automotive cameras in terms of resolution, dynamic range, and low-light sensitivity.
A vision system that is reliable in inclement weather needs to keep itself clear. While cameras on conventional cars can struggle with raindrops, road grime, and ice, our system features integrated cleaning systems to maintain visibility. In conditions where a camera’s view may be limited, our lidar and radar provide the necessary redundancy to maintain the Waymo Driver’s perception.
This focus on high-performance sensing extends throughout our hardware system. We've pushed more processing complexity into Waymo’s custom silicon chips rather than relying on multiple hardware components. This approach delivers superior results with remarkable efficiency—our new cameras outperform the highly capable system on our 5th-generation vehicles, even as we continue to reduce costs by using less than half the number of cameras.
Lidar
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