4 ms·

The Waymo Ojai Will Soon Offer Autonomous Rides Around the U.S.

44 points by Zigurd 10mo ago

lucidrains 10mo ago
They need to have a service that allows for pets. It is the only reason I still use Ubers!
tocs3 10mo ago
Certification documents show a single rear-mounted electric motor producing 268 horsepower and hooked up to a 93-kWh battery. Wow, that seems like a lot of horsepower.
- anishgupta 10mo ago
  Box on turbo
- stetrain 10mo ago
  Horsepower is pretty cheap in an EV once you have a big battery. The 2026 Nissan Leaf, an economy car and one of the cheapest new EVs in the US at $29k, has 214hp.
- nospice 10mo ago
  They were using Jaguar I-Pace for a good while, right? That was nearly 400 hp.
  - jerlam 10mo ago
    However, they accelerate rather slowly. Waymo isn't in any need to get you to your destination faster, nor get into additional collisions.
    - Analemma_ 10mo ago
      To me the torque is more important than the horsepower: one nice thing about Waymo is that they're quite good at gentle, constant acceleration up San Francisco's steep hills. Human Uber drivers have a 50/50 chance of making me carsick when they try this, out of some combination of inexperience and driving a car without enough low-end torque.
- standardUser 10mo ago
  This is the thing people seem to sleep on when it comes to EVs - they simply drive better than other cars. More responsive, better pickup, smoother drivetrains, etc.
  - idiotsecant 10mo ago
    This is also a feature of hybrids people overlook. They might have tiny ICE engines, but the additional torque from the electric motor more than makes up for it
    - redfern314 10mo ago
      I mean, kind of. Series hybrids (where the drivetrain is all electric and fed by a generator) yes, but all the parallel hybrids I've driven are still pretty anemic because you have both a tiny ICE engine and a tiny electric motor. They also don't always engage simultaneously in a way that makes it feel like you're getting the torque on demand.
    - sib 10mo ago
      Ehhhh.... The most prevalent hybrid (at least in the US) is the Toyota Prius. At least until to latest models, they were very slow, with a 0-60 time of ~10 seconds.
- yardie 10mo ago
  Tesla Model 3 Standard is 280HP/210kW. And it's only really limited by the C of the battery pack. Under optimal conditions I've measured 310HP, according to the Canbus app. EVs are incredibly powerful. Even the humble Nissan Leaf would blow the doors off an 00s performance car.
  - jedberg 10mo ago
    I have a Leaf. It makes me laugh when people with "muscle cars" try to race me. One time I humored one of them, and completely smoked them off the line. And my car was still in Eco mode.
    - gambiting 10mo ago
      We have a VW e-Up, with a very meagre 80hp electric motor - I can guarantee that off the lights that car is faster than pretty much any muscle or sports car, because it just instantly accelerates from standstil. I used to own an AMG few years ago, and to match what the e-Up can do I'd have to put it into Sports+ mode then enable launch control, then sit there with revs at 4000rpm just waiting for the light to change so the car would actually launch quickly. But off the standing start from idle? No chance.
      - foobarian 10mo ago
        The peak torque at 0rpm is a nice feature for city traffic low-key drag racing. I think if you really wanted to have a chance to troll an EV owner you'd have to incite them to race you on a highway with conditions that cause frequent speed changes in the 50-100mph range. But tbh even they you'd have a hard time. Maybe if you kept that up until they ran down the battery?
        elictronic 10mo ago
        Never or arrested on a public road basically vs my daily driver is fun even when driving in the real world. It’s not loud is the last real complaint I see.
anishgupta 10mo ago
All my support for carpools and shuttles in the US. We need this more especially in SF
- GuinansEyebrows 10mo ago
  https://www.sfmta.com/muni-transit https://www.sfmta.com/muni-transit
superkuh 10mo ago
>San Francisco and then expanding last year to Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta. "The Waymo Ojai Will Soon Offer Autonomous Rides Around the Southern U.S. in areas where there is no snow."
- Zigurd 10mo ago
  https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/creating-an-all-weather-driver https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/creating-an-all-weather-drive... They are testing in Detroit.
  - gipp 10mo ago
    And NYC. Just saw one this morning
    - superkuh 10mo ago
      Glad to hear it and I wish them luck! I was just clearing up the current status of self-driving vehicles re: the headline. For now they do not work in areas where road surfaces and edges get covered by and location changed by snow. They do not work "Around the US".
- sensen 10mo ago
  That sounds reasonable enough. If we can do this in areas that are less likely to suffer inclement weather, does it not make sense to realize the benefit?
- jtuple 10mo ago
  > A series of 13 cameras, six radar sensors, and four lidar sensors dot the Ojai's exterior, and are fitted with onboard heaters to reduce ice buildup and small wipers and fluid to clear away dirt. These features will be critical as Waymo expands beyond warm-weather cities and into gnarlier climates in the northeast United States. The whole point of this article is that the new vehicle is better suited to more climates. All the cities above already have service, the expansion in the title refers to the new markets that should (hopefully) be unlocked with this new vehicle.
jerlam 10mo ago
I wonder what loophole Waymo used here: Bonelli said that the Ojai is not affected by the U.S. government's regulations that aim to prevent Chinese cars from being sold to customers in the U.S. Possibly the Ojai is not fully assembled (therefore, not a car), or Waymo does not count as a consumer. Also, I hope they're more comfortable than the current Jaguars. I was stuck in traffic in the back of a Waymo for almost an hour and it wasn't great. If Waymo is expanding their range, longer rides might be more common.
- seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
  BYD already assembles buses in SoCal, so I don't see why they couldn't just set up something like that. Ah, but asking Gemini, I guess its different: Waymo is partnering with Chinese automotive giant Geely's brand, Zeekr, to produce the new AV platform. To comply with U.S. regulations, the vehicles are imported without any built-in telematics or data-transmitting hardware/software that could pose a national security risk. "Base Vehicles": The vehicles Waymo receives from Zeekr are essentially "gliders" or base platforms, stripped of any internal communication systems that would allow them to send data back to the manufacturer in China. U.S. Installation: All of Waymo's self-driving technology and connected components are installed after the vehicles arrive in the U.S. by authorized personnel. This means the entire "connected tech" system on board is American-owned and American-fitted, allowing Waymo to argue its vehicles fall outside the scope of U.S. Commerce Department restrictions on Chinese connected vehicles. They still have to pay steep tariffs, but on less complete cheaper vehicles.
- Zigurd 10mo ago
  For the Ipace-based Waymos, Magna was assembling them. They already built the Ipace for Jaguar. IIRC there's a plant in Arizona where Magna does this. So it's plausible that they are assembling the Zeeker van there, too. For whatever value of "assembling" gets around the tariffs. That and a few dozen solid gold Pixel Folds should do the job.
  - seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
    The import restrictions (can't import) on Chinese connected vehicles. It isn't about tariffs, they just can't import them. However, since Waymo is adding custom electronics in the US (and the Chinese vehicle is shipped to them with none), this restriction doesn't apply. This all comes from an article one year ago: https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-finds-a-way-around-us-restrictions-on-chinese-evs/ https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-finds-a-way-around-us-rest... They still have to pay a 100% tariff on the vehicle they receive, but It is probably somewhere in the realm of just $10k-$20k since they are receiving fairly stripped down vehicles.
digdugdirk 10mo ago
"Bonelli said that the Ojai is not affected by the U.S. government's regulations that aim to prevent Chinese cars from being sold to customers in the U.S." How does this get around the regulations? That's a massive loophole that will absolutely get abused by both China and domestic companies. Trucking, delivery vehicles, etc. will all get slammed by this. I'm not a fan of protectionist regulations like the ones keeping Chinese automobiles out of the US, but if you're going to have them, at least make them effective.
- gambiting 10mo ago
  They aren't selling them to American customers. The same how you see Xiaomi cars being tested in the US despite the ban, Xiaomi just imports them directly and lets select journalists use them, but they aren't actually sold there.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - garbawarb 10mo ago
    Is Waymo not an American customer?
    - gambiting 10mo ago
      Waymo can probably import them themselves, they just can't act as a dealer for customers in the US.
      - seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
        Waymo can import the base vehicles but none of the connected tech that comes with normal cars in China. Instead, they are specifically adding their own connected tech (after the car is delivered to the USA), so the ban is irrelevant to them.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
andsoitis 10mo ago
Waymo, being an Alphabet subsidiary, must be funneling rider data to the Google Ads business. Does anybody know the general shape of it?
- ddalex 10mo ago
  Protobufs probably
  - nasretdinov 10mo ago
    Most certainly protobufs, you literally can't build an RPC service that speaks a different protocol inside Google :)
- wmf 10mo ago
  I guess they are but that data must be a drop in the bucket compared to phone tracking.
lastofthemojito 10mo ago
Oh man I misunderstood that headline at first. I thought it was along the lines of "Waymo will start offering long-distance autonomous roadtrips across the US" but it's really "Waymo is still geoboxed in a handful of cities but is adding a second model of car to its fleet". I've taken a handful of sightseeing roadtrips in the US where the pattern tends to be hike/sightsee during the day, then hop in the car in the evening and drive for a few hours to get close to tomorrow's destination. It'd be great to be able to do that, except outsource the driving (and skip the hotel) by sleeping through the drive. Similar to night train travel in Europe.
- VikingCoder 10mo ago
  I've daydreamed the same thing. I can picture my family of four getting on our PJs and hopping in a sleeper car on Friday night. We tell the car if we need to stop for a restroom, or anything else... And we wake up on Saturday morning, up to eight hours away from home (were we allowed to go 90 mph? Or more?) And then we spend all day Saturday, all day Sunday, enjoying some town. Sunday night, we put on our PJs and hop in the sleeper car. We wake up Monday morning back at home, the kids go to school, and the adults go to work. I could get to Duluth, Charleston WV, Sioux Falls, Toronto, Pittsburgh.
- traeregan 10mo ago
  I also understood it the way that you did, and got excited. Womp womp. I'm optimistic that it will be reality in the not too distant future though. Wen Waymo Campervans?!
- AlotOfReading 10mo ago
  Leaving aside the technical problems, there's just not a big market of people willing to pay couple hundred dollars a night to sleep in a car. Buses, planes, and trains work by spreading the fixed costs of the vehicle over all the riders. A car can't really compete with those ticket prices. Plus, there aren't many destination pairs with demand between them willing to pay high prices where competitive transit services don't already exist. LA/SF maybe, but we've already seen a number of luxury sleeper bus operators fail to materialize demand on that route. LA/Vegas formerly, but those days seem numbered with brightline.
cvg 10mo ago
Small thing, but the article should have added how to pronounce Ojai. It sounds like “oh-hi”
perfmode 10mo ago
Is Waymo L5?
- nradov 10mo ago
  L4

44 points by Zigurd 10mo ago

They need to have a service that allows for pets. It is the only reason I still use Ubers!

tocs3 10mo ago

Certification documents show a single rear-mounted electric motor producing 268 horsepower and hooked up to a 93-kWh battery. Wow, that seems like a lot of horsepower.

anishgupta 10mo ago
Box on turbo
stetrain 10mo ago
Horsepower is pretty cheap in an EV once you have a big battery. The 2026 Nissan Leaf, an economy car and one of the cheapest new EVs in the US at $29k, has 214hp.
nospice 10mo ago
They were using Jaguar I-Pace for a good while, right? That was nearly 400 hp.
- jerlam 10mo ago
  However, they accelerate rather slowly. Waymo isn't in any need to get you to your destination faster, nor get into additional collisions.
  - Analemma_ 10mo ago
    To me the torque is more important than the horsepower: one nice thing about Waymo is that they're quite good at gentle, constant acceleration up San Francisco's steep hills. Human Uber drivers have a 50/50 chance of making me carsick when they try this, out of some combination of inexperience and driving a car without enough low-end torque.
standardUser 10mo ago
This is the thing people seem to sleep on when it comes to EVs - they simply drive better than other cars. More responsive, better pickup, smoother drivetrains, etc.
- idiotsecant 10mo ago
  This is also a feature of hybrids people overlook. They might have tiny ICE engines, but the additional torque from the electric motor more than makes up for it
  - redfern314 10mo ago
    I mean, kind of. Series hybrids (where the drivetrain is all electric and fed by a generator) yes, but all the parallel hybrids I've driven are still pretty anemic because you have both a tiny ICE engine and a tiny electric motor. They also don't always engage simultaneously in a way that makes it feel like you're getting the torque on demand.
  - sib 10mo ago
    Ehhhh.... The most prevalent hybrid (at least in the US) is the Toyota Prius. At least until to latest models, they were very slow, with a 0-60 time of ~10 seconds.
yardie 10mo ago
Tesla Model 3 Standard is 280HP/210kW. And it's only really limited by the C of the battery pack. Under optimal conditions I've measured 310HP, according to the Canbus app. EVs are incredibly powerful. Even the humble Nissan Leaf would blow the doors off an 00s performance car.
- jedberg 10mo ago
  I have a Leaf. It makes me laugh when people with "muscle cars" try to race me. One time I humored one of them, and completely smoked them off the line. And my car was still in Eco mode.
  - gambiting 10mo ago
    We have a VW e-Up, with a very meagre 80hp electric motor - I can guarantee that off the lights that car is faster than pretty much any muscle or sports car, because it just instantly accelerates from standstil. I used to own an AMG few years ago, and to match what the e-Up can do I'd have to put it into Sports+ mode then enable launch control, then sit there with revs at 4000rpm just waiting for the light to change so the car would actually launch quickly. But off the standing start from idle? No chance.
    - foobarian 10mo ago
      The peak torque at 0rpm is a nice feature for city traffic low-key drag racing. I think if you really wanted to have a chance to troll an EV owner you'd have to incite them to race you on a highway with conditions that cause frequent speed changes in the 50-100mph range. But tbh even they you'd have a hard time. Maybe if you kept that up until they ran down the battery?
      - elictronic 10mo ago
        Never or arrested on a public road basically vs my daily driver is fun even when driving in the real world. It’s not loud is the last real complaint I see.

anishgupta 10mo ago

All my support for carpools and shuttles in the US. We need this more especially in SF

GuinansEyebrows 10mo ago
https://www.sfmta.com/muni-transit https://www.sfmta.com/muni-transit

superkuh 10mo ago

>San Francisco and then expanding last year to Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta. "The Waymo Ojai Will Soon Offer Autonomous Rides Around the Southern U.S. in areas where there is no snow."

Zigurd 10mo ago
https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/creating-an-all-weather-driver https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/creating-an-all-weather-drive... They are testing in Detroit.
- gipp 10mo ago
  And NYC. Just saw one this morning
  - superkuh 10mo ago
    Glad to hear it and I wish them luck! I was just clearing up the current status of self-driving vehicles re: the headline. For now they do not work in areas where road surfaces and edges get covered by and location changed by snow. They do not work "Around the US".
sensen 10mo ago
That sounds reasonable enough. If we can do this in areas that are less likely to suffer inclement weather, does it not make sense to realize the benefit?
jtuple 10mo ago
> A series of 13 cameras, six radar sensors, and four lidar sensors dot the Ojai's exterior, and are fitted with onboard heaters to reduce ice buildup and small wipers and fluid to clear away dirt. These features will be critical as Waymo expands beyond warm-weather cities and into gnarlier climates in the northeast United States. The whole point of this article is that the new vehicle is better suited to more climates. All the cities above already have service, the expansion in the title refers to the new markets that should (hopefully) be unlocked with this new vehicle.

jerlam 10mo ago

I wonder what loophole Waymo used here: Bonelli said that the Ojai is not affected by the U.S. government's regulations that aim to prevent Chinese cars from being sold to customers in the U.S. Possibly the Ojai is not fully assembled (therefore, not a car), or Waymo does not count as a consumer. Also, I hope they're more comfortable than the current Jaguars. I was stuck in traffic in the back of a Waymo for almost an hour and it wasn't great. If Waymo is expanding their range, longer rides might be more common.

seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
BYD already assembles buses in SoCal, so I don't see why they couldn't just set up something like that. Ah, but asking Gemini, I guess its different: Waymo is partnering with Chinese automotive giant Geely's brand, Zeekr, to produce the new AV platform. To comply with U.S. regulations, the vehicles are imported without any built-in telematics or data-transmitting hardware/software that could pose a national security risk. "Base Vehicles": The vehicles Waymo receives from Zeekr are essentially "gliders" or base platforms, stripped of any internal communication systems that would allow them to send data back to the manufacturer in China. U.S. Installation: All of Waymo's self-driving technology and connected components are installed after the vehicles arrive in the U.S. by authorized personnel. This means the entire "connected tech" system on board is American-owned and American-fitted, allowing Waymo to argue its vehicles fall outside the scope of U.S. Commerce Department restrictions on Chinese connected vehicles. They still have to pay steep tariffs, but on less complete cheaper vehicles.
Zigurd 10mo ago
For the Ipace-based Waymos, Magna was assembling them. They already built the Ipace for Jaguar. IIRC there's a plant in Arizona where Magna does this. So it's plausible that they are assembling the Zeeker van there, too. For whatever value of "assembling" gets around the tariffs. That and a few dozen solid gold Pixel Folds should do the job.
- seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
  The import restrictions (can't import) on Chinese connected vehicles. It isn't about tariffs, they just can't import them. However, since Waymo is adding custom electronics in the US (and the Chinese vehicle is shipped to them with none), this restriction doesn't apply. This all comes from an article one year ago: https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-finds-a-way-around-us-restrictions-on-chinese-evs/ https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-finds-a-way-around-us-rest... They still have to pay a 100% tariff on the vehicle they receive, but It is probably somewhere in the realm of just $10k-$20k since they are receiving fairly stripped down vehicles.

digdugdirk 10mo ago

"Bonelli said that the Ojai is not affected by the U.S. government's regulations that aim to prevent Chinese cars from being sold to customers in the U.S." How does this get around the regulations? That's a massive loophole that will absolutely get abused by both China and domestic companies. Trucking, delivery vehicles, etc. will all get slammed by this. I'm not a fan of protectionist regulations like the ones keeping Chinese automobiles out of the US, but if you're going to have them, at least make them effective.

gambiting 10mo ago
They aren't selling them to American customers. The same how you see Xiaomi cars being tested in the US despite the ban, Xiaomi just imports them directly and lets select journalists use them, but they aren't actually sold there.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- garbawarb 10mo ago
  Is Waymo not an American customer?
  - gambiting 10mo ago
    Waymo can probably import them themselves, they just can't act as a dealer for customers in the US.
    - seanmcdirmid 10mo ago
      Waymo can import the base vehicles but none of the connected tech that comes with normal cars in China. Instead, they are specifically adding their own connected tech (after the car is delivered to the USA), so the ban is irrelevant to them.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]

andsoitis 10mo ago

Waymo, being an Alphabet subsidiary, must be funneling rider data to the Google Ads business. Does anybody know the general shape of it?

ddalex 10mo ago
Protobufs probably
- nasretdinov 10mo ago
  Most certainly protobufs, you literally can't build an RPC service that speaks a different protocol inside Google :)
wmf 10mo ago
I guess they are but that data must be a drop in the bucket compared to phone tracking.

lastofthemojito 10mo ago

Oh man I misunderstood that headline at first. I thought it was along the lines of "Waymo will start offering long-distance autonomous roadtrips across the US" but it's really "Waymo is still geoboxed in a handful of cities but is adding a second model of car to its fleet". I've taken a handful of sightseeing roadtrips in the US where the pattern tends to be hike/sightsee during the day, then hop in the car in the evening and drive for a few hours to get close to tomorrow's destination. It'd be great to be able to do that, except outsource the driving (and skip the hotel) by sleeping through the drive. Similar to night train travel in Europe.

VikingCoder 10mo ago
I've daydreamed the same thing. I can picture my family of four getting on our PJs and hopping in a sleeper car on Friday night. We tell the car if we need to stop for a restroom, or anything else... And we wake up on Saturday morning, up to eight hours away from home (were we allowed to go 90 mph? Or more?) And then we spend all day Saturday, all day Sunday, enjoying some town. Sunday night, we put on our PJs and hop in the sleeper car. We wake up Monday morning back at home, the kids go to school, and the adults go to work. I could get to Duluth, Charleston WV, Sioux Falls, Toronto, Pittsburgh.
traeregan 10mo ago
I also understood it the way that you did, and got excited. Womp womp. I'm optimistic that it will be reality in the not too distant future though. Wen Waymo Campervans?!
AlotOfReading 10mo ago
Leaving aside the technical problems, there's just not a big market of people willing to pay couple hundred dollars a night to sleep in a car. Buses, planes, and trains work by spreading the fixed costs of the vehicle over all the riders. A car can't really compete with those ticket prices. Plus, there aren't many destination pairs with demand between them willing to pay high prices where competitive transit services don't already exist. LA/SF maybe, but we've already seen a number of luxury sleeper bus operators fail to materialize demand on that route. LA/Vegas formerly, but those days seem numbered with brightline.

cvg 10mo ago

Small thing, but the article should have added how to pronounce Ojai. It sounds like “oh-hi”

perfmode 10mo ago

Is Waymo L5?

nradov 10mo ago
L4