In the past year, Sunnyvale, San Jose and Cupertino have seen an increase of Waymo self-driving cars on the streets. The company began testing their cars with employee volunteers as early as 2021, and after three years of trials across the US, they finally arrived in San Francisco with paid services in June 2024, according to Waymo. 

Waymo cars use a combination of lider, cameras and radar to navigate. Lider, or light detection and ranging, uses laser pulses that bounce back to construct a 3D picture of the surroundings of the car. The multitude of cameras around the car provide a full view of the surroundings, and radar waves give various information, such as distance or speed, and even things such as weather conditions. All of this information is processed by a central onboard computer that performs calculations to ensure the safety of both the rider and the people around them. 

Waymo and Jaguar have a partnership, allowing Waymo’s self-driving technology to build upon the Jaguar I-PACE. Under circumstances where the car is unsure — such as four-way stop signs or unusual intersections — Waymo’s cars may request a confirmation check from Google’s data center. However, these confirmation checks can create a backlog that contributes to traffic on the streets. On Dec. 19, 2025, San Francisco suffered from a massive power outage when a power substation burned down, leaving a third of the city without electricity for an extended period. During the outage, Waymo cars increased traffic congestion as the vehicles came to stops at inoperative intersections. Due to the outage, there were a significant number of four-way stop signs, and at each sign, Waymo vehicles requested a confirmation check from Google. However, Google systems were overloaded by these requests, and this resulted in self-driving vehicles across the city halting at stop signs, significantly increasing traffic. Waymo later issued a statement that they were improving on their current system to deal with the scale at which they operated.

Although the safety of automatic vehicles is constantly being improved upon, many people do not trust them. Around 56% of consumers are reluctant to ride in a fully autonomous vehicle and 61% of consumers believe that self-driving vehicles are more dangerous than those driven by humans, according to a survey by PatentPC in December 2025. 

“The community as a whole is a mix of whether [Waymo] is good or not,” FHS sophomore Yuvaan Maini said. “There’s a lot of people interested in it, but then again, there’s also a lot of people concerned by the safety aspects of it.” 

Compared to other self-driving cars, Waymo had 81% fewer injury-causing crashes and 80% or higher fewer crashes to vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists, according to the Waymo website. 

Waymo cars use machine learning to train on data from millions of miles driven on public roads and billions of simulations to be able to identify objects such as pedestrians, other vehicles, and more. Furthermore, CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), specifically Google’s reCAPTCHA, help train AI models for Waymo’s self-driving cars. Waymo gathers data that identifies important things to help their models identify them when they encounter each other. 

“Machine learning and AI are increasing at an unprecedented rate,” FHS freshman Avi Malhotra said. “So currently, Waymos are very good, but they also have their flaws. I think these flaws are very rare, and that they still have a little bit to go because they’re not 100% active.”