Waymo Expands Autonomous Vehicle Testing to 10 New Cities in 2025

LAS VEGAS, Nev. — Waymo, the autonomous vehicle subsidiary of Alphabet, announced plans to expand its testing operations to 10 new U.S. cities in 2025, starting with Las Vegas and San Diego. The initiative aims to evaluate how well its self-driving technology adapts to diverse urban environments, weather conditions, and regional driving habits.

The company will deploy manually driven vehicles to these cities, focusing on busy commercial districts where future robotaxi services are likely to operate. While the testing does not guarantee the launch of commercial services, it represents a critical step in refining Waymo’s autonomous systems for broader deployment.

“What we’re looking for is places that are going to challenge our system and look very, very different,” said Nick Rose, Waymo’s product manager for expansion efforts. “Las Vegas is pretty interesting because, I mean, if you’ve ever been to Vegas, it’s pretty unique among a lot of U.S. cities.”

Las Vegas presents unique challenges, including dense traffic, chaotic drop-off zones near hotels and casinos, and the use of Botts’ dots instead of painted lane lines. The city has already attracted other autonomous vehicle operators, such as Amazon‘s Zoox, which plans to launch a public rideshare service later this year.

San Diego, on the other hand, shares similarities with cities where Waymo already operates, such as San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. “What we wanna validate is that the system performs well in San Diego without having a ton of prior driving information there,” Rose added.

Waymo’s 2025 expansion follows last year’s efforts to test its vehicles in winter conditions in locations like Truckee, California, upstate New York, and Michigan. This year’s theme, “generalizability,” focuses on how well the vehicles adapt to new environments after accumulating tens of millions of miles in its core markets.

“When we go to a brand new city in the U.S., there are things that are subtly different,” Rose explained. “And we want to see how well the driver performs on those things out of the box without having to retrain or make adjustments.”

One example is the perception of emergency vehicles, which can vary by city. Fire trucks in San Francisco, for instance, differ subtly from those in Austin or Los Angeles. Waymo’s testing will help update its perception systems to account for these variations and other local quirks.

Waymo plans to send fewer than 10 vehicles to each city, where they will be manually driven for several months. The company is coordinating with local officials in advance but has not disclosed the names of the additional cities or the total miles it aims to accumulate.

“The general theme is to collect enough experience to where we can get a pretty statistically significant sense of how well we’re generalizing, especially these perception things,” Rose said.

Waymo’s expansion comes as the autonomous vehicle industry continues to grow, with companies like Zoox and Cruise also testing and deploying self-driving technologies. The results of Waymo’s 2025 testing could pave the way for broader adoption of autonomous vehicles in urban environments across the U.S.