Waymo's Self-Driving Cars Get Cheaper Hardware and Aim for a Million Rides a Week

The new version of the company's system uses less than half as much equipment — 13 cameras instead of 29, four laser scanners instead of five — and costs under $20,000 a car, roughly half the previous generation.

Waymo began running its sixth-generation self-driving system this week and set a target of a million paid rides a week. The engineering news is subtraction: the new version uses 13 cameras where the old one used 29, four laser scanners where it used five, and about 42 percent fewer sensors overall. The hardware now costs under $20,000 per vehicle, less than half what the previous generation cost.

Making a self-driving car cheaper is a more important problem than making one work, which sounds backwards until you look at the economics. Waymo's cars have worked for years — they drive themselves around Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin with nobody in the front seat, and they have driven tens of millions of miles. The obstacle to putting them everywhere has been that each one cost more than a luxury car in equipment alone, so every ride had to pay back an enormous fixed cost.

The reason the equipment could be reduced is that the software improved. Earlier versions needed overlapping sensors checking each other constantly because the software could not be trusted to interpret any one of them well enough. As the models got better at understanding what they were seeing, the redundancy became less necessary. That is the same pattern visible everywhere else in AI this decade: capability arrives first, and then the cost of delivering it collapses.

Waymo remains the only company running a genuinely driverless commercial service at scale in the United States, and it got there slowly while competitors promised faster. A million rides a week would move it from a curiosity in four cities toward something closer to a transport system.