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Waymo, the Alphabet-owned robotaxi company, has in recent months announced expansion to a host new cities after years of successful, if massively unprofitable, operation in Phoenix and San Francisco.Ìý

The company’s app-summoned, camera-covered Jaguar I-PACE electric vehicles will soon pick up passengers in Miami with a human backup driver, before going fully autonomous in 2026. Waymo last month opened its service to everyone in Los Angeles County. In early 2025, it will launch a partnership in Austin and Atlanta whereby Uber customers can summon supplied Waymos using the Uber app.

While warm-weather cities pose fewer challenges for autonomous vehicles, snow and ice aren’t expected to forever foil the cameras and sensors that feed inputs into a computer making split-second driving decisions.

Waymo . May Mobility, a smaller self-driving service, ., which sees average January temperatures similar to those of Toronto.

Julian Back, a Torontonian, rode in the passenger seat of a Waymo, with his wife and 10-year-old daughter in the back seat, as the car piloted them through San Francisco last August. He loved the experience even if there were a couple of glitches, including the family having to chase the app-summoned car after it drove past them before finally stopping so he could unlock the doors with his phone.

Video of their ride shows a giddy family marvelling at the empty driver seat as Eminem pumps out of the car’s speakers.

“It was just wild to see the steering wheel moving without anyone there, it was very surreal,” Black said. “I have driven all over the world and this was extremely safe … It was an incredible experience. I would do it again and I really hope they come here because they are safer. They follow the rules.”

Automated vehicles aren’t always safer than humans on city streets, yet, but they are getting closer, said Prof. Steven Waslander, director of the U of T’s º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøRobots and A.I. Laboratory.

“I’ve been at it for 10 years now and it’s reassuring that things are finally happening,” in autonomous driving, he said, after past predictions of a speedy autopilot revolution faltered amid safety incidents.

In 2018, an Arizona woman was struck and killed by a Tesla test vehicle. Last year, General Motors paused its Cruise service after one of its vehicles struck and dragged a San Francisco pedestrian. GM recently announced it will abandon robotaxi development and instead focus on autonomous driving development for personal vehicles.Ìý

“Waymo is being super careful and is way ahead of the field, expanding one city at a time,” said Waslander. “We’re at millions of kilometres driven without a human — the statistics are not significant but they are pointing in the right direction.

“The vehicle always drives the best it can — it just gets stuck sometimes in situations it wasn’t prepared for. That’s the final gap we’re trying to close.”

Waslander once rode in a Cruise vehicle and said he felt safe, although it made some decisions he would not have.

“If the services were offered in º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøI would gladly try them and support them and watch the statistics and the safety,” for each firm, he said.

“You want the governments to enable and allow these services in public environments, but to require careful monitoring of all events — not just casualties but every fender bender and disengagement — to know if they’re above or below industry standards.

“You want to be able to assess the service before you sit in the car or put your kids in the car on the way to soccer.

“I hope all this gets properly thought out quickly over the next five years or so, and when the vehicles start coming to Canada, we’re ready for it,” he added. “This is a technology that has promise and will work.”

°¿²Ô³Ù²¹°ù¾±´ÇÌý in 2016 accepting applications to test self-driving shuttles and other vehicles on public roads. An original requirement to always have a human operator as backup was relaxed for specific circumstances in 2019.

In October, the province added a 10-year pilot project for autonomous trucks more than 4,500 kilograms, like those envisioned by .

For two months in late 2021 the city, TTC and provincial transit agency Metrolinx tested — with a backup driver on board but no passengers — between Rouge Hill GO Station and nearby Scarborough neighbourhoods.

It was halted after numerous mechanical problems emerged, city staff say, and a shuttle operating in Whitby, made by the same company, while in manual mode, injuring the 23-year-old safety attendant.

While the º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøshuttle test didn’t last long “it was more of a success than if it had run smoothly,” because city staff learned a lot about how automated vehicles behave and the safety issues they raise, said Jennifer Niece, a manager with city transportation services.Ìý

Niece said she and her colleagues have closely watched robotaxi services roll out in other cities and have reached out to officials in some of those centres for information about how they are handling the innovation. The biggest concerns expressed by other municipalities are about how driverless vehicles handle construction zones and emergency vehicle interactions.

While cities have drafted detailed rules for the services when they arrive, Niece said º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøcan do only so much to prepare because the province will be the one issuing a specially tailored operating permit based on the type of service offered.

“I feel º£½ÇÉçÇø¹ÙÍøis really ready to engage with the province as they engage with applications from automated vehicle proponents — whether it’s a taxi service or something else,” Niece said. “There will be a lot of learning along the way, which is the point of the provincial pilot.”

There is a wild card in the form of Tesla chief executive Elon Musk‘s vision of personal vehicles becoming so proficient at autonomous driving that, when not in use by the owner, they prowl the streets earning money as robotaxis. Tesla owners might not feel compelled to ask the Ontario or city government for permission before switching on the capability.

Many industry observers, however, say Tesla technology has far to go before there is any chance of that happening.

For Waymos and other self-driving cabs that exist right now, the biggest obstacles include making passenger rides profitable, given the cost of building and operating the car — and the winter weather question.Ìý

Waslander said he doesn’t know if the devices will ever make financial sense. As for winter, his lab’s test of a self-driving vehicle in snow and ice showed a need to physically clear the cameras and sensors every 10 minutes.

“Taking on these challenges over the next 10 years will be part of the roll out of this technology in successive cities,” he said.

“If we can make these autonomous vehicles safer than our own vehicles — if they exceed our own performance — I think we’ll see them. That appears to be happening, although it’s not guaranteed yet.”

There is another question — even if robotaxis are feasible in Toronto, do they hurt or harm society as a whole?

Waslander said he has grappled with questions about safety, environmental sustainability and traffic congestions and believes that self-driving vehicles do offer potential net benefits, including freeing people up to do something productive while getting from A to B.

Kristine Hubbard, operations manager at Toronto’s Beck Taxi, said she has been hearing for a decade that driverless taxis threaten the business her family built, and those of the many independent operators who drive under Beck’s orange and green colours.

“Driverless cabs are not going to replace the taxi service that we enjoy in the city,” said Hubbard. “For every story about a perfect trip in San Francisco, there will be a line of 10 self-driving cars at an intersection that has no signal light, and the cars won’t know what to do.

“Our drivers provide real, personal service. I guess all this seems new and exciting but mostly for able-bodied customers who have smartphones and credit cards.”

As for how the city will handle such a service, if and when it does, Hubbard looks at Toronto’s incorporation of Uber and Lyft into the ride-for-hire rules, which remains a controversial topic at city hall.Ìý

“Unfortunately, I can’t have any confidence,” she said.

Correction - Jan. 13, 2025

This article was updated from a previous version that misspelled the surname of Torontonian Julian Back and the name of Toronto-based self-driving trucking startup Waabi.