Waymo Is Trying to Crack Down on Solo Kids in Driverless Cars

Waymo launches a loyalty program with 10% cash back and free cancellations

Waymo is launching a loyalty program called Waymo Premier, which will offer frequent robotaxi riders a number of perks in exchange for $29.99 per month.

Premier members will be able to skip the virtual line and earn 10% cash back on every trip (and “even more during busy times,” according to Waymo). They’ll also get five free ride cancellations every month, and Waymo says Premier members will even be able to hail a robotaxi in cities where the service still has a waitlist.

Waymo Premier will not be available to riders in Austin or Atlanta, the company told TechCrunch, because its robotaxis are only available via the Uber app in those cities.

The loyalty program is launching as Waymo ramps up its expansion in the U.S., and prepares for an international launch later this year. Waymo is also starting to roll out its newest vehicle, the Zeekr-built van that it calls “Ojai,” in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco.

The Premier program could also be the start of a new line of business for Waymo as it scales.

The company’s biggest partner, Uber, has built a sizable revenue-generator with its own program, Uber One. The ride-hail giant said in May that more than 50 million people now pay $9.99 per month (or $96 per year) for a membership. In exchange, Uber offers perks like 10% off of Uber Eats orders or hotel bookings, waived delivery fees, and other third-party discounts and promotions.

Loyalty programs are an even bigger business for airlines. The four biggest U.S. airlines would have each operated at a loss in 2024 if not for their money-printing memberships. The airlines have also shown how loyalty programs can provide value beyond the revenue they generate: during the pandemic, many of them used the programs as collateral to back emergency loans from the federal government.

Waymo says it built a better benchmark for comparing robotaxis to humans

Waymo has created a new computer model designed to more accurately answer a fundamental question: how does its autonomous driving software stack up against humans?

The Alphabet-owned robotaxi company, which developed the computer model of human driving capabilities in conjunction with TU Delft, published a research paper about it in Nature Communications on Wednesday.

Waymo said it expects the new model to be more accurate than the previous version it has used over the past several years. The new model was built using a framework called active inference — the theory that a driver is constantly imagining possible futures and taking actions to reach the safest, most predictable one.

Waymo said the new model will help it better understand how humans behave in crash scenarios that its robotaxis encounter.

“For decades, the automotive industry has used physical and virtual crash dummies to evaluate a car’s safety features, including its hardware and structural integrity,” Waymo wrote in a blog post on Wednesday. The new model, Waymo said, “evolves this concept, serving as a behavioral benchmark for autonomous driving systems able to realistically represent reasonable expectations on how a careful and competent human driver responds to traffic conflicts.”

A more accurate model of human driving behavior is table stakes for autonomous vehicle companies that need to understand and grade the performance of its robotaxis in crashes. And it comes at a critical juncture for Waymo, which is scaling to more cities and facing greater scrutiny from regulators and the public.

In January, when a Waymo robotaxi struck a child near a school in Santa Monica, California, the company relied on its previous computer model to claim that an attentive human driver would have made impact at around 14 miles per hour. The Waymo robotaxi hit the child at just 6 miles per hour, after decelerating from 17 miles per hour, and the company said she sustained minor injuries. (The crash is still under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board.)

The biggest difference between this new model — which Waymo calls the Reference Driver — and its predecessor is that it is able to reproduce a human driver’s behavior in the run-up to a crash. Previously, Waymo’s models (and other industry models) focused on replicating “last-second, reactive” human maneuvers, according to the company.

The Reference Driver, meanwhile, can “simulate the internal ‘surprise’ a driver feels during a conflict, providing a more human-like benchmark for autonomous driving systems that was previously impossible to automate at scale,” Arkady Zgonnikov, an assistant professor at TU Delft, said in a statement.

Waymo says this new driver model can be adapted to model a “wide range of road user behaviors beyond collision avoidance,” and that it is better-equipped to be applied to “large test sets with thousands of scenarios.”

“The model can represent and evaluate numerous complex, real-world crashes in a virtual environment, identifying performance improvements with unprecedented speed and efficiency,” the company wrote.

Waymo wants others to collaborate on pushing the Reference Driver further, too. The company said Wednesday that it is making the research code for the model available under an academic, non-commercial license that allows it to be used for research, teaching, personal experimentation, and scientific publication.

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Waymo bought Apples self-driving car proving ground for $220M

Waymo has acquired a massive 5,500-acre proving ground in Arizona owned by Route 14 Investment Partners LLC, a Delaware shell company associated with Apple, according to documents filed with Maricopa County.

Waymo acquired the property, which is located near other proving grounds in Wittman, Arizona, for $220 million, according to the filing. The sale was recorded June 5. Waymo confirmed the sale to TechCrunch.

The purchase rounds out Waymo’s already robust network of closed test courses. The Alphabet-owned company still uses the Castle Proving Ground in California as well as the Transportation Research Center in Ohio. Both of these are dwarfed by the Arizona location.

The Arizona location includes a 115-acre city course, a 35-acre vehicle dynamics area, a 4-mile oval track, and a freeway course purpose-built for autonomous vehicle testing. A Waymo spokesperson told TechCrunch the facility will be used to simulate driving scenarios in a controlled environment to continuously test and improve the performance of its self-driving system. Specifically, the company will support rider-only testing, motion control testing, operational training workflows, and future testing expansion over time.

Apple purchased the property in 2021 for $125 million after renting access to it for years. The facility had previously been used as a test facility for Fiat Chrysler. It features different road surfaces, a high-speed oval, and helped the Detroit automaker test cars and their components in hot weather.

Apple used it to put prototype vehicles through their paces as the tech company oscillated through different variations of its car project. That effort – known as Project Titan – was ultimately scuttled in early 2024 after Apple had spent billions of dollars on it.

The Phoenix Business Journal was the first to spot the document.

Waymo is in the middle of a dramatic expansion of its fleet, which currently stands at close to 4,000 vehicles. The company recently started offering the first rides in its new van, which is made by Zeekr. Waymo has said it wants to make tens of thousands of robotaxis per year, including the Zeekr van and the Hyundai Ioniq 5.

The Zeekr vehicles are sent to Waymo’s Arizona factory, where they are then outfitted with the company’s self-driving system.

Waymo has a growing commercial footprint in Phoenix and Maricopa County. The company began testing its autonomous vehicle technology in the Phoenix suburb of Chandler back in 2017. The area would be Waymo’s first market to offer a commercial robotaxi service.

Waymo has since expanded to more than 10 U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, and Atlanta.

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Kirsten Korosec is a reporter and editor who has covered the future of transportation from EVs and autonomous vehicles to urban air mobility and in-car tech for more than a decade. She is currently the transportation editor at TechCrunch and co-host of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. She is also co-founder and co-host of the podcast, “The Autonocast.” She previously wrote for Fortune, The Verge, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and CBS Interactive.

You can contact or verify outreach from Kirsten by emailing kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at kkorosec.07 on Signal.

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Sean O’Kane is a reporter who has spent a decade covering the rapidly-evolving business and technology of the transportation industry, including Tesla and the many startups chasing Elon Musk. Most recently, he was a reporter at Bloomberg News where he helped break stories about some of the most notorious EV SPAC flops. He previously worked at The Verge, where he also covered consumer technology, hosted many short- and long-form videos, performed product and editorial photography, and once nearly passed out in a Red Bull Air Race plane.

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Waymo dominates autonomous vehicle registrations as Tesla trails behind

Waymo has nearly 600 autonomous vehicles registered in Texas, a figure that far outpaces emerging competitors Avride, Nuro, Tesla, and Zoox, according to data available in a new website launched by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles.

The automated vehicle tracker tool — part of a new law that requires AV companies to register with the DMV —

gives the public the first accurate and easy-to-access accounting of how many autonomous vehicles are in Texas. The state law, which went into effect May 28, requires companies testing or deploying AVs in the state to share how many vehicles are in their fleets as well as other safety information.

It also shows just how wide the gap is between Waymo and rival Tesla — two companies offering commercial robotaxi services.

Alphabet-owned Waymo has registered 577 autonomous vehicles in Texas, followed by Avride with 317, and Nuro with 47. Tesla, which launched a robotaxi service in Austin last summer and has since said it has expanded to Dallas and Houston, has registered 42 autonomous vehicles. Other companies with registered autonomous vehicles in the state include Volkswagen subsidiary MOIA, which has a fleet of 12 electric, autonomous microbuses.

The size of an autonomous vehicle-fleet only reveals so much about where a company stands on the leaderboard. Many of these companies — Nuro and Zoox, for instance — are not operating commercially. Nor do these numbers track how many vehicles are actively being used. (Waymo, for instance, paused operations in some Texas cities earlier this month due to issues with how its vehicles operate around floods.)

But there’s no denying Waymo’s dominance in Texas — at least for now.

Over time, the tool should provide some measure of growth. Waymo launched its commercial service in Austin in March 2025 and has since expanded to Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.

The website also provides registration figures for other applications of autonomous vehicle tech, including self-driving trucks. Aurora, a publicly traded company that launched a commercial driverless trucking business in May 2025, has 91 self-driving trucks. Big rig competitors Kodiak AI and Waabi have 33 and 13 self-driving trucks, respectively. Gatik AI, a startup that focused on self-driving mid-sized trucks, has 64 vehicles in its fleet.

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Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods

Waymo has now paused service in two cities because its robotaxis are struggling to deal with heavy rain and flooded roads, a problem that already prompted the company to issue a recall last week.

One of Waymo’s robotaxis was spotted driving through a flooded street in Atlanta, Georgia on Wednesday before it ultimately got stuck for about an hour, according to local news reports. The vehicle was recovered and removed from the scene, Waymo told TechCrunch. Waymo says it paused service in the city, just like it has in San Antonio, Texas, while it figures out a solution.

“Safety is Waymo’s top priority, both for our riders and everyone we share the road with. During a period of intense rain yesterday in Atlanta, an unoccupied Waymo vehicle encountered a flooded road and stopped,” the company said in a statement.

Waymo admitted that it hadn’t finished developing a “final remedy” for avoiding flooded areas when it issued its software recall last week. Instead, the company said that it shipped an update to its fleet that placed “restrictions at times and in locations where there is an elevated risk of encountering a flooded, higher-speed roadway,” according to documents released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

But even those precautions apparently were not enough to stop the Waymo robotaxi from entering the flooded intersection in Atlanta. Waymo told TechCrunch on Thursday that the storm in Atlanta produced so much rainfall that flooding was happening before the National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning, watch, or advisory. The company’s fleet apparently relies on these formal notices in order to avoid driving into deep water.

This is not the first time Waymo has struggled to quickly stamp out problematic behavior with its robotaxis. When people started to notice Waymo robotaxis illegally passing stopped school buses last year, the company shipped a fix that was supposed to address the issue — only for its fleet to continue making illegal maneuvers around school buses.

Waymo’s behavior around school buses is at the center of one of two sets of active investigations into the company.

Both the NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) are looking into this problem. Waymo has already produced a batch of documents to the NHTSA, all of which were redacted to the public. On May 15, the NHTSA sent a second document request to Waymo because the company’s initial response “necessitates that [NHTSA] receive further data and information.”

The other set of investigations from the NHTSA and NTSB involve a January 23 incident where a Waymo robotaxi crashed into a child in Santa Monica, California. Waymo has said that its robotaxi braked to around six miles per hour before it struck that child, and that she suffered minor injuries.

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Waymo Is Trying to Crack Down on Solo Kids in Driverless Cars

By law, autonomous vehicles aren’t legally allowed to carry unaccompanied minors in California. Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving car company, doesn’t allow kids under 18 to ride alone anywhere outside of metro Phoenix, Arizona. But that hasn’t stopped some time-strapped parents from using their own accounts to transport their kids to school, extracurricular activities, and even social outings. Some have reported that the lack of drivers makes them feel safer.Waymo is working to crack down on the practice, the company confirmed Friday, after reports of new mid-ride age-verification checks began to float around on social media. The company has “policies in place” to help it identify violations of its terms of service, Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli wrote in a statement to WIRED. “We are continuing to refine our system and processes for accuracy over time.” Violating its terms of service can lead to temporary or permanent suspension of an account, Waymo says.The company uses cameras inside its cars to check that riders aren’t violating its rules. Its privacy policy notes that the company records video inside the vehicle during trips. Waymo says its support workers “may review video under certain circumstances,” and, “in more urgent circumstances,” access live video during a trip. The company says it does not use facial recognition or "other biometric identification technologies" to identify individuals.The news comes a month after several California labor groups, including the California Gig Workers Union, filed a formal complaint with a state regulatory agency, accusing Waymo of violating the terms of its permit to operate in the state by knowingly transporting unaccompanied minors. The matter was assigned to a judge this week. The state is evaluating new rules that could allow solo riders under 18 in driverless cars, perhaps patterned after a program that permits ride-hail companies with human drivers to transport minors in California.So far, several fresh-faced adults have been caught in the crossfire. On Tuesday, San Francisco machine learning engineer Nicholas Fleischhauer was about five minutes into his Waymo ride when the car connected him to support. A voice came over the line asking Fleischhauer to verify his age. He told the worker the truth: He’s 35. “I had messy and wet hair, and a backpack on me,” he says, by way of explaining why he might have been flagged by Waymo’s system. Plus, “people have told me that I look young for my age.” Fleischhauer says he takes Waymo weekly, but this marked the first time he had been asked about his age.Got a Tip?Are you a parent or guardian who uses driverless cars to transport your children? We'd like to hear from you. Contact the reporter securely on Signal at aarianm.30.Since last summer, Waymo has allowed parents in the Phoenix area to set up teen accounts for riders ages 14 to 17. The accounts allow the teen riders’ adults to track their real-time locations during their trips. Waymo says a specially trained team of support agents deals with any issues its teen riders might have. Waymo says that “hundreds” of Phoenix families use the service each week.In Waymo’s other markets across the US, adults are allowed to ride with guests under 18, though children under 8 must be in a secured car or booster seat.Ethan S. Klein is 23, but his 26th LA Waymo ride on Thursday—plus the music he was listening to—was interrupted by an in-car call from a support agent who asked him, for the first time, to verify his birth date. Klein is an adult, but his first impulse was almost teen-like. “I was a little startled,” he says. “I thought I was in trouble!”Parents who use Waymo to transport their kids to school and other activities have said that the driverless cars can be a big help when their families aren’t eligible for school bus services, different children need to be at different schools at the same time, or when they’re uncomfortable allowing kids to ride public transit. Uber and Lyft drivers s

Waymo Is Trying to Crack Down on Solo Kids in Driverless Cars

Waymo launches a loyalty program with 10% cash back and free cancellations

Waymo launches a loyalty program with 10% cash back and free cancellations

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Waymo says it built a better benchmark for comparing robotaxis to humans

Waymo bought Apples self-driving car proving ground for $220M

Waymo dominates autonomous vehicle registrations as Tesla trails behind

Waymo pauses Atlanta service as its robotaxis keep driving into floods