Waymo’s Highway Launch: The Questions Behind the Caveats

This Week in the Autonomy Economy, Waymo opened highway service to a limited number of riders, Kodiak doubled their autonomous trucking deployment, and Forterra raised $238 million at a $1 billion valuation.

Forterra’s latest round, led by Louis Bacon’s Moore Strategic Ventures, along with Einride’s recently announced SPAC, are two more clear signals that the autonomy capital markets are not just open, but active and increasingly competitive.

With several autonomy companies currently in the market raising capital, 2026 is shaping up to be a banner year for the sector as more companies go driver-out and begin scaling their operations globally.

The markets to watch in 2026:

• Robotaxis: United States, UK, Europe, UAE, Japan

• Autonomous Trucks: United States, Japan, Australia

Autonomy has crossed an inflection point. It’s no longer a science project, it is now a business. The companies that succeed from here won’t just have the best technology; they’ll be the ones that manage cash burn with discipline, scale deliberately, and convert autonomy into meaningful, recurring revenue.

The next generation of winners will be built on operational excellence as much as on engineering talent. There are bright times ahead for autonomy, and 2026 may be the year the market finally catches on to the opportunity in the emerging autonomy economy.

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WHAT’S MOVING THE MARKETS | AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

Waymo’s Highway Launch: The Questions Behind the Caveats

Waymo opened freeway service this week across San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, with the goal of reducing trip times by 50%. But in classic Waymo fashion, the launch arrives with a few caveats.

First, there’s no Mad Max mode as Waymo vehicles on the highway max out at 65 mph. In Tesla language, that’s Sloth or Chill mode. Second, the feature is available only to a “growing number of public riders” who must manually opt in. Why limit speed? Why limit riders? Those are the questions that matter, and they lead to bigger ones.

Is it actually safer for an autonomous vehicle to cap speed at the posted limit rather than match the flow of traffic? If surrounding traffic is moving 70–75 mph, is a rigid 65 mph cap really the safest choice?

The foundational FHWA-backed research on the Solomon curve offers the clearest answer we have to date. The crash risk increases as a vehicle’s speed deviates from the prevailing flow, whether that deviation is faster or slower.

Solomon’s analysis of more than 10,000 highway crashes showed that vehicles traveling slower than surrounding traffic experienced a sharply elevated crash involvement rate, nearly identical to vehicles traveling much faster than the flow.

The safest operating point wasn’t the posted speed limit, it was the mean speed of traffic, where speed differential approaches zero. Raising a direct safety question for autonomous highway driving, should robotaxis match the flow of traffic instead of hard-capping at the posted limit?

A vehicle traveling at 65 mph in 75–80 mph traffic isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s a rolling obstacle that forces overtakes, lane changes, and braking events around it. Every highway driver understands this instinctively, nobody wants to get stuck behind the one car stubbornly obeying the posted speed limit.

Now that car is Waymo. While Waymo’s approach to highway driving is defensible to regulators as they can always show the data that the vehicle drove at the posted limit. But is it safer? The Solomon data suggests the opposite. In fact, Waymo’s conservative speed policy may be introducing the very risk differential the company is trying to eliminate.

Then there are the fleet questions. Are the Jaguar I-PACEs using a different highway sensor configuration? It’s possible, and the opt-in system hints strongly at some underlying constraint.

If highway service truly cuts trip times in half, a massive theoretical capacity unlock, Waymo should be pushing every possible rider onto freeways to maximize utilization. Instead, they’re limiting access. Why?

Two scenarios could possibly explain this paradox:

1. Only part of the fleet has enhanced highway-grade hardware. Long-range lidar, extended-range cameras, upgraded compute, hardware configurations that aren’t deployed fleet-wide. If this is indeed true, it could explain Waymo’s controlled rollout rider-vehicle pairing opt-in gating. It would also imply that the company’s highway capability isn’t yet scalable across the entire fleet, a significant hit to unit economics.

2. Waymo simply doesn’t have enough vehicles. The company remains capacity-constrained in core urban markets. Even if highway operations double theoretical capacity, Waymo doesn’t have enough cars to serve existing demand. Flooding riders onto highways would leave urban zones underserved. So the opt-in system becomes a rationing mechanism disguised as a gradual rollout. Waymo hasn’t publicly addressed sensor differences or fleet limitations. But the launch mechanics make one thing clear, something is limiting supply.

Highways were supposed to be Waymo’s great efficiency unlock, faster trips, higher utilization, better unit economics. Instead, it exposes two unresolved constraint questions:

1. Safety-Methodology Contradiction Is Waymo optimizing for actual crash-risk reduction, or for regulatory defensibility? The Solomon curve suggests those are not the same thing.

2.  Capacity Constraints Either only a subset of vehicles is truly highway-capable, or Waymo doesn’t have enough vehicles to meet the demand this feature creates.

Waymo’s limited highway launch is a beginning, but the real test is whether it evolves its speed policy to match traffic flow, which data shows actually reduces crash risk. And even then, we’re left waiting to see what the next generation of hardware enables.

If higher-speed operation depends on new sensors, compute, or vehicle platforms, that raises a very different set of questions about scalability.

Our take: As Waymo continues to scale, the market will continue to ask questions.

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Waymo is currently ranked #1 with a bullish outlook on the AUTONOMY LEADERBOARD in the autonomous vehicle category.

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PIQUING OUR INTEREST

Waymo Launches San Jose Airport Service Waymo has begun operating commercial service at the San Jose Airport with curbside drop-off and pickups.

Waymo is One Step Closer to SFO Waymo Employees are now taking “supervised” rides from SF to destinations across the Bay Area. Next, paying passengers.

Kodiak Doubles Autonomous Trucking Deployments Kodiak has doubled their autonomous customer-owned trucking deployment to 10 trucks and logged 5,200 paid driverless miles (with no human attendant in the truck) in Q3 2025.

Forterra Raises $238 Million at $1 Billion Dollar Valuation Forterra, an autonomous vehicle developer focused on defense applications, recently raised $238 million in a financing round led by Louis Bacon’s Moore Strategic Ventures.

Enride is Looking to Go Public at a $1.8 Billion Dollar Valuation Swedish bespoke autonomous trucking start-up Enride is looking to go public via SPAC merger with Legato Merger Corp. III at a $1.8 billion dollar valuation.

Baidu Expands Robotaxi Service in Abu Dhabi Baidu is expanding their Apollo Go robotaxi service in Abu Dhabi with plans to add hundreds of vehicles in 2026.

WeRide Secures Autonomous Vehicle Testing Approval in Singapore WeRide has secured permission to test autonomous vehicles in the Punggol district of Singapore.

📰 Before these stories were featured here, they were available on X. Follow @RoadToAutonomy today to stay up-to-date on the latest news and developments shaping the autonomy economy.

SOCIAL BUZZ | AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

Waymo’s Fleet Keeps on Growing

Waymo now has 2,500 robotaxis deployed across five markets in the United States.

Our take: Deployments are great, but now is the time to increase vehicle counts to lower wait times and improve overall service reliability.

Companies Mentioned: $GOOGL ( ▼ 0.78% ) 

AUTONOMY MARKETS PODCAST

Waymo’s Highway Unlock Is Real. Its Moat Still Isn’t.

(November 15, 2025) This week on Autonomy Markets, Grayson Brulte and Walter Piecyk discuss Waymo's great highway unlock, their Bay Area expansion to 260 square miles and the company's growing vehicle supply issue.

Watch on YouTube | Spotify | X

Companies Mentioned: $GOOGL ( ▼ 0.78% )

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