From Denver’s icy streets to California’s “atmospheric rivers”, winter driving means something different in every city. As Waymo grows, building a Driver for all four seasons means providing a ride you can rely on while operating responsibly. With a historic El Niño ahead this season, here’s a look at how we’re readying our fleet to manage severe weather this winter.
Preparing may mean pausing
Preparing for winter means developing a Driver that can understand and respond to changing weather conditions, and it also means knowing when conditions call for us to slow down, limit service or pause rides altogether. Before rolling out any capability to the public, we evaluate it through our Safety Framework—a rigorous, peer-reviewed process that defines the conditions our technology and commercial service are validated to handle. When forecasted or real-time weather exceeds those boundaries, we’ll proactively adjust our service, including reducing the service area or pausing our service entirely. Depending on conditions, those pauses may last for hours or even days.
Weather forecasts, though, only tell one part of the story. Winter storms impact cities unevenly—one corridor might remain buried under packed snowbanks while another has already been salted and cleared. To navigate that local patchwork, we look directly at the street-level reality. Each Waymo vehicle acts as a mobile weather station, sharing real-time insights across our fleet to constantly gather road data, weather updates, and driving conditions. We also draw on insights from local officials and account for road maintenance and closures when assessing where we can safely operate. This also means, there may be times when it’s not clear why service is paused. For example, the weather may seem perfectly fine in your area, but a scattered stormfront may be hitting another part of town. Our priority is evaluating whether the roads are safe across our growing service areas before we choose to resume operations.
The Ojai and sixth-gen Waymo Driver performing closed course winter testing.
We know our riders rely on our service, and we'll work to minimize disruptions while making careful decisions about where and when to operate. Our goal remains to build a driver that can safely navigate diverse weather globally– no matter what winter looks like where our riders live.
A Driver that understands winter
Driving safely in the winter requires an all-weather driver and paying attention to the skies and the streets. The 6th-generation Waymo Driver uses cameras, radar, and lidar to navigate the world around it, while built-in heaters and micro-wipers keep sensors clear in icy conditions. These overlapping perspectives mean that if one sensor is challenged—such as cameras during a blinding whiteout—another sensing system is there to back it up. The system also uses these inputs to recognize changing road conditions, like whether a light dusting is just starting to fall or a major flurry is starting to stick onto the road. As the car moves, it measures real-time traction changes under each wheel, automatically adjusting steering, braking, and acceleration as conditions change. And across our winter weather fleet, we’re equipping our vehicles with snow tires, while local operations teams prepare for the cold—keeping vehicles charged, clean, and ready to support riders through challenging conditions.
Building a truly winter-ready system takes time—and ours is grounded in over a decade of real-world experience. Over the past few years, we’ve been testing the Waymo Driver in some of North America's snowiest regions, accumulating tens of thousands of real-world miles across Upstate New York, Michigan's Upper Peninsula and the Sierra Nevada. This season in Alaska, for example, we’ll be conducting closed-course evaluations and heavy snowfall data collection to further refine critical cold-weather capabilities.
Simulated videos of what the Waymo Driver sees while navigating snowy scenes in “Denver.”
To supplement what nature gives us, we also use simulation testing to recreate challenging conditions like black ice and whiteouts digitally. These tools allow us to test the Driver's responses and continue refining its capabilities year-round. We then bring these lessons back to real city streets, validating the system with trained human drivers behind the wheel in snowy metros, steadily working toward keeping riders moving in any season, in any city.
For the latest information about service availability in your city, check the Waymo app and follow our progress at waymo.com/updates.