Waymo’s Vans Rack up Test Miles, but Charging and Emissions Remain Opaque

Vehicles announce their efficiency, or lack thereof, through good design and clever marketing.
Think of a Prius. Everything about it screams sacrifice and appliance on wheels, whereas a Ford Raptor announces that peak oil was just a bad dream, gas prices will remain low, and climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese.
But other vehicles leave people guessing as to their green credentials. The Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid, which is actually a plug-in hybrid, falls into this other category — a no man’s land where efficiency is either hard to gauge by looking at it or relative to the function the vehicle performs.
The function the Pacifica Hybrid performs for Waymo is to shuttle its early riders (soon to be paying riders) around Phoenix, Arizona, where they generate data, commute to work, and annoy other area drivers.
The consumer version of the Pacifica Hybrid is rated at 33 all-electric miles. The battery that provides these all-electric miles in the consumer version of the van is what qualifies it for the full $7,500 federal electric vehicle tax credit that Waymo or Alphabet are eligible to claim, as was reported in June.
A total of 200,000 credits can be claimed by each manufacturer; once that number is reached, the credit begins a quarterly phaseout period. Only Tesla has hit the 200,000 mark so far, but its credit has not yet started its phaseout.
According to a Congressional Budget Office report from 2012, the federal electric vehicle tax credit was designed to foster the development and adoption of electric vehicles, and there is an argument to be made that Waymo’s mass purchase of up to 62,000 Pacifica Hybrids helps accomplish this objective.

But the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulations governing how manufacturers certify whether a vehicle qualifies, which in turn governs who can claim the credit, require that the onboard battery propel the vehicle. In other words, the battery alone doesn’t bestow eligibility; the vehicle’s drivetrain must use it and — presumably — spend a portion of time operating under electric-only power. Otherwise the second part of the credit’s purpose, which is to curb carbon emissions, is not realized.
Waymo’s Pacifica Hybrids are built to spec for the company by Fiat Chrysler America (FCA). While the thought process behind Waymo’s decision to use the Pacifica Hybrid is not completely known, the large energy requirements of autonomous technology are well documented, and the Pacifica Hybrid offers the flexibility with its internal combustion engine and battery pack to meet these large energy demands.
Other companies in the autonomous vehicle space like Voyage, Nuro, and Uber have also favored plug-in hybrid vehicles for their robust electrical systems and batteries capable of handling the significant power consumption requirements of their systems. These systems include lidar, radar, and cameras — all of which must operate continuously and flawlessly.
Because of how far ahead it is, Waymo offers the first real glimpse into how autonomous vehicle technology, as applied today, may affect carbon emissions in localities where these services operate. If a Waymo early rider is shifting from a truck or SUV to a Waymo van, then that is likely a net win for emissions. However, a Waymo rider shifting from a Honda Civic to a Waymo van might see their carbon footprint increase depending on how many trips they make and whether any of those trips are shared.
Further, Waymo doesn’t offer any information to the public regarding whether or how often they charge their Pacifica Hybrids. And because these vehicles are made to spec by FCA for Waymo, it’s unclear whether the large traction battery that qualifies this vehicle for the $7,500 federal tax credit propels the vehicles some of the time or largely powers Waymo’s tech, which also calls into question the applicability of the tax credit in this situation.
Waymo is king of the autonomous world right now
Aside from a recent story in The Information that described Waymo’s behind-the-scenes struggles, the company is having an incredibly good year so far.
For starters, it was recently valued at $175 billion by Morgan Stanley, which is more than double that bank’s previous estimates.
And by nearly all accounts, the company is the industry leader when it comes to autonomous vehicle technology. As The Verge reports, early riders volunteered to use Waymo’s vans to commute, run errands, and perform any of the myriad daily activities that normally involve schlepping around in a personal vehicle, especially in a sprawled region like Phoenix.
Waymo has even partnered with Walmart to offer a shuttle service to its stores for early riders to pick up orders that they place online. Nuro, another autonomous vehicle company, is piloting a similar service with Kroger.
In exchange for these free services, Waymo’s early riders must sign a nondisclosure agreement and report back to the company. These experiences, in turn, help Waymo perfect its service ahead of its widely anticipated launch of a paid ride-hailing service later this year. Waymo also uses these early rider experiences to develop curated rider profiles, like this one posted recently on Medium where the company operates its blog.
In it, Lilla, an early rider, is quoted as saying, “Humanity has this wonderful opportunity to move forward in terms of personal transportation, and I feel honored to be a part of it.”
Presumably, Lilla is speaking to Waymo’s work toward developing fully autonomous vehicles. But bigger questions continue to swirl around the topic of transportation and what it means for humanity’s future, especially as the issue of carbon emissions and climate change becomes more pressing.
Whether Waymo’s modified Pacifica Hybrids are “propelled to a significant extent by an electric motor” governs eligibility for federal tax credit
The Pacifica Hybrid is one of only a handful of plug-in hybrid vehicles sold that qualifies for the full $7,500 federal EV tax credit because of its larger battery size and 33 miles of all-electric range.

While legal, the optics of Waymo receiving these tax credits (at the expense of future consumer purchases given that the credits are currently finite) are not good. Beyond optics, however, here’s why the application of the credit here may be problematic.
What’s often ignored when discussing autonomous vehicles and their systems is how power-hungry they are. A piece in Autoweek last fall cited a Bloomberg article and reported that “current prototypes for fully autonomous driving systems consume the equivalent energy of 50 to 100 laptops,” adding that “[t]his translates to 2 to 4 kilowatts of electricity, which in a modern car makes it 5 to 10 percent more difficult to meet fuel economy and carbon emission targets.”
This means that when FCA delivers these vans to Waymo, their onboard autonomous systems can also likely draw power from the more robust electrical system that is also used to propel the vehicle.
When the Pacifica Hybrid is not running on all-electric power, the consumer version gets roughly 32 miles per gallon when operating as a traditional hybrid. This mileage isn’t bad for a van, but many other non-hybrid vehicles return higher fuel efficiency numbers.
If the traction batteries do not largely power Waymo’s vans, but instead power their autonomous systems, then this use would seem to preclude eligibility for the federal EV tax credit, which the IRS limits to a “motor vehicle [that] is propelled to a significant extent by an electric motor that draws electricity from a battery.”
Waymo’s built-to-spec Pacifica Hybrid is likely less efficient than its human-driven consumer version, which still gets worse mileage than many new vehicles
Waymo isn’t sharing specific numbers or specs regarding its systems or how much power they consume when in operation.
A quick search of their website and promotional materials revealed no mention of carbon emissions, charging cycles, or carbon offset efforts (something Lyft already does), which is a bit odd for a company in the transportation business. However, Waymo does proudly claim their vehicles are now logging 25,000 miles per day, a not-insignificant number.
And when The Verge gave readers the most detailed glimpse to date inside of Waymo’s operations in Phoenix, the article never mentioned charging cycles or all-electric miles. Photos and videos included in the piece (presumably provided by Waymo) also showed none of the vans plugged in or charging in the large warehouse-like garage used to maintain their growing fleet.
When I contacted a Waymo spokesperson to ask about whether and how often they charge these vans to maximize all-electric miles, I received the following response:
Fully self-driving cars have the potential to save lives and improve quality of life for millions of people so Waymo is building the most experienced driver; a car that can drive itself. As we prepare to launch our driverless transportation service later this year, we need to ensure that our growing fleet of self-driving cars is ready for our riders at any time, day or night. We’ve partnered with Avis Budget Group who provides fleet support and maintenance, ensuring our vehicles are charged, cleaned and presentable for riders.
Does Waymo’s goal to improve “quality of life” consider air quality and its effect on human health? The link between vehicle emissions and human health is well established. Its communications to date have thrown some shade on the idea of carpooling and transit.
Lilla, the early rider profiled on Waymo’s blog, is quoted as saying that she was thrilled with the service because it meant “[n]o more ridesharing in a car that may feel cramped.” This sentiment presumably also rules out travel by carpool, bus, train, or plane — in other words, the same individualistic values that have given us suburban sprawl and our current traffic hellscape.
Elon Musk was recently criticized for voicing similar complaints about transit. And his impetus for developing companies like the Boring Company is to escape the traffic created by the same collective desire of other drivers to commute alone.
The current technology in use to operate autonomous vehicles requires an energy efficiency sacrifice, when compared to human drivers, in vehicles used to carry riders
It is important to view every autonomous vehicle development through the lens of energy efficiency and carbon emissions, both of which factor into tackling one of the most pressing challenges facing humans today: climate change.

The transportation sector is currently the largest contributor to carbon emissions in the United States. If current trends continue, 2018 will mark the third year in a row when the transportation sector has dominated carbon emissions (beating out power, which is historically the largest contributor).
It’s unlikely autonomous vehicle technology and all its requisite sensors, cameras, and computers will beat an average human driver’s weight/energy use efficiency anytime soon. Any vehicle designed to carry passengers, no matter the type or size, will likely always require more equipment and carry more weight when outfitted with autonomous vehicle technology.
That said, those who study the impacts of autonomous vehicle technology deployed on a wide scale cite numerous traffic/congestion benefits that would more than recoup the efficiency losses that come with all the tech required to power these vehicles and the trips without riders — a result of the shift from personal at-home vehicles to remotely located fleet vehicles.
But what’s often required to realize these benefits is near-complete adoption of these technologies across the fleet and the disappearance of human drivers from our roads. This is an unlikely scenario in the near term. And that’s not the world Waymo and its competitors operate in now.
Instead, these vehicles will likely share the road with human drivers for the foreseeable future, drivers who — despite all their flaws when it comes to operating vehicles — can still deliver impressive driving performance that most current autonomous vehicle systems aren’t even close to approximating from an energy-efficiency standpoint.
