Waymo just keeps growing. Driverless rides started slowly at first in a couple of cities. Now Alphabet’s robotaxi business is scaling up quickly as it heads to more markets.
On Thursday, America’s autonomous-car leader said it had cracked a new milestone: 500,000 paid rides per week. That weekly throughput has doubled in less than a year, with Waymo first crossing 250,000 rides per week last April.
Expanding into new territory has helped. Last month, Waymo started offering rides in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando, bringing the total number of market’s it is operating in to 10. At the start of 2025, Waymo had commercial operations in three cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix.
Rivals are trying to catch up, but they’re moving more slowly. Zoox this week announced that it would expand the pilot areas in Las Vegas and San Francisco where its purpose-built pod ferries around passengers. It also said it would start testing in Austin and Miami. Tesla’s Robotaxi service still only operates in Austin, with only a limited of vehicles ditching the human safety backstop.
Waymo has big expansion plans on the horizon. It lists 21 cities as “Up Next” on its website, including New York, London, and Chicago. It’ll start integrating Zeekr vans and Hyundai Ioniq 5s into its fleet, too, giving it an alternative to its aging Jaguar I-Paces. Now that the company has largely proven that its self-driving tech can work reliably, it faces another challenge: scaling up to more cities, with different traffic environments and weather, and doing so safely. By year’s end, the company is targeting 1 million rides per week, its co-CEO told Bloomberg.
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