In the race to transport people in self-driving taxis, Alphabet’s subsidiary Waymo has emerged as the clear frontrunner.
On Tuesday the company announced that its customers were taking more than 100,000 paid rides weekly—double the number from just a few months ago in May. It’s a signal that Waymo is extending its lead over its robo-taxi competitors and that its ride-hailing business could become a meaningful revenue stream for Google’s parent company.
“Even if now the visible milestones are coming a lot sooner—one after the other—it’s after years and years of investment,” Saswat Panigrahi, Waymo’s Chief Product Officer, told Fortune in an interview of the company’s recent efforts to scale.
Waymo’s boost in ridership comes as it ramps up service this year—fully launching commercial rides in San Francisco and starting gradual service in Los Angeles all in the last few months. Panigrahi said that there are more than 150,000 people on the waitlist to ride in Los Angeles, and said that the waitlist in Austin, where Waymo is still in the testing phase, is “also sizeable.”
Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana, who leads the company alongside fellow co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov, had said in March that Waymo had started testing self-driving rides in Austin. Panigrahi wouldn’t specify when Waymo plans to officially launch commercial service in Texas, but said that it was now having Google employees, in addition to Waymo-specific staffers, taking rides in the autonomous taxis. The next stage of expansion will be opening it up to the public: “We’ll slowly expand from there,” he said.
As Waymo has entered new cities, its competitors have fallen further behind. General Motors–owned Cruise, which had launched commercial service in San Francisco in 2022, pulled its fleet off the streets after its handling of an accident last fall. While Cruise resumed supervised autonomous driving in some markets in May, it’s still using human safety drivers. Amazon-owned Zoox, another robotaxi competitor, has yet to launch passenger service, though employees are taking rides in Las Vegas and Foster City, Calif. China-based startup WeRide, which drove more than 40,000 miles in California last year, just received its California permit to test its vehicles with passengers last week.
Of course, Waymo, which just released new details about its upcoming sensor system for its vehicle yesterday, has had its own hiccups, too—most recently with locals in the Bay Area. Over the last week, neighbors of a Waymo parking lot complained that its cars were honking overnight.
Companies like Waymo that work with foreign manufacturers also have new trade measures to think about these days, after the tariff the Biden administration imposed earlier this year on foreign-made electric vehicles. Waymo has partnered with Chinese carmaker Zeekr to build a new, roomier vehicle for its ridehail service and new sensory system. But the tariff could end up making this partnership more costly.
Panigrahi explained that Waymo’s new generation sensor system ”is all designed and manufactured in the U.S.” But he said that Waymo is “watching that tariff situation… There’s an election coming as well, so we’ll keep an eye on that.”
