Waymo opens Denver, San Diego and Tampa as Zoox tests in Houston
Robotaxi season just went national. Waymo opened paid rides in three more U.S. cities today, Amazon's Zoox said it will start supervised testing in two more, and Tesla has a Cybercab event on Thursday — all inside 72 hours.
Waymo is now live in 14 U.S. cities. The Alphabet-owned company began offering paid driverless rides to the public in Denver, San Diego and Tampa on Tuesday, rolling out rider invitations gradually in its usual pattern. The expansion lifts its fleet past 4,000 vehicles — the self-driving Jaguar I-Pace hatchbacks plus the Zeekr-built minivan branded the Ojai — and puts Waymo in Colorado for the first time. In Denver and San Diego, the Ojai is the only vehicle riders can hail, which makes those two cities the first real test of whether Waymo's newer, roomier hardware carries the service on its own. Waymo says it will start with dozens of cars in each city and reach "hundreds over time."
The numbers behind the rollout are the actual story. Waymo is running more than 500,000 paid rides a week in the U.S. and says it wants to cross one million a week by the end of 2026 — roughly a doubling of the business in four months, on a fleet it is only now learning to service at 14-city scale. Goldman Sachs Research forecasts the U.S. robotaxi market at about $3 billion next year and $19 billion in 2030, so everyone is spending now to own the shape of that curve. Our own read: the constraint on this industry stopped being the driving a while ago. It is the permitting, the fleet ops, and how fast a city lets you go from a safety driver to a fare.
Zoox is going wide while staying years behind. Amazon's Zoox said it will begin testing its toaster-shaped vehicles in Houston and San Diego this month with human supervisors on board, which will give it a presence in 12 U.S. markets. That sounds competitive until you notice the fine print: Zoox's only paid ride-hailing service still runs in Las Vegas, and its San Francisco service is free for select riders with no announced date for paid trips. Zoox is buying geographic coverage with supervised test miles, which is a cheap way to look national and a slow way to build a business.
Tesla is the reason both announcements landed today. The company is expected to share details about its driverless Cybercab and Robotaxi service at an event Thursday, and it already charges for rides in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa — including Tampa, which is precisely the market Waymo opened this morning. The two companies are now fighting over the same streets rather than adjacent ones. Meanwhile, labor leaders warn about displaced driving jobs and safety advocates keep pressing for standardized mileage and crash disclosure, a fight the industry has not yet had to win.
What to watch: whether Waymo's one-million-rides-a-week target for December survives contact with three new cities at once — and what Tesla actually ships on Thursday. We've tracked this fleet's growing pains before, in AI Brief: Waymo's fleet hits 4,000 as recalls and edge cases mount.
Is a robotaxi in your city a convenience or a commute you'd rather not hand over? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: CNBC · TechCrunch · Waymo opens up robotaxi service in Dallas to everyone (TechCrunch) · Waymo's newest robotaxi is Chinese-made and now accepting riders (TechCrunch)
