Waymo put the Ojai alone on three new cities — and started the clock on a tariff that's about to double

Waymo lit up paid driverless service in Denver, San Diego and Tampa on Tuesday, taking the U.S. robotaxi count to 14 cities and more than 4,000 vehicles. The detail most coverage skipped: in two of those three cities, the only car in the fleet is the new Zeekr-built Ojai — not the Jaguar I-Pace that carried the company this far. That makes Denver and San Diego the first real test of whether the cheaper, sixth-generation vehicle can carry a commercial service on its own, and it lands at the exact moment a federal rule is about to make the import pipeline that built it a lot harder to use.

What changed, in context

Waymo says it is running "dozens" of vehicles in each new city and plans to "reach hundreds over time." The fleet-wide count now sits north of 4,000, with more than 500,000 paid rides a week in the U.S. and an end-of-2026 target of one million a week. That is roughly a doubling of the business in four months on a fleet that is learning to service itself at 14-city scale — and the doubling is happening on hardware that, until August, only operated in three cities.

The Ojai matters because it changes the unit economics. Waymo has imported more than 3,200 Zeekr vans through the Port of Los Angeles since 2024, with more than 2,600 of those arriving in 2026 alone, according to import declarations cited by Forbes. Each vehicle was declared at roughly $38,000; after the Section 301 and Section 232 duties stacked on Chinese-built EVs (a combined 127.5% on top of the ordinary rate), that $38,000 base balloons to about $86,500 before a single sensor is bolted on. Add the sixth-generation sensor and compute stack — 13 cameras, four lidars, six radars, the custom Waymo Driver hardware — and the per-vehicle cost climbs past $100,000. Even at that number, it is roughly half the reported cost of converting a Jaguar I-Pace, which the company has previously put above $200,000 per unit. The Ojai wins the math because the Zeekr was engineered on the line for redundancy that a consumer car has to be retrofitted with after the fact.

The other story in the rollout is who is allowed to compete. Tesla is in Tampa, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami and Orlando; Tesla has already begun running driverless Model Ys in Austin and is expected to show its purpose-built Cybercab, a vehicle with no steering wheel and no pedals, at an event on Thursday. Zoox said it will start supervised testing in Houston and San Diego this month, which will put it in 12 U.S. markets — but its only paid service still runs in Las Vegas, with a free San Francisco pilot and no announced date for paid trips there. The geographic race is over; the commercial race is between Waymo and Tesla, and the Cybercab is the test of whether Tesla can scale on a purpose-built platform the way Waymo just did.

The technical and business substance

The Ojai is a variant of Geely's Zeekr Mix, built on the SEA-M architecture with a body designed in Sweden. Waymo strips the Chinese connectivity and perception hardware at import and bolts on its own compute and sensor suite at the 239,000-square-foot Mesa, Arizona facility operated with Magna. The sixth-generation Driver carries 13 cameras, four lidars and six radars — a 42% cut in sensor count from the fifth generation — and the company has previously said the hardware package now runs under $20,000 per vehicle. MoffettNathanson, which tracks Zeekr shipments into the U.S., reported 725 Ojai vehicles entering the country in July alone, more than double the current Jaguar fleet's total. About 1,000 Ojais were staged at Mesa as of last week, with hundreds already converted and ready to deploy alongside the roughly 3,700 Jaguar I-Pace vehicles still in service.

Two dates inside the federal rulebook matter more than the import math. The Commerce Department's connected-vehicle rule, finalized in January 2025 and effective March 17, 2025, bars sales of connected vehicles by manufacturers with a sufficient nexus to China or Russia starting with model year 2027 — and it covers Automated Driving System software, not just the Vehicle Connectivity System hardware that is banned from MY 2030. Waymo's legal posture is that it is not importing a connected vehicle at all: Zeekr supplies a base vehicle, Waymo and Magna install the connectivity, compute and sensor hardware in Arizona. Whether that argument holds depends on which entity a regulator decides is the "connected vehicle manufacturer" — the Chinese company that built the rolling shell, or the American company that turned it into a vehicle capable of talking to anything.

Why it matters — who wins, who loses

Waymo wins if the Ojai carries three new cities on its own. The whole pitch of the sixth-generation platform is that it scales faster, costs less per unit, and lets the company push into smaller markets without the per-city engineering tax the I-Pace demanded. A clean Denver and San Diego debut is the proof; a messy one hands the narrative to Tesla on Thursday. Tesla wins if the Cybercab event lands and the regulatory path in Texas, Nevada and California is clear enough to start running a no-steering-wheel vehicle on public roads. Goldman Sachs Research forecasts the U.S. robotaxi market at about $3 billion next year, $19 billion in 2030, and $48 billion in 2035 — and every dollar of that market is being fought for now, on the assumption that the operator who controls the most cities in 2027 controls the curve.

Zoox loses ground whether or not the Ojai works. Being in 12 cities sounds national; being paid in one city is what investors underwrite. The other quiet loser is any domestic OEM that could have built a purpose-driven autonomous platform and didn't — the Ojai tariff is, in effect, a bet that Detroit's product planners will not match what Geely is shipping out of Hangzhou Bay at $38,000 a copy.

The skeptic's case

The first problem is the import clock. The MY 2027 software prohibition in the connected-vehicle rule is closer than the unit economics suggest; a 24-month production-period definition in the rule text gives a stockpiling strategy real legal leverage, but stockpiling is not a permanent posture, and the rule is being read narrowly. The second problem is the data. The 4,000-fleet count and the 500,000-rides-a-week number are company disclosures, and the public incidents catalogued in the New York Times — a 3,791-vehicle flood recall, 1,593 vehicles paused in a San Francisco power outage, multi-city suspensions during May storms — show that scale is still bumping into a long tail of conditions no simulator fully captures. The third problem is the tariff itself. A 127.5% duty is a tax designed to keep $38,000 cars out of American buyers' hands, and it is succeeding at that. Waymo is the loophole the tariff did not anticipate: a customer who never sells the car, who just needs it to drive itself cheaply for a decade.

What to watch next

Three things will tell us whether today's rollout is the inflection or just another step. One: whether the one-million-rides-a-week target survives the first 30 days in three new cities at once. Two: what Tesla actually ships on Thursday — a Cybercab with a regulatory path or another event with no vehicle to sell. Three: whether the Commerce Department's connected-vehicle rule generates a formal determination of who the "connected vehicle manufacturer" is on an imported, Arizona-converted Zeekr — because that determination is worth more to Waymo's roadmap than any software release.

If the tariff is the loophole that funded the Ojai rollout, what happens to unit economics when the loophole closes? Tell us in the comments.

Sources: CNBC — Waymo and Zoox expand into more U.S. markets · TechCrunch — Waymo accelerates robotaxi expansion · Forbes — Rides In Waymo's Ojai Help Reveal Robotaxi Future · Electrek — Waymo Zeekr Ojai all riders · BIS — Connected Vehicles final rule · Deep Dive — Waymo's custom chip brings Gemini into the car · Waymo opens Ojai robotaxi to all riders in LA, Phoenix and San Francisco · AI Brief: Waymo's fleet hits 4,000 as recalls and edge cases mount · Tesla's Austin robotaxis go driverless