Alphabet’s autonomous vehicle subsidiary Waymo has reached a milestone that would have seemed improbable just a few years ago: its robotaxis are now operating in 10 U.S. cities, a rapid expansion that signals the company’s growing confidence in its driverless technology and its determination to outpace a field of competitors scrambling to keep up.
The expansion, reported by TechCrunch, represents a significant acceleration in Waymo’s commercial rollout strategy. What began as a cautious, geofenced experiment in the suburbs of Phoenix has now become a coast-to-coast operation spanning major metropolitan areas. The company’s fleet of autonomous Jaguar I-PACE vehicles — and increasingly, its next-generation vehicles built on the Geely Zeekr platform — are ferrying passengers through some of America’s most complex urban environments, from the rain-slicked streets of San Francisco to the congested corridors of Los Angeles, and now into newer markets that test the limits of what autonomous systems can handle.
From Phoenix to a National Footprint: Tracing the Expansion
Waymo’s path to 10 cities has been anything but linear. The company launched its first fully public, rider-only commercial service — Waymo One — in parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area in late 2020. For years, Phoenix remained the primary proving ground, with the company slowly expanding its operational design domain to include more of the metro area, including downtown Phoenix and Scottsdale. San Francisco followed as the second major market, with Waymo beginning paid rides there in 2024 after an extended testing period that drew both praise from riders and protests from residents concerned about traffic disruptions.
Los Angeles and Austin, Texas, came next, with Waymo opening up commercial operations in both cities in 2024 and early 2025. Each new city brought fresh challenges — LA’s sprawling freeway system, Austin’s rapidly changing infrastructure — but also provided Waymo with invaluable data to refine its machine learning models. According to TechCrunch, the latest wave of expansion has brought the total to 10 cities, with Waymo entering markets including Atlanta, Miami, and several others where the company had been conducting mapping and testing operations for months prior to launching rider services.
The Business Model Takes Shape
For years, skeptics questioned whether autonomous ride-hailing could ever pencil out economically. The vehicles are expensive to build and maintain, the technology requires constant updates, and the regulatory environment remains a patchwork of state and local rules. But Waymo appears to be making progress on the unit economics front. The company has disclosed that it is completing over 200,000 paid rides per week across its markets, a figure that has grown steadily as it has expanded its service areas and operating hours.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has repeatedly pointed to Waymo as one of the company’s most promising long-term bets. During Alphabet’s most recent earnings call, Pichai noted that Waymo’s rider satisfaction scores remain exceptionally high and that the company is seeing strong repeat usage in its more mature markets. While Alphabet does not break out Waymo’s financials separately — the unit is housed within the “Other Bets” segment — analysts estimate that Waymo’s annualized revenue run rate is now in the hundreds of millions of dollars, though the business remains unprofitable as it invests heavily in expansion.
Technology and Safety: The Core of Waymo’s Pitch
Waymo’s expansion has been underpinned by what the company describes as a relentless focus on safety. The company’s sixth-generation autonomous driving system, known as the Waymo Driver, uses a combination of lidar, radar, and cameras to perceive the world around the vehicle. Unlike some competitors who have moved away from lidar due to cost concerns, Waymo has doubled down on the sensor, arguing that the redundancy it provides is essential for safe operation in dense urban environments.
The safety record, at least by Waymo’s own published data and third-party analyses, has been favorable. A study published by Waymo in collaboration with Swiss Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurers, found that Waymo’s vehicles were involved in significantly fewer bodily injury claims per mile than the average human driver. The company has also voluntarily reported its crash data to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a practice that not all autonomous vehicle operators have adopted with the same level of transparency. Still, incidents do occur. Waymo vehicles have been involved in minor collisions, and there have been instances where the cars have behaved erratically in unusual situations — stopping unexpectedly, struggling with construction zones, or becoming confused by unusual road configurations. Each of these events draws public scrutiny and regulatory attention.
Regulatory Headwinds and Tailwinds
The regulatory picture for autonomous vehicles in the United States remains fragmented. Some states, like Arizona and Texas, have adopted relatively permissive frameworks that have allowed companies like Waymo to operate with minimal friction. California, by contrast, has imposed more stringent requirements, including mandatory reporting of disengagements and collisions, and has at times slowed Waymo’s expansion through lengthy permitting processes. The California Public Utilities Commission and the California Department of Motor Vehicles both play roles in overseeing autonomous vehicle operations in the state, creating a dual-regulatory structure that companies must satisfy.
At the federal level, Congress has repeatedly failed to pass comprehensive autonomous vehicle legislation, leaving the regulatory framework largely in the hands of individual states. The current administration has signaled support for autonomous vehicle development, viewing it as a competitiveness issue vis-à-vis China, where companies like Baidu’s Apollo and Pony.ai have been expanding their own robotaxi operations. The Department of Transportation has issued updated guidance encouraging the development and deployment of autonomous vehicles, but binding federal rules remain elusive. For Waymo, the lack of a unified federal framework means that each new city requires a bespoke regulatory strategy, adding complexity and cost to the expansion process.
The Competitive Field: Who Else Is in the Race
Waymo’s 10-city footprint puts it well ahead of its closest U.S. competitors, but the field is far from settled. Cruise, the General Motors-backed autonomous vehicle company, suspended its operations in late 2023 following an incident in San Francisco in which one of its vehicles dragged a pedestrian. Cruise has since been working to rebuild trust with regulators and the public, and has resumed limited testing in select markets, but it has not yet relaunched full commercial service. The setback gave Waymo a significant first-mover advantage in several markets where Cruise had been operating or planned to operate.
Amazon’s Zoox is another competitor worth watching. The company has been testing its purpose-built, bidirectional robotaxi in Foster City, California, and Las Vegas, and has ambitions to launch commercial service, though it has not yet done so at scale. Tesla, meanwhile, has taken a fundamentally different approach, relying on camera-only perception systems and planning to launch a robotaxi service using modified versions of its consumer vehicles. CEO Elon Musk has promised an autonomous ride-hailing service for years, and the company began limited operations in Austin in June 2025, though the service initially operated with safety drivers behind the wheel. The contrast between Tesla’s vision-only approach and Waymo’s multi-sensor strategy has become one of the defining technical debates in the industry.
What 10 Cities Means for the Broader Transportation Industry
Waymo’s expansion to 10 cities is not just a corporate milestone; it carries implications for urban planning, labor markets, and the ride-hailing industry more broadly. Uber and Lyft, which once viewed autonomous vehicles as existential threats, have adopted a more pragmatic stance. Uber has a partnership with Waymo that allows riders to hail Waymo vehicles through the Uber app in certain markets, effectively turning a potential competitor into a supply partner. Lyft has pursued similar arrangements with other autonomous vehicle developers.
For the millions of Americans who drive for a living — taxi drivers, ride-hail drivers, delivery workers — the expansion of autonomous fleets raises pressing questions about the future of their livelihoods. Labor advocates have called for proactive policies to support workers who may be displaced by automation, including retraining programs and transition assistance. So far, the scale of autonomous operations remains small relative to the overall ride-hail market, but the trajectory is clear: if Waymo can operate profitably at scale, the economic incentives to replace human drivers will be powerful.
The Road From 10 Cities to Everywhere
Waymo’s leadership has been careful not to overpromise on the timeline for further expansion, having learned from the industry’s history of missed deadlines and inflated expectations. But the pace of growth over the past 18 months suggests that the company is gaining operational confidence. Each new city launch has come faster than the last, aided by improvements in the Waymo Driver’s ability to generalize across different environments and by the company’s growing expertise in the logistical challenges of fleet management, vehicle maintenance, and customer support.
The question now is whether Waymo can sustain this momentum. Scaling an autonomous vehicle service is not simply a matter of shipping cars to a new city; it requires detailed mapping, regulatory approval, the establishment of local operations centers, and extensive community engagement. Weather remains a factor as well — Waymo has historically operated in warm, dry climates, and expanding into cities with harsh winters or heavy rainfall will test the system’s capabilities in new ways. The company has been conducting cold-weather testing, including operations in parts of the Northeast, but has not yet launched commercial service in a city known for severe winter conditions.
With 10 cities now under its belt, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in the U.S. autonomous ride-hailing market. But leadership in a nascent industry is a fragile thing. The technology must continue to improve, the safety record must hold, regulators must remain supportive, and the economics must eventually work. For now, the millions of rides Waymo is completing each month suggest that the public is willing to get in a car with no driver — and that may be the most important validation of all.