Google Leads the Autonomous Taxi Race Through Waymo

The Google subsidiary has deployed self-driving taxis in multiple American cities. Neither regulators nor hardware costs are likely to impede its slow but steady progress.

A Waymo self-driving “robotaxi” in 2022. Photo by: Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “San Francisco (CA, USA), California Street, autonomes Fahrzeug (Waymo) -- 2022 -- 2925” / CC BY-SA 4.0. Source.

Waymo, a subsidiary of Google’s holding company Alphabet, is a developer of autonomous “self-driving” vehicles, which it deploys via app-based taxi services. In 2023, Waymo vehicles drove 3.7 million miles in California with a human “safety driver” supervising, and 1.2 million miles completely autonomously, together more than any other self-driving vehicle company, with General Motors-owned Cruise in second place.¹ As of January 2024, the company, in total, has driven more than seven million miles with no drivers across three cities: San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, Arizona.² The company’s short-term expansion plans include Austin, Texas in 2024 and New York City, the latter only with human safety drivers.³ In the long term, the company envisions a future where most driving is done by computers, not humans.