Waymo has fired the starting gun on the second phase of its U.S. robotaxi rollout. The Alphabet-owned self-driving unit said this week that it will begin offering paid driverless rides to the public in Denver, San Diego and Tampa, extending its commercial footprint to 14 cities and marking the first deployment of the Zeekr-built Ojai purpose-built robotaxi to paying customers outside California.
Fleet passes 4,000 vehicles, 500,000 weekly rides
Waymo will invite riders on a rolling basis and slowly ramp access in each city, following its now-familiar playbook of mapping, testing, safety-operator removal and staged onboarding. The three launches lift Waymo’s fleet — a mix of retrofitted Jaguar I-Pace SUVs and the new Ojai minivan — to more than 4,000 vehicles nationwide. The company is currently delivering more than 500,000 paid rides every week and is targeting 1 million weekly rides by year-end.
Zeekr Ojai debuts outside California
Denver and San Diego will be Ojai-only markets from day one. The Chinese-built minivan, which runs Waymo’s sixth-generation Driver stack, is designed to be significantly cheaper to build, operate and maintain than the Jaguar I-Pace. Waymo currently has about 300 Ojai vehicles on the road, but plans to scale that fleet quickly as it chases unit-economics profitability.
Zoox, Tesla and Uber crowd the field
The launches come as Amazon-owned Zoox pushes into Houston and San Diego for testing and Tesla continues to expand paid Cybercab-and-Model-Y service across Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa. Nevada regulators recently cleared Waymo, Tesla and Uber to run up to 1,000 autonomous vehicles apiece around Las Vegas, and Waymo is preparing launches in London and Munich. Financial analysts at Goldman Sachs Research estimate U.S. robotaxi revenue will hit $19 billion by 2030 and $48 billion by 2035.
Reporting based on coverage from Waymo, TechCrunch, Bloomberg and CNBC.