Waymo is expanding its driverless ride-hailing vision, rolling out in Detroit, Las Vegas, and San Diego, adding to its commercial robotaxi footprint beyond Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Austin. The company will serve riders with a combination of self-driving Jaguar I-Pace SUVs and new Zeekr RT purpose-built vehicles while increasing testing among a larger pool of the general public.
These three cities add meaningful operational challenges that Waymo has trained toward:
- Detroit: Winter conditions and complex arterial networks; Waymo has run tests across multiple seasons in Metro Detroit and the Michigan Upper Peninsula. Detroit-native Waymo engineers live in the area, and it is logical for cold weather to be one of the locations.
- Las Vegas: A high-demand corridor with the Strip, stadiums, and convention centers; between the rail, monorail, scooters, and edibles, tourists fill the area in a rich environment of constantly chaotic paradise. Mayors, CEO Vinny Schirripa, and the strategy officer emphasize robotaxi as practical mobility rather than an avant-tech experiment; curb space, pickup zones, and enforcement are actions to plan autonomy in intervals.
- San Diego: Coastal microclimates, hilly neighborhoods, and military roads; with the beach on your left, the hills on your right, military on the coast, and construction crews in the middle, you experience almost every edge case possible.
Phased rollout with safety gates and staged access
As in prior cities, Waymo’s go-to-market playbook starts with human-driven routes to refine maps and perception priors, followed by supervised autonomous operation. After sufficient driverless testing, the service opens to employees, partners, and small rider cohorts before general availability. The public won’t get immediate, full access in these new markets. In other words, there will be limited initial rides while the company validates performance against local conditions and regulator feedback.
The vehicles run a multi-redundant sensor suite—lidar, radar, and cameras—paired with high-definition maps and an AV stack trained on billions of simulated miles. Redundant compute, braking, and steering systems are engineered to deliver software-defined, fail-operational behavior if a component fails. Waymo has described this architecture in safety briefs shared with regulators and city agencies.
Momentum by the numbers across expanding markets
Waymo says it is completing more than 250,000 rides per week across existing metros and has set a near-term target of 1 million weekly trips as additional cities come online. The company also reports over 20 million rider-only miles on public roads, a milestone that reflects growing, truly driverless operations rather than supervised testing.
- 250,000+ rides per week across current metros
- Target of 1 million weekly trips as new cities launch
- 20 million+ rider-only miles on public roads
As part of these rider-only outings, the company also conducts extensive simulation runs that expose the system to extremely rare, high-risk scenarios at a scale that human driving could never safely replicate. Alongside this, the company has expanded distribution: the Waymo One app is available through partnerships with ride-hail platforms in select markets. These partnerships will allow Waymo to quickly fill vehicles and smooth demand in newly launched geofences.
Competitive and regulatory context for robotaxis
Waymo’s latest moves maintain its lead in driverless ride-hailing, but competition is sharpening. Zoox operates a free robotaxi service in Las Vegas, leveraging years of local testing. Tesla has piloted ride services with an in-vehicle human present in parts of Austin, with ambitions to remove that supervision as software matures. Established automakers and AV suppliers remain active with supervised features and freight-focused autonomy, though robotaxi commercialization at city scale is still rare.
Regulatory oversight remains central. City transportation departments, state public utilities commissions, and federal safety regulators have pressed operators to improve incident reporting, ensure robust remote assistance procedures, and coordinate on emergency response. Waymo’s published safety analyses and data sharing with agencies aim to demonstrate lower crash rates versus human benchmarks, though independent validation continues to be a priority for policymakers and the public.
What riders should expect during early availability
In the early phase, access will likely require an invite or waitlist approval. When open to the public, riders typically summon vehicles through the Waymo One app, receive clear pickup instructions with curbside guidance, and interact with an in-cabin touchscreen for route confirmation and support. Pricing usually mirrors premium ride-hail tiers, with dynamic adjustments based on demand and time of day.
The fleet mix matters, too. The Jaguar I-Pace brings a familiar SUV form factor for urban streets, while the Zeekr RT is designed as a dedicated robotaxi with a spacious cabin and rider-first ergonomics—features that can boost throughput and comfort in dense urban corridors.
The bigger picture for scale and geographic breadth
Detroit, Las Vegas, and San Diego reveal winter resiliency, tourism-driven demand, and varied coastal terrain. These three pillars, if mastered, could feasibly generalize to dozens of additional metros. If Waymo sustains its safety record while scaling volume and partnerships, the path to millions of weekly trips looks increasingly plausible as a new phase in driverless mobility normalization.
