From Los Angeles to Austin to Atlanta, Waymo robotaxis are everywhere. And 2026 could be the year Waymo expands its lead in the space.
Waymo, part of Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), began in 2009 as an in-house startup within Google’s X initiative and officially became Waymo in 2016. In 2018, Waymo and Jaguar paired up, using the British automaker’s I-Pace EV for its testing. This is the vehicle most users are accustomed to seeing.
Since 2020, anyone in its service area can download the Waymo app and hail a fully autonomous car. Waymo says it has the most robotaxi miles driven and that it performs around 250,000 trips a week and has performed 20 million trips since the service began.
But those numbers are likely to jump, perhaps big-time. The company is targeting around 1 million rides a week by the end of 2026 — four times its current volume.
Dan Rowan exits a Waymo vehicle after arriving at San Jose Mineta International Airport on Nov. 12, 2025, in San Jose, Calif. (AP Photo/Godofredo A. Vásquez) ·ASSOCIATED PRESS
In 2026, Waymo will enter its most aggressive expansion phase yet, moving beyond its current territories to tackle more US cities and international markets.
Currently, Waymo has robotaxi fleets in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta, where users can summon vehicles using Waymo’s app or from partners like Uber (UBER) in Austin and Atlanta.
The plan for 2026 moves beyond those areas, eventually adding 20 new markets. Waymo says it is progressing in test areas in the South, including Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando, with full service expected to begin in early 2026.
In the West, the company plans to add Las Vegas and San Diego, with targeted service start dates in 2026.
In the Northeast, Waymo is testing in Detroit and Washington, D.C., also for 2026 launches, and added Baltimore, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis to the list earlier this month. The difficulties with northern cities, which are prone to inclement weather and conditions like snow that could block the cars’ sensors, is of particular importance. Each of these cities will begin Waymo service with human operators before scaling up to driverless. The human operator sits the driver’s seat and takes over if needed.
The company is also testing in highly populous areas like New York City, which requires special permitting and will likely take a much longer time to ramp up to official service. The company did not give a targeted start date for New York City service. Waymo is also scheduled to add service in London, its first international market, starting sometime in 2026, and has been testing in Tokyo since April.
Morgan Stanley on Waymo’s US expansion, December 2025. ·Morgan Stanley
For its part, Tesla (TSLA), which operates a ride-hailing service service with safety occupants, has only been in Austin and the San Francisco Bay Area since mid-2025 but will supposedly expand in Nevada and Phoenix next year.
To meet these goals, the company is expanding its manufacturing facilities. Waymo, along with its manufacturing parter Magna, will expand its new plant in Arizona to double production and build more than 2,000 vehicles at the facility by the end of 2026.
The company will begin to assemble its next-generation robotaxi on Zeekr’s RT platform, with the stated goal of building “tens of thousands” of fully autonomous Waymo vehicles per year.
Wall Street is mostly in favor.
“Waymo is furthest along in true driverless deployment: it is already operating fully autonomous ride-hail services in parts of Phoenix, San Francisco (Bay Area), Los Angeles, and testing in additional US cities, with no safety driver in the vehicle for many rides,” Deutsche Bank’s Edison Yu wrote in early December. “These are limited geofence, high CAPEX operations, but they prove the technical feasibility of Level 4 autonomy in constrained urban zones.”
But Yu added that Waymo’s tech “stack” is heavily dependent on costly equipment like lidar (light detection and ranging) sensors, radar, and cameras, and is map-dependent, which slows scaling speed and pushes up the per-vehicle cost.
Morgan Stanley’s robotics research team, now led by longtime analyst Adam Jonas, agrees that Waymo’s tech, though impressive, will be held back by higher costs compared to Tesla, which uses a vision-only system powered by a neural network, essentially acting like a robotic driver.
Robots vs. humans: Waymo says its driverless taxis are safer “drivers” compared to the driving public. ·Waymo
In Waymo’s defense, the company and analysts like Deutsche Bank’s Yu argue that the complement of sensors and cameras helps with reliability and safety.
Waymo’s data shows its robotaxis are involved in fewer accidents involving serious injury, airbag deployment, or any injury, for that matter, compared to human drivers. In fact, a human driver is five times more likely to be involved in an accident resulting in an injury compared to a Waymo robotaxi (0.8 crashes per 1 million miles in Waymo vs 3.96 crashes per 1 million miles with a human driver).
Though details are still scarce, Tesla data via the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows Tesla robotaxis had seven crashes in 250,000 miles, implying a crash rate of around 28 crashes per 1 million miles.
Public safety is also a key regulatory challenge facing both Waymo and Tesla, with permitting across various municipalities complicated to navigate and possible overarching federal guidelines that the NHTSA hinted may be coming.
And though not a passenger safety concern, the electrical blackout on Dec. 20 in San Francisco led to embarrassing “bricking” of Waymo robotaxis, leaving them stuck in the middle of streets, unable to move due to traffic signals being inoperative. Incidents like these are headaches for municipalities, though Waymo promises a software update will alleviate these incidents.
Nevertheless, passenger safety is most important, and Waymo’s data reporting showing its strong safety record will help cities looking to test robotaxis in their jurisdictions, as well as win over the public, which may be open to but skeptical about riding in driverless cars.
Waymo’s own ubiquitousness may also help in its rollout. While a survey performed by the Verge in April 2024 found that, overall, 45% of respondents believed robotaxi services were safe (compared to 37% against), the percentages were actually higher in cities where Waymo was already operating (54% for and 32% against).
A recent survey conducted in San Francisco this past July found that 67% of San Francisco residents now support the operation of driverless robotaxis, up from 44% in 2023, with “net favorability” of robotaxis swinging from -7% in late 2023 to +38% in mid-2025.
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Pras Subramanian is Lead Auto Reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on X and on Instagram.
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