Self-driving cars are slowly becoming less sci-fi and more real-world as companies like Waymo, the driverless arm of Google's parent Alphabet, expand into more cities. Its newest service area: Atlanta, through a partnership with Uber. Now riders there can travel across 65 square miles of the city, and there are plans for future expansions.
Last week, the robotaxi service stretched into more parts of the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. Bay Area riders can hail a fully autonomous Waymo ride in Brisbane, South San Francisco, San Bruno, Millbrae and Burlingame via the Waymo One app, and select riders can access Mountain View and more of Palo Alto and Menlo Park. LA riders can use the ride-hailing service in Playa del Rey, Ladera Heights, Echo Park, Silver Lake and along all of Sunset Boulevard. They can also go directly from Mid-City to Inglewood and Westchester via La Cienega and La Brea, expanding Waymo's LA County service area to more than 120 square miles.
And starting next month, Waymo will begin testing its autonomous tech in New York City. In June, Waymo shared that it applied for a permit with the New York City Department of Transportation to drive autonomously in Manhattan, with a safety driver behind the wheel. In the meantime, the company will drive manually in the city, as it did in 2021. Waymo also says it's "advocating for a change in state law that would allow for operating a vehicle with no human behind the wheel," adding, "we have every intention of bringing our fully autonomous ride-hailing service to the city in the future." (Existing laws in the state of New York don't permit the same fully autonomous ride-hailing service that companies like Waymo offer in other parts of the country.)
Waymo currently operates fully autonomous rides for the general public in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Austin, Texas, which take place aboard the all-electric Jaguar I-Pace. The company plans to begin offering rides in Washington, DC, and Miami starting in 2026. In April, Waymo said it'll begin driving its vehicles on Tokyo's streets, making this the company's first international location.
Along with those launches, Waymo in January announced it would also begin testing with manually driven vehicles in 10 new cities this year, starting with Las Vegas and San Diego. And in April, Waymo said it reached a preliminary agreement with Toyota to "explore a collaboration" geared toward developing autonomous driving tech, which could someday be factored into personally owned vehicles, too.
Waymo's expansion extends to its manufacturing facilities as well. In May, the company said it's opening a new, 239,000-square-foot autonomous vehicle factory in the Phoenix area. The plan is to add 2,000 more fully autonomous Jaguar I-Pace vehicles to its existing 1,500-vehicle fleet. Notably, Waymo indicated it received its "final delivery from Jaguar" earlier this year, as it plans for future iterations of its driverless rides. Waymo added that the "facility's flexible design" will allow it to integrate its upcoming sixth-generation self-driving technology into new vehicles, starting with the all-electric Zeekr RT.
In October, Waymo also announced that it's partnering with Hyundai to bring the next generation of its technology into Ioniq 5 SUVs. In the years to come, riders will be able to summon those all-electric, autonomous vehicles using the Waymo One app.
Waymo says it provides more than 250,000 paid trips each week. I've hailed several rides myself in San Francisco and, as off-putting as it can seem at first (especially to see a steering wheel turn by itself), I quickly adjusted, and it soon felt like an ordinary ride.
That's not to say there hasn't been pushback as Waymo rolls out to more cities. The company's vehicles have been involved in a handful of high-profile collisions, including one with a bicyclist in San Francisco and another with a towed pickup truck in Phoenix. (Waymo recalled and updated its software to address the issue.)
Waymo's Safety Impact report notes that over the course of 71 million autonomous miles driven through March 2025, its Waymo Driver technology had 88% fewer crashes leading to serious injuries or worse and 78% fewer injury-causing crashes, compared with "an average human driver over the same distance in our operating cities." It also reported significantly fewer crashes with injuries to pedestrians (93%), cyclists (81%) and motorcyclists (86%).
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