What Is Waymo? Inside Alphabet's Self-Driving Robotaxis
What is Waymo? Waymo is Alphabet's driverless ride-hailing service. Its all-electric cars (the Jaguar I-PACE today, with purpose-built Zeekr robotaxis next) drive themselves at SAE Level 4, with no human behind the wheel, in cities such as Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin.
What is Waymo?
Waymo is Alphabet's self-driving car company, and it runs the only large-scale robotaxi service in the world where you can pay for a ride with nobody in the driver's seat. Its cars are Level 4 autonomous (fully driverless inside their mapped service areas) and they are electric: the fleet is built mostly on the Jaguar I-PACE. That combination is what sets Waymo apart from rivals like Tesla, which still keep a human behind the wheel.
This article answers the questions people actually ask about Waymo: what the company is, how its self-driving cars work, what cars it uses, where you can ride one, how safe it is, and how it stacks up against Tesla.
Waymo is no longer a test project. By 2026 its driverless cars carry paying passengers every day in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and Atlanta, with more cities being added. The fleet is fully electric (mainly Jaguar I-PACE SUVs, alongside older Chrysler Pacifica minivans) and it now hands out more than half a million paid rides a week. Its main competitor for years, GM's Cruise, was shut down in late 2024, which leaves Waymo well ahead of the field.
Where Waymo came from
Waymo is the autonomous driving division of Alphabet, Google's parent company. It started as Google's self-driving car project in 2009 and spun out as a standalone company under Alphabet in 2016. That long head start matters: Waymo has been refining the same core self-driving system for over fifteen years, which is a big part of why it reached genuine Level 4 driving on public roads before anyone else.
What Key Features Set Waymo Apart?
| Feature | Description |
|---|---|
| Level 4 autonomy | Waymo runs at Level 4, which means the car drives itself with no human intervention inside its mapped service area. That is a step beyond Tesla's Level 2 Full Self-Driving (FSD), where the driver must stay ready to take over. Waymo handling dense city traffic with an empty driver's seat is the clearest proof of the gap. |
| Lidar and sensor suite | Each Waymo carries lidar, cameras and radar working together. Lidar builds a detailed 3D map of everything around the car, which lets it place pedestrians, cyclists and other vehicles precisely, and keeps working at night or in glare, where cameras alone struggle. |
| Real-world miles | Waymo has driven more than 100 million fully driverless miles on public roads (over 200 million by early 2026), across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and Atlanta. No other company has anywhere near that much rider-only experience to learn from. |
| The cars and how you book them | The fleet is built on the all-electric Jaguar I-PACE, with older Chrysler Pacifica minivans still in service. You hail a ride through the Waymo One app in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, or through the Uber app in Austin and Atlanta, where Waymo and Uber run the service together. |
| Safety record | Across tens of millions of driverless miles, independent and peer-reviewed analyses of Waymo's data show roughly 90% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers on the same roads. The car drives cautiously by design, which occasionally annoys people stuck behind it. |
How does Waymo work?
From the passenger's side it is simple: you open an app, request a ride, and an empty Jaguar I-PACE pulls up and takes you there. Underneath, the car combines its lidar, camera and radar feeds into a live 3D model of the street, then matches that against a high-definition map Waymo has already built of the area. It plans a path, predicts what other road users will do, and drives, no remote pilot steering it. Human operators sit in the background and can give the car guidance if it gets stuck, but they do not drive it.
Booking depends on the city. In San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix you use the Waymo One app directly. In Austin and Atlanta the rides come through the Uber app instead: Waymo and Uber run those markets together, with Uber handling dispatch and Waymo running the cars. Cruise, the GM-backed rival that once looked like Waymo's closest competitor, was wound down after GM pulled its funding in late 2024.
Waymo vs Tesla: who leads in self-driving?
This is the comparison everyone wants: is Waymo better than Tesla? The honest answer is that they are not yet doing the same thing. Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) is a Level 2 system: impressive, available on cars you can buy, but it still needs a human ready to take over at any moment. Waymo's cars are Level 4 and carry paying passengers with nobody in the front seat. On the core measure (can it drive with no human in the loop?) Waymo is ahead today.
The two also bet on different hardware. Waymo leans on lidar plus detailed pre-built maps, which is accurate but expensive and slow to roll out city by city. Tesla skips lidar and maps, using cameras and AI to read the road in real time, cheaper and far easier to scale across millions of cars, but a harder path to true driverless operation. Tesla is chasing scale; Waymo already has the driverless miles. Whose approach wins is the central open question in self-driving.
Does Uber offer self-driving rides?
Yes, in some cities, through Waymo. In Austin and Atlanta, requesting a standard Uber can match you with a driverless Waymo instead of a human driver, and you can set whether you want that in the app. Uber itself does not build self-driving cars; it offers them through partners. For a while that included GM's Cruise, but Cruise has shut down, so Waymo is the partner that matters now.
What happened to Cruise?
Cruise, owned by General Motors, was for years seen as Waymo's closest rival and ran its own driverless taxis in San Francisco. That changed after an October 2023 crash in which one of its cars dragged a pedestrian; Cruise lost its California permits and grounded the fleet. In December 2024 GM stopped funding the robotaxi business and folded what was left into its own driver-assistance work. The upshot for riders: among large, genuinely driverless services in the US, Waymo is now effectively on its own, with Tesla still working toward a comparable public service.
EV-Global verdict: where self-driving goes next
Waymo has settled the question of whether a paid, fully driverless taxi can work on real city streets, it does, every day, at a scale of more than half a million rides a week. The open questions now are about money and reach: whether the lidar-and-mapping approach can expand quickly and cheaply enough to cover whole metros, and whether Tesla's camera-only bet ever closes the gap. Either way, the technology has moved from demo to daily transport, and that is the part that is no longer in doubt.
Waymo robotaxis: frequently asked questions
Is Waymo actually fully driverless?
Yes. In its service areas Waymo runs genuine Level 4 robotaxis with no safety driver, carrying paying passengers. It is one of the only companies doing this at scale.
Where can you ride in a Waymo?
Paid public rides operate in cities including Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin and Atlanta, with more being added. Service is limited to mapped zones within those metros.
How safe is Waymo compared with human drivers?
Waymo's own data, backed by insurance studies, shows markedly fewer injury crashes per mile than human drivers across hundreds of millions of driverless miles. It is cautious by design, which sometimes frustrates other road users.
How much does a Waymo ride cost?
Fares are broadly comparable to Uber or Lyft in the same cities, varying with distance and demand. There is no driver, but you still pay a normal ride-hailing-style price.
