W

• Waymo now plans to expand its self-driving taxi service to at least 20 cities. 
• The latest announcement includes Minneapolis, Tampa and New Orleans. 
• Waymo operates in five cities right now, but it plans a whirlwind of new cities in the coming years. 

The future of transportation is electric and autonomous. And while the whole electric part may have hit a few speed bumps in the U.S. as of late, the driverless car industry is moving faster than ever. 

There are many companies making headway, but one is setting the pace: Waymo. The Alphabet-owned driverless taxi firm on Thursday announced that it will expand service to Minneapolis, Tampa and New Orleans. It plans to start on-road testing in those cities “in the coming days.”

Let’s take a step back and recap what that means for Waymo. Because its whirlwind of announcements can be tough to keep track of. Factoring in this latest news, Waymo now plans to offer driverless rides in at least 20 cities worldwide. 

Here’s a list of the cities Waymo is either operating a paid service in currently, or has announced plans for:

Waymo has said many of those cities—including Dallas, Washington, D.C., Nashville and London—will come online in 2026. Others don’t have a firm timeline, with the company saying it will launch rides once it completes manual and then driverless testing. Waymo also hasn’t shared when its purpose-built Zeekr van will hit the streets.

For now, the company’s retrofitted Jaguar I-Pace, outfitted with the fifth-generation Waymo Driver, is handling all of its rides. But the Zeekr and an adapted Hyundai Ioniq 5, which will run its next-gen tech, are coming soon. 

Waymo uses a fleet of thousands of Jaguar I-Paces, but it’s adding Zeekr and Hyundai vehicles soon.

Waymo started with a limited group of riders in Phoenix in 2017, then opened things up to the public in that city in 2020. Public rides began in San Francisco in 2024, followed shortly thereafter by Los Angeles. Austin and Atlanta came online this year, exclusively through the Uber app. 

Now the company says its tech has matured to the point where it can expand more rapidly than before. 

“The Waymo Driver is increasingly capable and generalizable, and we’ve been able to expand to each new city quicker than the last,” said Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher in an email. 

Given the pace of its announcements and expansions, the company is running circles around everybody else in the robotaxi space.

Amazon’s Zoox just launched public rides in San Francisco, but they’re free and only available to some people in a small section of the city. Tesla has grand plans to expand its service across the country, but right now it just runs driverless Model Ys in Austin, and they still have a safety monitor in the front seat. May Mobility hasn’t really gotten past the pilot stage either, though it did notch a partnership to add autonomous rides to the Lyft app in Atlanta. 

The race isn’t settled yet. And players like Uber are striking partnerships left and right, including with Lucid and Nuro to deploy Lucid Gravity robotaxis. 

Plus, there’s still the question of how quickly and successfully Waymo can actually stand up service in all of these new cities practically simultaneously. The last couple of years have been convincing proof that Waymo’s driverless taxis are reliable and effective in the cities it operates in. And that they can garner hundreds of thousands of rides per week. Now the company needs to scale up that business.

If 2024 and 2025 were the years when Waymo proved that its robotaxi service can go from a crawl to a walk, 2026 is when we’ll learn if it can run.

Contact the author: Tim.Levin@InsideEVs.com