Waymo launches fully driverless rides in San Diego, Las Vegas, Tampa and Denver
Las Vegas went fully driverless immediately, with Denver, San Diego and Tampa to follow, as Waymo pushed toward a stated goal of 1 million paid rides a week by the end of 2026.
- Culture & impact
- Compute & infrastructure
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Waymo announced fully driverless service in four new US cities — San Diego, Las Vegas, Tampa and Denver — extending its robotaxi footprint to more than a dozen metro areas. Las Vegas switched to fully driverless operation, with no safety driver, immediately; Denver, San Diego and Tampa were named as following once additional mapping and validation work was complete, having launched first as rides with a human employee aboard.
Waymo said it operated a fleet of around 3,500 vehicles and had passed 20 million total trips, with roughly 500,000 paid rides a week across its existing markets before the expansion. The company has set a public target of 1 million paid rides a week by the end of 2026. The rollout followed a $16 billion funding round earlier in the year that valued the company at $126 billion.
The four-city addition kept Waymo well ahead of competitors still operating supervised or geofenced pilots, and underlined how much of the remaining path to that ride-volume target depends less on driving capability itself than on the slower, city-by-city regulatory and mapping work needed to remove the safety driver.