Waymo’s Self-Driving Future Is Here
Moments before I hop into my first Waymo in Austin, Texas, the driverless car is already locked in a standoff with a human rival. I’ve hailed the car in a tricky triangular parking lot in the middle of a big intersection, hoping to hitch a ride downtown. After about six minutes of waiting, I see it approaching: a hulking white all-electric Jaguar SUV with whirring sensors on all sides, conjuring a rhinoceros with hummingbird wings.
But when the Waymo enters the lot, it takes far too wide of a turn, and finds itself nose-to-nose with a pickup truck driver trying to exit. The driver glares at the Waymo, but sees nobody through the front windshield. For a second, man and machine face off in a very mundane version of The Terminator.
But then the pickup truck edges to the right, and the Waymo, sensing this, backs up slightly and pulls the opposite way, sliding cleanly past him and right up to where I’m standing, dumbfounded and relieved I haven’t caused a news incident. As I open the car door, a pleasant, corporate female voice greets me with a “Good to see you, Andrew.” I clamber in and put on my seatbelt, and the car merges cleanly out of the parking lot and into a future that, as the sci-fi author William Gibson once said, is already here—just not very evenly distributed.
Self-driving cars have long featured in sci-fi renderings of the future: in Da Vinci sketches, World’s Fairs, and The Jetsons. But many people don’t realize that a handful of cities already exist in that future—and that the transition, all things considered, has been relatively painless. In San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta, Waymo driverless taxis are completing more than 250,000 paid rides a week and traversing over 2 million miles: more than double their reach last year, and the equivalent of three human lifetimes of driving. Waymos do not drive perfectly. But scores of data suggest that they are already much safer than human drivers, reducing injury-causing collisions by around 80%. And culturally, they have mostly been accepted into these cities as mere facts of the road.
As they enter more and more cities, Waymo’s leaders stress that their central mission is road safety: to eradicate as many accidents as possible. In Phoenix this summer, they’ll launch solo trips (tied to a parent’s account) for teens 14 to 17, aiming to reduce accidents—which are the leading cause of death for U.S. teens—and freeing parents from shuttling kids around. Waymo’s leaders also believe its rise could, within the next decade, foment a greener, more livable future for cities, in which transportation is instantaneous and cheap—and in which a decrease in car ownership has unshackled urban congestion. “The way cities will look will be drastically different,” says co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana. “Our expectations of safe mobility options are going to be completely transformed.”
But significant traffic lies ahead on the road to utopia. Much of the American public still deeply distrusts autonomous vehicles, especially after dramatic mistakes like when competitor Cruise's car dragged a woman that was pinned underneath it for 20 feet in 2023, resulting in serious injuries. Labor displacement concerns abound, especially regarding America’s millions of rideshare and taxi drivers and longhaul truckers. Privacy experts worry about surveillance from sensor-filled computers patrolling streets.
Economic pressures also weigh heavily on Waymo’s future. With their cutting-edge AI technologies and sensors, each Waymo car is eye-poppingly expensive: more than $120,000, analysts estimate. Alphabet, its parent company, has poured billions of dollars into a project that analysts believe is far from being profitable. (Waymo declined to comment on expense figures or profitability.) And despite its head start, Waymo will soon have to compete for market share with Amazon’s Zoox and Elon Musk, who just launched the Tesla Cybercab in Austin in June.
Mawakana believes that Waymo is threading the needle on all fronts, and that the company’s gradual, safety-first, city-by-city approach (Phoenix in 2020, San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2024, Austin and Atlanta this year, and Washington D.C. in 2026) is exactly why it will emerge victorious in the automated rideshare race. Cruise shut down in 2024 after its headline-making accident; Tesla faces multiple lawsuits related to its autopilot technology.
“Trust is hard to build and easy to lose,” Mawakana says. “Not just Tesla, but there have been other companies that have come and gone that have had very, very audacious claims. We’ve learned the amount of humility needed: Ultimately, it’s the riders who are going to decide.”
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While Waymo is the first company to deploy a self-driving fleet, they’re far from the only company to try. In the early 2010s, Uber spent hundreds of millions of dollars on autonomous vehicles, which executives believed were essential to profitability. Raffi Krikorian, former director of Uber’s Advanced Technologies Center, who led those efforts from 2015 to 2017, said that the mechanical aspect of teaching cars to drive was one challenge, but unspoken social norms were another entirely.
“When you follow all the rules of the road to the letter, you’re actually a dangerous driver,” Krikorian says. “You actually need to know when to speed, when to roll through a yellow. When we first deployed, we would slam on the brakes at red lights.”
Around the same time, Google was ramping up its own self-driving project, operating buggy-like Firefly prototypes with plastic windshields around the company’s Bay Area-campuses. Being within Google’s massive corporate umbrella gave engineers the time and resources to experiment without rushing to market. In 2016, Google spun this project, called Waymo, into its own company within Alphabet.
Dmitri Dolgov, an engineer who worked on the Firefly and is now Waymo’s co-CEO, says those days were characterized both by technological breakthroughs and painstaking cautiousness. “We would build something with goals for what the Waymo driver would be capable of, and then run it through our rigorous safety framework—and see that it fell short of where we set the bar,” he says. “And we would not deploy.”
Mawakana joined the company in 2017, initially as vice president of public policy and government affairs, ultimately moving into running business operations. Waymo’s road safety mission was personal to her: Her uncle, a longhaul trucker, had died in his vehicle from a heart attack. She relates to customers’ stories of family members killed by drunk driving or other accidents. “People don’t think they need a safer alternative. But the status quo is not acceptable,” Mawakana says.
After several years of testing and iterating, Waymo first began offering fully autonomous rides to the public in October 2020 in Phoenix, Arizona. (The city has attracted several driverless companies due to its wide lanes, separated pedestrian walkways, and mostly snow-less weather.) At first, many community members reacted with skepticism or outright anger. Reports of strange but harmless incidents piled up, including Waymos stopping unexpectedly in the middle of the road.
But gradually, Waymo’s technology improved, and the community grew accustomed to their presence on the streets. Converts included Mayor Kate Gallego, who tells TIME that the city has seen lower tailpipe emissions and more drivers following the speed limits since Waymo arrived.
Wamyo’s staff has now grown to 2,500 employees, and its fleet to over 1,500 cars. In San Francisco, Waymo cars have become tourist attractions, with visitors taking the cars up the iconic winding Lombard Street. The prices of individual rides are variable, but often competitive with that of Uber or Lyft. While social media users have laughed at cringeworthy moments—like a flock honking at each other in a parking lot—those incidents were ultimately just that: laughable, but not dangerous.
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Driverless cars sound terrifying at first blush. But there are several reasons why they make theoretically safer drivers than humans. While humans have blind spots and fallible attention, Waymos ingest visual and spatial information through a slew of cameras and sensors. Radar allows the vehicle to see clearly through fog or snow. LIDAR, 360-degree laser-based spatial sensors, detect other cars in the dead of night and outside of the reach of a car’s headlights. Whenever Waymo enters a city, it begins a detailed custom mapping process, ingesting data like lane markers and curb heights. Each car on the road then provides real-time updates about new construction zones or road closures. All of this information is held on a powerful computer in the car’s trunk—the contents of which are uploaded and used to improve the Waymo driver.
In January, I took Waymos around Austin, closely watching a screen on each console that showed real-time digital representations of buildings, trees, pedestrians and even dogs passing by. One afternoon, I tested a car’s reflexes jumping out in front of it on an empty street (do not try this at home, kids); It immediately ground to a halt. While in the car, I tested the “assistance” button, which refers passengers to a support team—and someone picked up immediately.
Once the novelty wore off, riding around in Waymos felt shockingly uninteresting. The cars drove cautiously but competently; though their tendency to drive just above the speed limit sometimes created long lines behind them. Still, the cars occasionally showed welcome spurts of defensive driving. One Waymo, while navigating a one-lane cramped downtown street, sped up in order to seize a gap in parked cars before an oncoming car could beat it to the spot. Another, when needing to take a left-hand turn, cranked the wheel hard and flew through the intersection before a rush of cars arrived; I would have waited for the next light.
Even some professional drivers grudgingly admit that Waymo cars drive pretty well. “I love the way they drive: I think they drive better than me,” says Sergio Avedian, a Los Angeles-based Uber driver and a senior contributor for the blog The Rideshare Guy.
“People have seen it evolve and now overwhelmingly love it,” says Ryan Johnson, a Tempe-based real estate developer. “Other drivers even think that Waymo makes other drivers drive safer.”
While Waymo earns money every ride, perhaps even more valuable is the data it ingests—about handling merging, entering crowded parking lots, or avoiding road closures—all of which train the system to make it more robust. (A spokesperson said that the data is not shared with Google Maps.) “We're driving two million miles a week, which is more than most humans will drive in their lifetime,” says Matthew Schwall, Waymo’s director of safety and incident management. Whenever unusual or dangerous situations occur, his team studies them closely, running simulations and tweaking variables so all Waymo cars can better navigate future crises.
Waymos also avoid many of humanity’s worst traits when it comes to driving. We tire; we check our phones; we fly into road rage; we drive drunk. These flaws contribute to 40,000 U.S. roadway deaths every year—a number that most of society has come to ignore or sweep aside.
“There have been many situations where I have been intentionally harassed or carelessly mistreated by human drivers with emotions and entitlements,” says Andre Rouhani, a PhD student in Tempe, who often rides to class on his bicycle. He says he feels much safer with more Waymos on the road.
While Waymo, at 9 years old, is still a very young company, data so far shows that its cars are, in fact, safer than the average driver. A peer-reviewed May paper found that over 56.7 million miles, Waymos were involved in 85% fewer crashes with serious injuries than the average human, and 96% fewer injury-involving intersection crashes, a leading cause of severe accidents. In March, the tech journalist Timothy Lee analyzed the 38 crashes that Waymo reported over the previous eight months, and found that at least 34 of them were mostly or entirely the fault of others involved.
Waymo regularly publishes technical peer-reviewed academic papers on safety, and maintains detailed safety reports on its website which have been praised by trusted nonprofit bodies like the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS).
“What has been refreshing about Waymo is they’re open to sharing information and working in an academic way with independent groups,” says David Kidd, a senior research scientist at the IIHS. “They’re at the fore of something that nobody else is doing right now, which is furnishing all of their data. They've provided a model which other companies can follow for increasing transparency.”
“They are showing to the world the desirability of autonomous vehicles,” says Edwin Olson of competitor startup May Mobility, which recently partnered with Uber to bring AV rideshares to Arlington, Texas. “We’ve heard so many times that regulators will never allow it, or riders won’t get in. But with Waymo, what’s happened is the exact opposite.”
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But none of these safety efforts matter much if Waymo can’t build a sustainable business model. The company continues to raise and spend aggressively: In October, Waymo raised $5.6 billion in an investment round led by Alphabet, giving the company a $45 billion valuation. Waymo is privately held and does not release any financial data, but most analysts believe that the project is deeply in the red. Investors will want to see a return at some point—and ample skepticism abounds about earning potential.
“Rideshare is a horrible business as it is,” says Avedian, the rideshare driver. “The unit economics is going to upside down for a long, long time: You can’t put a $100,000 car with all the bells and whistles on the road, expect it to do $10 a pop and just be profitable.”
Mawakana and Dolgov declined to say when Waymo would become profitable, but did lay out a vision to get there. First, they say that the price of the cars will drop drastically. While most Waymos on the road are Jaguars, Waymo inked a partnership with Hyundai last fall giving them access to IONIQ 5s, which bear a sticker tag that’s some $30,000 less than Jaguar I-Paces. Both are EVs, eliminating gas costs. In April, Waymo reached a preliminary partnership agreement with Toyota. And Dolgov contends that every hardware component of their cars—from sensors to cameras to compute—will get cheaper with every new generation.
Elon Musk has a different solution: to get rid of the sensors entirely. In 2023, he called LIDAR “expensive” and “unnecessary,” and declared that Tesla Cybercabs need only rely on cameras. He has teased the idea of Cybercabs costing under $30,000, which would severely undercut Waymo’s pricing, analysts say.
Waymo’s CEOs contend that many sensors are necessary to maintain utmost safety standards. The company is also all too cognizant of the business risks of eschewing safety for speed: The fallout from the Cruise incident was so brutal that GM paid $2 million in fines to regulators and suspended the initiative a year later. “If there's an ecosystem of companies and competitors that are improving road safety, that's great,” Mawakana says. “But if they're not, that's a real harm to this technology, and it potentially threatens the opportunity to scale the way we all want to scale, either because of a regulatory overreaction at the state or federal level.”
Schwall contends Waymo could operate safely in any American town tomorrow, but massive infrastructure and trust must be built first: obtaining permits, setting up service depots, meeting community groups, training local law enforcement and medics. The company says it has cumulatively trained over 20,000 first responders about Waymo’s technology across more than 75 U.S. agencies. (Waymos are programmed to pull over if they detect a police car flashing its lights behind them.)
Even with Waymo’s head start, Tesla could catch up fast thanks to Musk’s starpower, brand recognition and manufacturing ability to crank out new cars. Zoox also lurks, but recently issued a recall after an injury-less crash in Las Vegas in April. Meanwhile, in China, Baudi, Didi and WeRide have several hundred robotaxis on the road.
Deepwater analyst Gene Munster expects Waymo to go public within two to four years, which would allow the company to keep fundraising, but also increase pressures from investors. Mawakana says that she will not “speculate about an IPO.” But she did float other hopes for the company and its growth: that she hopes to launch in international cities “this decade”; get into the longhaul trucking business; and eventually, put Waymo’s self-driving technology into personal cars you can own and take anywhere.
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The Teamsters, who represent drivers in industries including freight, delivery, and construction, have been watching Waymo warily as they threaten to undercut their members’ livelihoods, and accused the company of violating San Francisco lobbying laws last year. Munster, the analyst, believes that the profitability of Waymo’s rideshare business will mostly stem from the sheer fact that they don’t have to pay for human drivers’ labor. This also stands as a direct threat to the over one million Uber, Lyft, and taxi drivers in the U.S. When looked at through this lens, Waymo’s rise seems to be apiece with a longstanding pernicious force in American society: of machines taking money out of workers’ pockets and shipping it straight to Silicon Valley.
Nicole Moore, the president of the worker-led organization Rideshare Drivers United, is also concerned about how Waymos will dent local economies dependent on drivers who buy energy drinks, food at restaurants, and services from car washes and mechanics. “It’ll centralize where transportation money goes,” she says. “It’s not going to help our communities.”
But Sarah Dennis Phillips, executive director of San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, described Waymo as a “tourism asset.” “Locals and tourists alike still marvel at the sight of driverless cars moving through our streets and are excited to use them,” she tells TIME.
Mawakana contends that Waymo is spurring local business by allowing consumers to travel more easily, while also creating new types of jobs. She says that her uncle’s death in his truck makes her take labor concerns seriously.
“That job was so important to him—but the truth is that it was really, really hard. He was away from his family most of the time, and ate most of his meals there,” she says. “Some of the scariest parts of our mission requires that we go headlong into these challenging debate spaces, like, ‘Are we trying to eliminate jobs?’ No: We're trying to improve road safety, access to mobility, how efficiently goods move—and create new job categories that are more appealing and more compelling.”
Concerns also abound about privacy and surveillance. If Waymos become just as ubiquitous as Ubers and Lyfts, they would essentially serve as high-tech patrol cars capturing everything happening around them. “This means more data, and more ability for this data to be misused or hacked,” says Tom Kemp, an entrepreneur and the author of Containing Big Tech. (Waymos have interior cameras and microphones, but the company says they’re only switched on when riders are talking to a customer service representative.)
Kemp points out that Google complies with requests from government agencies to disclose user information about 82% of the time, and worries that, for example, Waymo could be pressured by state governments in which abortion is illegal to prosecute offenders who hail a Waymo to a known provider. When asked about that possibility, Mawakana responded: “We comply with laws. And so to me, the answer to your question is going to go squarely within, ‘What does the law require of us.’”
Some critics also fear that Waymo and similar companies will divert focus and funding from public transportation, making American cities even more congested. However, Ryan Johnson, the Tempe real estate entrepreneur, disagrees. Johnson is the CEO of Culdesac, a company that built a car-free neighborhood in Tempe. Johnson says that Waymos could ironically help immensely in lessening America’s reliance on car culture. “The key thing about Waymo is it can be implemented immediately and help catalyze denser, more walkable neighborhoods, which eventually make transit solutions more viable,” he says. “It drastically reduces the need for parking spaces, which transforms urban design in a meaningful way.”
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For months, carmakers have been grappling with the financial uncertainty caused by Donald Trump’s automotive tariffs, which he softened in late April. Mawakana points out that much of Waymo’s business is American: born in California, incubated in Phoenix, initially assembled in Michigan. But the company still relies on a global supply chain. A Waymo spokesperson declined to comment on tariffs.
Despite the uncertainty, Waymo is pressing ahead with its investment and development, because its ambitions are long-term and global. The company recently announced it has applied for permits to operate in New York City, and has started mapping the streets of Tokyo in hopes of expanding there. (“Japan has a large, aging population that has led to a shortage of cab drivers,” Mawakana notes.) Mawakana promises that Waymo will bring the same cautiousness and community connection they have to each city they arrive in next—and paradoxically, put humans at the center of their mission for automation.
“For me, it’s not about new technology for its own sake. That’s not what moves me,” she says. “It’s: ‘How do I get my son to an after school activity when I need to focus on a call? How can we save lives and allow people to be more productive?”
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