While Elon Musk keeps promising a robotaxi future that’s perpetually one year away, Alphabet’s Waymo just did something no autonomous vehicle company has ever pulled off — launching commercial ride-hailing service in four major cities simultaneously.
On Tuesday, Waymo opened its doors to riders in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando. That brings the company’s total footprint to 10 U.S. metropolitan markets, including Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Miami, and Austin. The goal? Twenty-plus cities by the end of the decade, with all four of today’s new markets expected to be fully open to the general public by late 2026.
The scale numbers are starting to get serious. Waymo is now delivering over 400,000 paid trips per week and has surpassed 20 million lifetime rides. These aren’t demo laps around a parking lot — they’re real rides, paid for by real passengers, in real traffic. The company operates just over 3,000 autonomous Jaguar I-PACE sedans using its fifth-generation driver system, with a sleeker sixth-generation platform built on Geely’s Ojai electric vehicle already being tested in California.
The financial backing matches the ambition. In early February, Waymo closed a staggering $16 billion funding round that valued the company at $126 billion — with Alphabet as the majority investor. For context, that’s more than the market cap of most automakers. And unlike Tesla’s Full Self-Driving, which still requires a human behind the wheel, Waymo’s vehicles are fully driverless. No safety driver. No steering wheel grab.
The competitive landscape is heating up fast. Amazon’s Zoox, along with startups Waabi and Nuro, are all racing to launch their own commercial services. Overseas, Baidu’s Apollo Go and publicly traded WeRide are gobbling up market share in China. But none of them are operating at Waymo’s scale in the U.S. right now.
It’s not all smooth cruising. NHTSA has opened investigations into how Waymo vehicles behave around schools and school buses. During a December power outage in San Francisco, Waymo cars stopped dead in intersections and added to the gridlock. Sen. Edward Markey is pushing for more transparency on how often these “autonomous” vehicles actually rely on remote human assistants to navigate tricky situations.
Still, here’s the trade. If you believe autonomous transportation is a $10 trillion global opportunity — and most analysts do — then Waymo is the clear front-runner in the biggest market on earth. Alphabet stock (GOOGL) gives you exposure, along with everything else Google prints money on. The question isn’t whether robotaxis are coming. It’s whether anyone can catch Waymo before the moat becomes permanent.