Waymo Grows Its Robotaxi Grid to 14 U.S. Cities

Waymo opened paid robotaxi rides to the public in Denver, San Diego and Tampa on September 1, taking its U.S. network to 14 cities. Tens of thousands of people in each city had already signed up. Access will land by email invite, not an open tap in the app.

The three launches put a driverless Waymo on Sun Belt streets Tesla already serves in Tampa, and they arrive while London’s fully driverless target is still waiting on permits.

Three Cities Open on a Waitlist

Alphabet’s robotaxi unit said it is welcoming its first public riders in three cities and will steadily add more people as it works toward opening the service to everyone. Suzanne Philion, Waymo’s chief marketing officer, said the company is focused on making everyday trips safer, easier and more accessible from coast to coast, and that the launches bring its newest vehicle platform and next-generation driver to riders in San Diego, Tampa and her home state of Colorado.

We’re pulling up in Denver, San Diego & Tampa today! Download the Waymo app to be one of the first to take a ride. Learn more: https://t.co/0ObfWGz0u6 pic.twitter.com/8K0Z3qhkBR

— Waymo (@Waymo) September 1, 2026

Each new market starts small. Waymo said the three cities begin with dozens of vehicles, with plans to reach hundreds over time, against a U.S. fleet of more than 4,000 cars. Riders hail through the Waymo app. San Diego service is starting in certain neighborhoods, with a wider rollout later this month, so a signup is still a ticket to a queue.

THE THREE NEW MARKETS

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis tied the Denver opening to cleaner air and more mobility choices. Tampa Mayor Jane Castor said the service gives the city another way to get around and more options for different needs. Waymo also worked with AARP Florida and the San Diego chapter of the National Federation of the Blind before the doors opened.

As someone who is blind, I usually get very anxious when using rideshare because of the unpredictability. I never know if I’ll get a driver who will turn away my dog, which is stressful and frustrating. Being able to experience Waymo and having the freedom to get into a car without a driver and knowing my dog can ride without any issues is a truly great feeling.

Julia Cardenas, President, National Federation of the Blind, San Diego Chapter

Laura Streed, director of outreach and engagement at AARP Florida, said older adults who no longer want to drive need as many trip options as they can get. That is the local pitch. The operating reality is still a gated app and a thin starting fleet.

Tampa Already Has a Second Robotaxi

Tampa is the overlap. Tesla switched on paid Robotaxi trips there and in Orlando on July 21, using camera-only Model Y cars in a 25-to-45 square mile zone centered on downtown, Ybor City, Tampa Heights, West Tampa and parts of East Tampa. Waymo now covers nearly 50 square miles, from Hyde Park to Northwest Park and Temple Crest, and from Westshore to Highlands Pines, with stops at Water Street, the Channel District, Armature Works, Ybor City, the Florida Aquarium, Raymond James Stadium, Amalie Arena and Steinbrenner Field.

A rider in those overlapping streets can open two driverless apps and compare wait times on the same block. Tesla already runs unsupervised paid service in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa. Waymo’s bet is a lidar-and-radar fleet it owns and stocks city by city. Tesla’s bet is a ride network grown from cars it already sells. Tampa is where those two methods sit on one map, and the comparison is about cars on the road, not slide decks.

Waymo has been on Tampa streets since December 2025, working with Tampa Fire Rescue and Hillsborough County Rescue while it checked the Waymo Driver on local roads. Tesla’s Tampa grid still skips South Tampa, Tampa International Airport and most suburbs. Neither company is running a metro-wide taxi replacement. Both are selling a geofence.

Denver and San Diego Get the Ojai Minivan

Denver and San Diego are Ojai-only at launch. The roomier Zeekr-built minivan runs Waymo’s sixth-generation Driver and is meant to cost less to build, run and maintain than the Jaguar I-Pace hatchbacks that still make up most of the fleet. Early counts put the Ojai pool around 300 vehicles. Tampa gets both the minivan and the Jaguar.

Philion called Ojai the newest vehicle platform. Denver is also Waymo’s first public market in Colorado, which means snow, altitude and a winter street mix the company did not have to sell to riders in Phoenix or Miami. San Diego adds beach traffic, military gates and a county that is larger than the first service box. Waymo said those boxes were drawn around the places people actually need to go, with plans to grow them over time.

Amazon’s Zoox is preparing supervised testing in San Diego and Houston, with safety drivers on board, after it began charging for rides in Las Vegas on August 10. San Diego could become a two-operator city later. Right now the only driverless paid ride there is a Waymo, and only if the invite arrives.

How Waymo Got to 14 U.S. Cities

The 14-city count is a Sun Belt and California map, not a national blanket. The public list is Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Miami, Orlando, Nashville, Denver, San Diego and Tampa. There is no Northeast pin, no Chicago pin, no Seattle pin. The product is a set of large geofences in cities that already live on ride-hail, tourism and sprawl.

Waymo now completes more than 500,000 paid trips a week and wants 1 million weekly rides by the end of 2026. Lifetime trips are over 20 million. Those figures are the reason a three-city Tuesday matters: the company is no longer proving a car can drive. It is trying to plant enough cars that the waitlist becomes a habit.

THE ROAD TO TUESDAY’S OPENING

1. 2009: Google starts the Self-Driving Car Project that becomes Waymo.
2. 2015: Waymo serves its first fully driverless rides.
3. August 2023: Paid driverless rides open in San Francisco after years of Phoenix service.
4. March 2025: Austin opens through an Uber partnership and the multi-city push speeds up.
5. July 8, 2026: Employee-only driverless trips begin in Las Vegas, with Denver, San Diego and Tampa next.
6. July 21, 2026: Tesla adds paid Robotaxi service in Tampa and Orlando.
7. August 4, 2026: Dallas drops its waitlist after nearly 150,000 riders from the interest list.
8. September 1, 2026: Denver, San Diego and Tampa open to public riders by rolling invite.

In the 18 months after Austin, Waymo added Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Nashville, Orlando and San Antonio. Dallas showed the playbook at scale: a long interest list, then a flip to anyone with the app. The three new cities are still on the first half of that script, less than two months after employee-only driving began in July.

London Still Needs a Permit

Tokyo and Munich are on Waymo’s overseas list. London was supposed to be the first big European test this year. Fully driverless paid rides there now depend on an automated passenger services permit from the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, with Transport for London giving consent at the end. A TfL spokesperson said no operator has finished the first step, which is registering vehicles with the Vehicle Certification Agency, and that no DVSA permit applications or TfL consent requests have come in.

The U.K. Department for Transport has said the fuller self-driving framework is being built for 2027. Christina Calderato, TfL’s director of strategy, told the London Assembly’s transport committee she does not think TfL is in a rush to publish its consent guidance, given the work still underway. Waymo said it still intends to operate driverless cars by the end of the year, subject to government approval, and that it will review TfL’s guidance when it is published and work to earn consent.

LONDON’S DRIVERLESS PERMIT STACK

• The supervised path: TfL has already granted private hire licences for Wayve-equipped Ford Mustang Mach-E cars on Uber, with a licensed driver still in the seat.
• The interest list: Wayve said more than 100,000 Londoners have signed up in eight weeks for a chance at those rides.
• The driverless path: Removing that driver requires the APS permit, and TfL says nobody has completed vehicle registration yet.
• The calendar: Alex Kendall, Wayve’s chief executive, said the company has never claimed a fully driverless operation this year and will not put a date on it until the rules are finished.

Goldman Sachs Research forecasts a U.S. robotaxi market of about $3 billion next year, $19 billion in 2030 and $48 billion in 2035. That forecast assumes American cities keep saying yes. London is the reminder that a 14-city U.S. map does not travel with the cars.

The Safety Record These Cities Inherit

Waymo is selling the new cities on a crash record built in older ones. Its safety hub, through March 2026, counts 220.6 million rider-only miles without a human driver, including 80.551 million in Phoenix, 67.078 million in the San Francisco Bay Area, 51.816 million in Los Angeles, 15.789 million in Austin and 5.379 million in Atlanta. On those miles, compared with human drivers over the same distance in the same places, the Waymo Driver had 94% fewer serious injury crashes (47 fewer), 82% fewer crashes with an airbag deployment in any vehicle (305 fewer) and 82% fewer crashes with any reported injury (707 fewer), regardless of fault.

CRASHES AVOIDED VS. HUMAN BENCHMARKS

Swiss Re, looking at insurance claims over 25 million miles, found 92% fewer bodily injury claims and 88% fewer property-damage claims than human-driven vehicles. Waymo’s ride-hail service also holds a 3-star rating, the top mark, on the FIA Road Safety Index. The company presents that record as progress toward Vision Zero and lists itself among federal roadway safety strategy allies.

Waymo’s new data-sharing hub helps move AV safety science forward by enabling those outside the company to conduct independent analyses of Waymo’s performance data. Better safety benefits everyone, and enabling others to make their own assessments brings more ideas and wisdom to the AV table.

Carol A. Flannagan, Ph.D., Research Professor, University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute

Those comparisons do not yet include Denver snow or Tampa’s mix with Tesla traffic. Waymo said it spent months checking the Driver on local streets and training with first responders before Tuesday’s invites went out. The 94% figure is a rate from cities with enough miles to measure. The three new markets still have to earn their own rows on that table.

Las Vegas Still Runs Without Public Rides

Las Vegas got empty-seat driving on July 8, ahead of Denver, San Diego and Tampa, and the Nevada Transportation Authority on August 20 approved Waymo to run up to 1,000 autonomous vehicles in Clark County over the next year. Public riders in Vegas are still waiting. Tuesday’s three-city opening jumped a market that already had employee trips and a large permit on paper.

That is the pattern these launches lock in. Waymo can add a city in under two months once employee driving starts, then drip access to tens of thousands of signups while the fleet grows from dozens of cars toward hundreds. Tesla can put a second driverless brand on the same Tampa map with a smaller unsupervised fleet. London can collect 100,000 names and still lack a driverless permit. The U.S. grid is 14 cities wide and one email deep, and the next names on the map will follow the same gated path unless a regulator, or a rival with cars already on the street, forces a faster opening.