Waymo

Waymo LLC is an American autonomous driving technology company based in Mountain View, California. It is part of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google. As of March 2026, Waymo offers public commercial robotaxi services in 10 US cities. They have over 3,700 self-driving cars in use, providing 500,000 paid rides each week, and have driven more than 200 million miles without a driver.

Waymo started from the Stanford Racing Team, which took part in the 2005 and 2007 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Grand Challenges. Google began developing self-driving technology in January 2009, and announced it in October 2010. In December 2016, the project was named Waymo and became a separate company under Alphabet. By October 2020, Waymo was the first to offer rides to the public without safety drivers in the car.

The company is led by co-CEOs Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov, who took over in April 2021. Waymo has raised $11 billion from investors by 2024. In February 2026, they raised another $16 billion, making the company's value $126 billion.

History

Ground work

Google started working on self-driving technology on January 17, 2009, at the Google X lab, led by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The project began with Sebastian Thrun, the former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Anthony Levandowski, founder of 510 Systems and Anthony's Robots.

The team used software and artificial intelligence designs they created before joining Google. They built cars named Stanley and Junior for Stanford's entries in the 2005 and 2007 DARPA Challenges. In 2007, Google hired the VuTool team to help improve its Street View technology. As part of this, 100 Toyota Priuses were equipped with digital mapping tools.

In 2008, the Street View team started Project Ground Truth to create accurate road maps using data from satellites and street views.

Pribot

In February 2008, a Discovery Channel producer asked Levandowski to borrow his self-driving motorcycle for a show. Since it wasn’t available, he offered to turn a Toyota Prius into a self-driving pizza delivery car. Levandowski asked Google if they wanted to join, but they said no due to liability. He started Anthony's Robots to do the project himself. He added special technology, sensors, and cameras to the car. The Stanford team provided the software. The episode showed Pribot delivering pizza across the San Francisco Bay Bridge with police escort in December 2008.

This success led Google to start its self-driving car program in January 2009. In 2011, Google bought 510 Systems and Anthony's Robots for about $20 million. Levandowski’s car and tools, plus Stanford’s artificial intelligence technology, became the core of the project.

Project Chauffeur

After almost two years of testing on the road with seven cars, the New York Times reported about Google’s project on October 9, 2010. Google announced it the same day.

Starting in 2010, lawmakers in different states worried about how to regulate self-driving cars. A law in Nevada began on March 1, 2012. Google had been pushing for such laws. In May 2012, a changed Prius got a license from the Nevada Department of Motor Vehicles. It was “driven” by Chris Urmson with Levandowski as a passenger. This was the first license for a self-driving car in the United States.

In January 2014, Google got a patent for a transportation service using ads and self-driving cars. In late May, Google showed a self-driving car prototype with no steering wheel, gas pedal, or brake pedal. In December, Google showed a Firefly prototype to test on San Francisco Bay Area roads starting early 2015.

In 2015, Levandowski left the project. In August 2015, Google hired John Krafcik, a former Hyundai executive, as CEO. In fall 2015, Google gave a ride to a blind man in a fully self-driving car in Austin, Texas. It was the first fully self-driving trip on a public road with no driver or police escort. The car had no steering wheel or pedals. By the end of 2015, Project Chauffeur had driven more than a million miles.

Google spent $1.1 billion on the project from 2009 to 2015.

Waymo

In May 2016, Google and Stellantis agreed to buy 100 Chrysler Pacifica hybrid minivans to test self-driving technology. In December 2016, the project changed its name to Waymo and became a separate part of Alphabet. The name came from “a new way forward in mobility.” In May 2016, Waymo opened a large technology center in Novi, Michigan.

In February 2017, Waymo sued Uber, saying three former Google employees, including Levandowski, stole secret files. Waymo said Uber took secret information about their special technology. A settlement gave Waymo 0.34% of Uber stock, worth about $245 million. Uber agreed not to use Waymo’s secrets. In May 2017, Uber fired Levandowski. In 2020, Levandowski admitted to one of 33 charges and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

Waymo began testing minivans without safety drivers on public roads in Chandler, Arizona, in October 2017. In 2017, Waymo showed new, cheaper sensors and tools, plus better cameras and wipers for their system. Waymo used its technology in cars like the Prius, Audi TT, Chrysler Pacifica, and Lexus RX450h. Waymo worked with Lyft on testing and building products.

Waymo started testing in Phoenix without safety drivers in November 2017.

In March 2018, Jaguar Land Rover said Waymo ordered up to 20,000 I-Pace electric SUVs for about $1 billion. In late May 2018, Alphabet planned to add up to 62,000 Pacifica Hybrid minivans to the fleet. In May 2018, Waymo created Huimo Business Consulting in Shanghai.

In October 2018, the California Department of Motor Vehicles gave Waymo permission to operate cars without safety drivers. Waymo was the first company to get permission to test during day and night on public roads and highways. Waymo said its service would include Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, and Palo Alto. In July 2019, Waymo got permission to carry passengers.

In December 2018, Waymo launched Waymo One in Phoenix, carrying passengers. The service used safety drivers for some rides, with others in certain areas without them. In November 2019, Waymo One became the first self-driving service in the world to operate without safety drivers. Waymo One started in San Francisco with a “trusted tester” group. In March 2022, Waymo began offering rides for Waymo staff in San Francisco without a safety driver.

In April 2019, Waymo announced plans to build vehicles in Detroit at the old American Axle & Manufacturing plant, creating 100 to 400 jobs. Waymo worked with vehicle builder Magna to turn Jaguar I-PACE electric SUVs and Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans into Waymo Level 4 self-driving vehicles. Waymo later went back to changing existing models instead of making new designs.

2020s

In March 2020, Waymo Via started after the company said it had raised $2.25 billion from investors. In May 2020, Waymo raised another $750 million. In July 2020, Waymo announced an exclusive partnership with Volvo to add Waymo technology.

In April 2021, Krafcik was replaced by two co-CEOs: Waymo’s COO Tekedra Mawakana and CTO Dmitri Dolgov. Mawakana handles business, and Dolgov handles technology. Waymo raised $2.5 billion in another funding round in June 2021, with total funding of $5.5 billion. Waymo started a consumer testing program in San Francisco in August 2021.

In May 2022, Waymo began a pilot program looking for riders in downtown Phoenix, Arizona. In May 2022, Waymo said it would expand the program to more parts of Phoenix. In 2023, the Waymo One area grew by 45 square miles, including downtown Mesa, uptown Phoenix, and South Mountain Village.

In June 2022, Waymo announced a partnership with Uber to add its self-driving technology to Uber’s freight truck service. Plans to expand to Los Angeles were announced in late 2022. On December 13, 2022, Waymo applied for the final permit needed to operate fully self-driving taxis without a backup driver in California.

In January 2023, The Information reported that Waymo staff were among those affected by Google’s layoffs of about 12,000 workers. TechCrunch reported that Waymo would stop its trucking program.

In July 2024, Waymo began testing its sixth-generation self-driving cars based on electric vehicles from Chinese car company Zeekr, announced in a partnership in 2021. They were expected to lower costs when Waymo was operating at a loss.

In October 2024, Waymo closed a $5.6 billion funding round led by Alphabet, aiming to grow its self-driving taxi services, bringing its total money to over $11 billion. Around that time, the New York Times said Waymo was “far ahead of the competition,” especially after Cruise stopped operating after an accident in 2023.

Also in November 2025, the permit area in Northern California expanded to include Santa Rosa and Sacramento. The Southern California permit area grew to reach from the Mexican border to Ventura County. These new areas were approved by the California Department of Motor Vehicles. The operating area is planned to expand to cover San Diego by mid-2026.

In January 2026, the National Transportation Safety Board and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration started looking into Waymo’s self-driving taxis for repeated problems with passing stopped school buses and one incident where a self-driving car hit a child who ran from behind a parked SUV in a school zone.

In February 2026, Waymo raised a $16 billion funding round that valued the company at $126 billion to grow into new markets. Bloomberg said $13 billion of that came from Alphabet.

Lobbying

Waymo often talks to public leaders and rule-makers in US cities and states to help update laws so self-driving vehicles can operate in those places. In 2024, Waymo spent $1.7 million on lobbying in the US. In New York state, Waymo has spent $1.8 million on lobbying since 2019, as of January 2026.

In February 2026, Waymo representatives spoke to the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and asked the federal government to create the same rules nationwide for self-driving vehicles. The company said that if the US doesn’t reduce rules that slow down new ideas, US companies might lose the trillion-dollar global self-driving vehicle market to Chinese companies.

Services

In 2017, Waymo showed four ways to use its self-driving technology: robotaxis, trucking, city buses, and cars. By 2023, it stopped focusing on trucking.

Waymo now offers robotaxis in some cities in the United States, with plans to expand to Japan and the United Kingdom. Riders can call a ride using the Waymo iOS app or Android app. In Austin and Atlanta, people can use the Uber app instead. When the car arrives, riders press a button to start the ride. The car’s steering wheel moves when it turns, and passengers can sit in the front right seat, but not the driver’s seat. Some information from the car’s sensors shows on a screen.

As of March 2026, Waymo has 3,000 robotaxis, gives 500,000 paid rides each week, and drives 4 million miles with riders every week.

Waymo plans to grow in many places. In the U.S., it talked with officials in Oakland and the Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport. By November 2025, Waymo had permission to drive autonomously in the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, Yolo, and parts of Southern California. There were also early talks with Raleigh in North Carolina and with a state leader in Utah.

Waymo is also talking about expanding to Australia, Canada, Singapore, and South Korea.

In September 2025, Waymo joined Chandler, Arizona’s city to add its service to the city’s small public buses.

Waymo once worked on self-driving trucks but stopped in July 2023 to focus more on robotaxis. It had tested big trucks and worked with companies like Daimler and United Parcel Service.

Waymo also works with Uber Eats and DoorDash to deliver food.

Waymo’s data helps local governments find and fix potholes.

Technology

Google has spent a lot on special computer parts like matrix multiplication and video processing tools, including the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), to work alongside Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) and Intel’s central processing units (CPUs) in Waymo cars.

Waymo builds its own self-driving tools, such as sensors, a special vision system, lidar, and radar. These tools help the cars see all around and detect objects far away. The lidar can spot things up to 300 meters (about 980 feet) away, and radar helps the car see past other cars and track moving objects.

Waymo uses a smart computer system called VectorNet to guess where cars will go in busy traffic. It also has a virtual world called Waymo Carcraft, where 25,000 fake self-driving cars practice driving in models of real cities like Austin, Texas; Mountain View, California; and Phoenix, Arizona.

Most of Waymo’s self-driving taxis are special Jaguar I-Pace cars. The company plans to add Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Zeekr Ojai cars soon. In February 2026, Waymo said that they have workers in the United States and the Philippines who help the cars when needed, but these workers do not drive the cars—they only give advice that the car can choose to follow or ignore.

Operations, efficiency, and safety

Waymo has grown quickly. By September 2025, it provided about 4.75 million passenger miles each month. This needed 6.57 million vehicle miles, which is three times more than in September 2024.

Most trips have just one person in the car. About 44% of the time, the cars travel empty, and a small number of trips get cancelled.

In 2024, Waymo worked with an insurance company to compare safety. They found Waymo had fewer claims than human drivers for injuries and damage to things like cars. Over 25 million miles, Waymo had very few claims compared to what human drivers might have had.

Incidents and controversies

Waymo, a company that makes self-driving cars, has had some problems and legal issues over the years.

Sometimes, Waymo cars have been in accidents. For example, they have hit dogs, bicycles, and other vehicles. In some cases, people were hurt, and Waymo had to improve its technology. There have also been times when Waymo cars did things they were not supposed to, like passing school buses or driving in places they should not have.

Waymo has also had legal problems. In some cities, people have argued about whether Waymo cars should be allowed to operate. Some city leaders have said they worry about safety or how the cars might affect regular drivers who work for ride services. Waymo has had to defend itself in court and work with local leaders to address these concerns.

Sometimes, people have also been upset with Waymo cars for other reasons, like making too much noise or getting stuck in traffic. Waymo has tried to fix these problems by updating its software and changing how the cars operate.