Waymo

Waymo’s robotaxis have collected more than 8,300 parking tickets in San Francisco since the start of 2025, running up close to $1 million in fines along the way.

The citations tracked the fleet’s rapid growth across the city. In 2024, Waymo caught just 589 tickets. It’s now averaging more than 100 a week.

Waymo opened its driverless ride-hailing service to the general public in Denver, San Diego, and Tampa on Monday, bringing the Alphabet-owned company to 14 US cities.

Tens of thousands of people in each market had already signed up before the doors opened, and Waymo says it will let them in gradually over the coming weeks.

Waymo published a list of “10 AI lessons” from driving more than 200 million fully autonomous miles, and several of them read as a direct rebuke of Tesla’s self-driving strategy — without ever naming Tesla.

The sharpest: trying to turn a driver-assist system into full autonomy is a “false summit,” according to Waymo. That’s exactly what Tesla is attempting with Full Self-Driving.

Waymo is now letting all riders in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix hail its next-generation Ojai robotaxi — a vehicle built in China by Zeekr.

That makes the Ojai one of the only ways for an American to ride in a Chinese-made EV, a car they still can’t legally buy for themselves.

Nevada’s Transportation Authority granted Tesla a permit to run driverless vehicles in Las Vegas last month and capped the fleet at 10 cars. Tesla’s application had asked for 5,000.

The permit also confines Tesla to an approved stretch of the Strip, bans pickups at Harry Reid International Airport, and limits the vehicles to 45 mph.

On today’s self-steering episode of Quick Charge, we take a look at Waymo’s westward expansion into 18 new California counties – a move the company believes will power it to more than one MILLION paid rides by the end of the year.

Waymo says California regulators have signed off on the biggest expansion of its robotaxi service yet, covering 18 counties from Sonoma down to San Diego.

The California Public Utilities Commission approval clears Waymo to charge for fully driverless rides across the whole Bay Area and Los Angeles, and to open two brand-new markets in Sacramento and San Diego.

Waymo has 684 of its new Ojai robotaxis finished and ready to deploy at its factory in Mesa, Arizona, according to the latest aerial count of the site.

That’s out of 953 Ojai vehicles on the lot in total, or 72% already converted. It’s the clearest sign yet of how much driverless capacity Waymo is stockpiling.

On today’s brain-addled episode of Quick Charge, President Trump says electric car drivers have a disease, Full Self Driving won’t stop earning Tesla drivers tickets, and Waymo’s CEO spends over forty minutes explaining why Tesla’s tech won’t ever beat a human driver.

Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov laid out the clearest technical case yet for why cameras alone can’t take a self-driving system to full autonomy, arguing that “weak sensing” hits a safety ceiling long before it reaches superhuman performance.

He never said the word Tesla. But camera-only is Tesla’s entire bet, and this was a direct shot at it.

Waymo is putting Google’s Gemini AI assistant inside its robotaxis for the first time, alongside the first major redesign of its rider interface in years.

Both features are launching in the Ojai, Waymo’s purpose-built vehicle, as the company gets ready to open the car up to more public riders.

Waymo’s autonomous electric taxis crash 68% less than the average human driver, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, with lower-severity crashes on average as well. But there are some important caveats that limit the data.

Waymo has tapped fleet management company Element to help keep its robotaxis charged, maintained, and on the road as the company expands into more cities.

Waymo’s retired EV batteries won’t be heading straight to recycling anymore. Instead, they’re going to help support the power grid in California and Texas.

On today’s exciting episode of Quick Charge, we’re exploring the industry’s backlash – real or imagined – towards Elon Musk’s SpaceX merger talks, Full Self Driving’s staff revolt, and even large, utility scale solar projects. All this and more when you hit that play button!

Waymo is beginning to offer select riders trips in its new purpose-built Ojai robotaxi, debuting the company’s 6th-generation Driver hardware across San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. Trips will be free for a limited time.

The Ojai represents a significant step for Waymo, which has now surpassed 20 million fully autonomous trips across 11 cities — a scale that no competitor comes close to matching.

Waymo announced a major expansion of its autonomous robotaxi service area, growing to over 1,400 square miles across 11 US cities. That’s an estimated 27% increase from its previous coverage and more territory than the entire state of Rhode Island.

The expansion starts in Miami, with Austin, Atlanta, Houston, and the San Francisco Bay Area up next for broader coverage.

Waymo has filed a voluntary recall with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) covering 3,791 robotaxis after one of its vehicles drove into a flooded road in San Antonio last month. No one was injured.

The key detail: the recall is a software fix that will be deployed over the air to Waymo’s entire fleet — no vehicles need to visit a service center. Waymo has already implemented interim constraints while the full remedy is finalized.

Travis Kalanick, the former CEO of Uber who helped pioneer the ride-hailing industry, says Waymo is “obviously” ahead of Tesla in the robotaxi race, and that Elon Musk’s company needs a “ChatGPT moment” for its vision-based autonomous driving to catch up.

The comments came during an appearance on the All-In podcast this week, where Kalanick also revealed he’s jumping back into the self-driving game himself with a new robotics venture called Atoms.

After Chicago residents began posting images of Waymo vehicles being unloaded on the city’s streets, the autonomous rideshare company confirmed it is exploring expanding its network to the Second City. However, an obstacle currently stands in the way of that deployment.

On today’s high-dollar episode of Quick Charge, Tesla is reeling from a $243 million judgement against it in a high-profile wrongful death case involving the company’s Autopilot system, and has a hard time getting the relevant data to NHTSA.