Alphabet's Waymo and Amazon's Zoox both announced expansions into new U.S. cities on September 1, intensifying a competition among self-driving car companies to control the geography of robotaxi service before Tesla's more nascent autonomous ride-hailing effort catches up.
Waymo said it is opening its fully driverless ride-hailing app to the public in Denver, San Diego and Tampa, marking the company's first commercial service in Colorado and bringing its total footprint to 14 U.S. cities. The company said it will run several dozen vehicles in each new market at launch, with plans to expand to "hundreds over time." Waymo has said it now completes more than 500,000 paid rides a week across its network and is aiming to cross one million weekly rides by the end of 2026.
Zoox, the robotaxi unit Amazon acquired in 2020, said it will begin testing its purpose-built, steering-wheel-free vehicles in Houston and San Diego, bringing its footprint to 12 U.S. locations. Unlike Waymo's rollout, Zoox's expansion starts with retrofitted mapping vehicles driven manually by human safety drivers, a preliminary step the company also used before opening a paid driverless service in Las Vegas in August. Zoox has run free passenger testing in San Francisco, Austin and Miami but, for now, offers paid rides only in Las Vegas, leaving it well behind Waymo's commercial scale.
The expansions come as competition in autonomous ride-hailing accelerates on multiple fronts. Tesla has been testing its own robotaxi service in a handful of markets but still relies on human safety monitors in most deployments, while Uber and Lyft have largely partnered with Waymo and other autonomous-vehicle developers rather than building their own self-driving technology. Waymo is also testing internationally, including in Munich, where it has said it plans a commercial launch by late 2027.
For both companies, growth now depends less on proving the underlying technology works — regulators in multiple states have already approved driverless operations — than on manufacturing enough vehicles, training enough remote operators and building service infrastructure fast enough to keep pace with rider demand in each new city. Both companies still rely on remote human operators who can intervene if a vehicle gets stuck, and neither has said how quickly it plans to convert its newest markets from limited testing to full public, paid service.
