Waymo has started selling rides on highways in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Phoenix, extending its robotaxis beyond the surface-street routes that have defined commercial driverless service until now. The Alphabet-owned company is also pulling human safety operators from vehicles in Miami ahead of a planned 2026 commercial launch there, with Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando set to follow in the coming weeks.
The highway expansion is a meaningful technical step: freeway driving involves merging, higher speeds and more complex traffic patterns than the city-street operations Waymo has run for years. The company said weekly paid rides have grown twentyfold over the past two years to more than 200,000, and co-chief executive Tekedra Mawakana said Waymo expects to reach 1 million rides a week by the end of 2026.
A fast rollout, with a federal inquiry attached
Waymo is also planning to add nine more cities by the end of the year, including Detroit, Las Vegas, San Diego and Nashville, and is testing in New York and London. The expansion continues even as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration investigates the company after one of its vehicles in Atlanta drove past a stopped school bus with its lights flashing — a maneuver human drivers are legally required to avoid and a notable blemish on a safety record Waymo has otherwise used as its core selling point.
Mawakana has pointed to the company's operating history as justification for the pace of expansion, saying Waymo has "developed the definitive playbook for operating autonomous fleets, across dozens of sites, and industry-leading end-to-end rider support." That confidence is being tested by a more crowded field: Amazon-owned Zoox recently began offering free robotaxi rides in San Francisco to build ridership before charging fares, while Tesla continues testing its own robotaxi service in Austin with human safety monitors still on board, a more cautious approach than Waymo's driverless-first model.
The NHTSA probe is the kind of regulatory friction that tends to accompany rapid autonomous-vehicle expansion, and its outcome could shape how quickly Waymo and competitors are allowed to scale highway and multi-city operations. For now, the company is betting that expanding service — and racking up real-world driving data — moves faster than regulators can slow it down, a wager that has mostly paid off since Waymo began charging for driverless rides in 2020 but one that carries higher stakes as the fleet multiplies across dozens of new markets at once.
