Waymo

Waymo is the autonomous driving company of Alphabet, the parent of Google, and operates the largest commercial robotaxi service in the United States. Its self-driving system, the Waymo Driver, replaces the human driver using lidar, radar, cameras and machine-learning software, and by December 2025 the service was completing more than 450,000 paid rides per week.^[1][2][3]

History

Waymo traces its origins to the Google Self-Driving Car Project, launched in January 2009 inside the Google X research lab under Sebastian Thrun and Anthony Levandowski. Google revealed the project in October 2010, and in October 2015 a blind passenger, Steve Mahan, rode in the first fully autonomous trip on public roads. In December 2016 the effort was spun out of Google as Waymo — a name meant to suggest "a new way forward in mobility" — within Alphabet, and in 2017 it became the first company to test fully self-driving vehicles on public roads without a safety driver, in Chandler, Arizona.^[1][2]

Waymo launched Waymo One, its commercial ride-hailing service, in Phoenix in December 2018, and in October 2020 began offering rides to the public with no safety driver at all — the first service of its kind. Expansion followed through the 2020s to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta and further cities, some reached through a partnership that places Waymo rides inside Uber's app, and in November 2025 the company began operating on freeways in three metropolitan areas.^[1][4]

Growth accelerated sharply into 2026. Waymo crossed 450,000 weekly paid rides in December 2025 and announced the start of fully autonomous operations with its sixth-generation Waymo Driver in February 2026; by mid-2026 it had launched in San Diego, Las Vegas, Tampa and Denver, targeting one million rides per week and more than twenty cities — among them planned international markets such as London and Tokyo — by the end of the year. A reported US$16 billion funding round in February 2026 valued the company at about US$126 billion.^[1][3][5][6]

Technology

The Waymo Driver is designed for Level 4 automation: it performs the entire driving task within its operating area without a human in the driver's seat. The system fuses lidar, radar and camera data and relies on machine-learning models for perception, prediction and planning, reinforced by redundancies in steering, braking and computing, and by extensive simulation. Successive hardware generations have cut sensor costs dramatically since the programme's early years, and the sixth-generation system introduced in 2026 reduces the sensor count while improving capability. Waymo publishes safety research comparing its crash record against human-driver benchmarks, part of a transparency strategy aimed at regulators and riders.^[1][2]

Applications and impact

Robotaxis are among the most visible commercial deployments of artificial intelligence in the physical world, and Waymo's scale — hundreds of thousands of driverless rides a week — has made it the benchmark for the sector, ahead of rivals including Tesla's robotaxi effort. The company has moved to integrate with public transport, adding transit rewards for riders who connect to rail and bus services, and its expansion has fuelled debate over the future of driving jobs, urban congestion and the economics of capital-intensive autonomy.^[1][2]

>See Also

• Autonomous Vehicles
• Grab
• Computer Vision
• AI Roadmap Malaysia
• AI in Malaysian Logistics