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Waymo builds and runs self-driving taxis that pick up passengers and drive them around without a human behind the wheel.
Waymo is a self-driving car company. It runs a robotaxi service: you open an app, a car with no driver pulls up, you get in, and it takes you where you're going. Today that mostly means rides around Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, with more cities being added. The cars are white Jaguar and Hyundai electric vehicles loaded with sensors and software that do the driving.
The company began inside Google, where its self-driving project started back in 2009, before spinning out as its own business under Google's parent company Alphabet in 2016. That long head start matters. Waymo has spent years and billions of dollars training its software on real roads, and it is widely considered the leader in actually running driverless cars commercially rather than just testing them. Its rivals include Tesla Tesla and, in China, Baidu Baidu and others. The money question is the interesting one. Waymo is still a money-loser in a big way — building and running a fleet of robotaxis is expensive — and it does not break out detailed financials. Alphabet keeps it as a "other bets" unit, which basically means a long-term bet that is not yet paying for itself. The bet is simple: if a car can drive itself safely, the cost of a taxi ride falls a lot, because you no longer pay a human driver. That is the whole prize, and it is enormous if it works. The hard part is everything else. Driverless cars have to be safer than humans, which is a very high bar, and Waymo has had to deal with regulators, city officials, and the occasional very public incident — like its cars struggling around a power outage or blocking traffic. Expanding to new cities means re-mapping streets, retraining the software, and winning local permission. Waymo is also under pressure to show it can eventually make money, not just impress people.
So Waymo is best understood as the most advanced driverless-taxi business in the world, still spending heavily to prove that a car with no driver can be a real, safe, everyday service — and eventually a very big business.
Saved answer · last researched 4 Nov 2026