Waymo Goes Fully Driverless — Ride-Hailing with No One at the Wheel

Waymo is the Alphabet-owned self-driving company that grew out of Google's self-driving car project. On 8 October 2020 it opened fully driverless rides, with no one in the driver's seat, to members of the public using its Waymo One ride-hailing service in metro Phoenix, Arizona. Until then such rides had been reserved for a small group of early riders under non-disclosure agreements and made up only 5–10% of its rides in 2020. From that day, a car summoned by an ordinary person through an app, with no human driving it, became an everyday service.

Waymo has since spread to San Francisco, Los Angeles and beyond, and by March 2026 it was giving 500,000 paid rides a week across 10 US cities. It has been testing in Tokyo, and in September 2026 it announced with GO and Nihon Kotsu that it aims to run fully driverless taxis there during 2027.

Roots: Google in 2009 and the DARPA races

According to Waymo's own history, Google's self-driving car project began in 2009 with a challenge to drive ten uninterrupted 100-mile routes autonomously in Toyota Prius cars. On 9 October 2010 Sebastian Thrun, who led the project, opened a post on Google's official blog by recalling that Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google to solve really big problems with technology, and disclosed that the cars had already logged over 140,000 miles.

Thrun wrote that the team had gathered engineers from the DARPA Challenges, the autonomous-vehicle races organised by the US government: Chris Urmson, technical team leader of the Carnegie Mellon team that won the 2007 Urban Challenge, and Mike Montemerlo, software lead of the Stanford team that won the 2005 Grand Challenge. The races are covered on the DARPA Grand Challenge page. The test cars of that era always carried a trained safety driver and a software operator.

Waymo calls the 2015 ride the world's first fully self-driving ride on public roads and describes Waymo One as the world's first commercial autonomous ride-hailing service; those are the company's own descriptions.

8 October 2020: what changed

According to Waymo's blog, it had run its early rider program in Phoenix since 2017, and over the preceding year had pioneered fully driverless, paid rides on high-speed roads across a service area larger than the city of San Francisco. In parallel it had been offering more people the public Waymo One service with a vehicle operator monitoring each ride.

With the 8 October change, existing Waymo One members first, and then new riders joining through the app over the following weeks, could take fully driverless rides. Waymo said that in the near term 100% of its rides would be fully driverless, and riders could now bring friends and family. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it said it would reintroduce rides with a trained operator, adding capacity and a larger service area, only after fitting barriers between the front row and the rear cabin.

The significance of that day is that the person responsible for driving was no longer in the car. Driver assistance such as Tesla's Autopilot assumes the driver monitors the road at all times; in a Waymo rider-only ride, the driving is done by the system on board.

Regulators and incidents: expansion and setbacks

On 10 August 2023 the California Public Utilities Commission granted Waymo and GM's Cruise permission to charge fares for driverless passenger service in San Francisco at any time of day. Commissioner John Reynolds observed that regulators did not yet have the data to judge autonomous vehicles against the standard human drivers set. Two and a half months later, on 24 October 2023, the California DMV immediately suspended Cruise's driverless deployment and testing permits.

Waymo has had problems of its own. According to NPR, the school district in Austin, Texas, documented 19 instances of Waymo vehicles illegally passing its stopped school buses. NHTSA opened an investigation, and in December 2025 Waymo said it would file a voluntary software recall. Its chief safety officer said that while the company was proud of its safety record, holding the highest safety standards means recognising when its behaviour should be better.

2026: half a million rides a week, and Tokyo

According to TechCrunch, Waymo's paid rides grew from 50,000 a week in May 2024 to 500,000 a week in March 2026. Its service expanded from Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles to ten cities, adding Austin, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando, with a fleet of a little over 3,000 vehicles. Even so, the same article noted that Waymo's numbers were still a sliver of Uber's human-driven ride-hailing business.

In Japan, the taxi app GO, the taxi company Nihon Kotsu and Waymo announced a strategic partnership on 15 September 2026 to commercialise self-driving taxis in Tokyo. According to Car Watch, the three companies have been testing on public roads in seven Tokyo wards since 2025 with Nihon Kotsu drivers on board, and aim during 2027 to run Japan's first commercial taxi service with SAE Level 4 fully driverless operation, growing in stages to around 100 vehicles.

At the announcement, Ichiro Kawanabe, chairman of GO and of the national hire-and-taxi federation, said he became convinced this was the future after riding a Waymo in Phoenix in August 2023, and presented it as an answer to accidents, labour shortages and areas left without transport. Nihon Kotsu's president, Mr Wakabayashi, framed it as an effort to make up for a future shortage of drivers while coexisting with human-driven taxis. Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said the company had cut injury crashes by 94% compared with human drivers; that is Waymo's own claim.

For AI's social effects more broadly see the AI and society timeline; for the company's parent, the Google page.