Five hundred thousand paid rides a week. That is the figure Waymo put on the board in late March 2026, and it is the one that matters.
The Alphabet-owned company announced the number in a post on X, saying it now carries riders across 10 U.S. cities. Its own caption was short: “Plenty of road left to cover.”
By the numbers
The growth is steep. Waymo reported roughly 50,000 weekly rides in May 2024. By around April 2025 the figure had reached 250,000, and the jump from 250,000 to 500,000 came in under a year. Put together, that is a tenfold rise in under two years.
Geography did a lot of the work. Waymo started with Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Since then it has added Austin, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando, and all seven of those cities arrived within the past year.
The fleet did not grow at anything like the same pace. Regulatory data from December 2025 showed 3,067 robotaxis running the company’s fifth-generation self-driving system, a number Waymo still rounds to “over 3,000.” So the same cars are simply busy more of the time. Investors will note why that matters: an idle robotaxi earns nothing and adds to traffic.
Money and what comes next
The expansion has had cash behind it. Waymo closed a $16 billion funding round about six weeks before the announcement, at a reported valuation of $126 billion. A sixth-generation system is next, due on Zeekr’s Ojai minivan and on the Hyundai Ioniq 5.
Scrutiny and scale
Growth has brought attention from regulators. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are looking into incidents in which Waymo vehicles behaved improperly around school buses. In San Francisco, officials have raised concerns about how the company handles stranded vehicles, including cases where police and fire crews had to be called to clear them.
Context also helps. Uber logged about 13.5 billion trips in 2025, and Uber and Lyft together complete roughly 675,000 trips a day in New York City alone. That is more than Waymo manages in a week across all ten of its cities. Rivals such as Avride, Motional and Zoox are still working toward paid robotaxi service, and China’s Pony.ai and WeRide do not operate in the United States.
Sources
- Waymo delivers 500,000 paid robotaxi rides weekly across 10 US cities (Mezha, citing TechCrunch)
- Waymo Hits 500,000 Weekly Robotaxi Trips, Proving Autonomous Scale (The Agent Times, citing Waymo's official X account)
- Waymo Hits 500,000 Weekly Robotaxi Rides, Noting A Growth Of 10x In 2 Years (TechDogs)
