Waymo

• 1. Introduction

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  Waymo, the autonomous driving company headquartered in Mountain View, California, now puts half a million paid passengers into driverless cars every single week. There are no steering-wheel-gripping safety drivers in those trips, no human foot hovering over a brake pedal. The car simply goes. That milestone, achieved by a company that traces its roots to a pizza-delivery stunt on the San Francisco Bay Bridge, raises a set of questions that are still far from settled: How did a search-engine company end up running a taxi fleet? What does it actually take to make a car that can navigate a city without human help? And what happens when the machine gets it wrong?

  By February 2026, investors had valued Waymo at $126 billion, with $13 billion of a $16 billion funding round coming from its parent, Alphabet. More than 3,700 robotaxis were in service across the United States. Yet in that same month, federal investigators were looking into the company's vehicles for passing stopped school buses and hitting a child in a school zone. The gap between those two realities, between a $126 billion valuation and a car that cannot reliably stop for a school bus, is where Waymo's story actually lives.

• 2. From DARPA to a Pizza Car

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  On the 17th of January 2009, Google's development of self-driving technology began at Google X lab, under co-founder Sergey Brin. But the ideas that made it possible had already been running on desert roads. Sebastian Thrun, former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Anthony Levandowski, founder of 510 Systems and Anthony's Robots, brought with them a team of 15 engineers who had built Stanley and Junior, Stanford's entries in the 2005 and 2007 DARPA Grand Challenges. That software and AI design became the nucleus of what would eventually become Waymo.

  The pivot from desert racing to city streets began with a phone call in February 2008. A producer for the Discovery Channel documentary series Prototype This! called Levandowski looking for Ghost Rider, his autonomous two-wheeled motorcycle, which had been donated to the Smithsonian. When Levandowski said it was unavailable, he offered something else entirely: a Toyota Prius retrofitted as a self-driving pizza delivery car. Larry Page and Thrun declined to have Google involved, citing liability, but they authorized Levandowski to proceed as long as it carried no Google branding. Within weeks he founded Anthony's Robots for the purpose. He fitted the car with lidar, sensors, and cameras. The Stanford team lent the Stanley car's code base. In December 2008, the episode aired, showing Pribot delivering pizza across the Bay Bridge under police escort. That success persuaded Google to formally greenlight the self-driving car program the following month.

  In 2011, Google acquired both 510 Systems, co-founded by Levandowski, Pierre-Yves Droz, and Andrew Schultz, and Anthony's Robots for an estimated $20 million. The combined hardware, vehicles, and software became the technical foundation of everything that followed. Meanwhile, a parallel effort called Ground Truth, launched in 2008, was extracting road map data from satellites and street-level imagery. One hundred Toyota Priuses were outfitted with Topcon digital mapping hardware developed by 510 Systems, laying the groundwork for accurate maps that autonomous vehicles would later depend on.

• 3. Project Chauffeur Goes Public

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  On the 9th of October 2010, the New York Times revealed the existence of Google's project, and Google announced it the same day. By then almost two years of road testing with seven vehicles had already taken place in secret. The announcement arrived at a moment when no legal framework existed for autonomous cars anywhere in the United States. Starting in 2010, state lawmakers began debating how to regulate them. Nevada moved first: a related law went into effect on the 1st of March 2012, and in May 2012, a modified Prius became the first US-licensed self-driven car, with Chris Urmson at the wheel and Levandowski in the passenger seat.

  In late 2015 came a milestone that is easy to overlook. Google gave a blind man a ride in a fully autonomous vehicle in Austin, Texas. It was the first entirely autonomous trip on a public road without a test driver or police escort. The car had no steering wheel and no floor pedals. At that point Project Chauffeur had covered more than a million miles. Google had spent $1.1 billion on the project between 2009 and 2015. That figure puts the investment in context: General Motors acquired Cruise Automation in March 2016 for $500 million, and Uber picked up Otto in August 2016 for $680 million. Google had already spent twice the price of either deal before either competitor had even entered the game.

  In December 2016, the project was renamed Waymo and spun out of Google as part of Alphabet. The name, the company explained, came from "a new way forward in mobility." Levandowski had already left the project in 2015. His departure would become considerably more consequential than it appeared at the time.

• 4. Trade Secrets and a $245 Million Reckoning

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  In February 2017, Waymo sued Uber and its subsidiary Otto, the self-driving trucking company, alleging that three former Google employees, including Levandowski, had stolen trade secrets before joining Uber. The alleged theft centered on Waymo's proprietary lidar technology. According to the lawsuit, Levandowski had downloaded 9 gigabytes of data containing more than a hundred trade secrets, eight of which were at stake during the trial.

  The settlement gave Waymo 0.34% of Uber stock, equivalent to $245 million at the time. Uber agreed not to use Waymo's intellectual property and provided a guarantee that Waymo's confidential information had not been incorporated into Uber's Advanced Technologies Group hardware or software. Uber maintained after the settlement that it had received no trade secrets. According to an Uber spokesman, Levandowski was fired in May, which resulted in him losing roughly $250 million of his equity in Uber, a figure that almost exactly matched the settlement amount. Uber shuttered the Otto subsidiary in July 2018. In 2020, Levandowski pleaded guilty to one of 33 charges and was sentenced to 18 months in prison.

  The case set the terms under which Waymo would operate going forward: as a company that would fight to protect the technical advantages it had spent years and more than a billion dollars building. The lidar cost story makes that investment concrete. At the start of the self-driving program, the company used a $75,000 lidar system from Velodyne. By 2017, after converting to in-house built lidar, that cost had dropped approximately 90 percent. The same year, Waymo unveiled new sensors, improved cameras, and lidar wipers, and announced it would test minivans without a safety driver on public roads in Chandler, Arizona.

• 5. The Road to Driverless Service

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  In December 2018, Waymo launched Waymo One in Phoenix, carrying paying passengers for the first time. Some rides still had safety drivers; others, in select areas, did not. The full driverless transition came in November 2019, when Waymo One became the first autonomous ride service in the world to operate without any safety driver at all. In October 2020, Waymo made that offer public, to anyone in the service area, not just invited testers. No other company had done that.

  Expansion required vehicles at scale. In March 2018, Jaguar Land Rover announced that Waymo had ordered up to 20,000 of its I-Pace electric SUVs at an estimated cost of more than $1 billion. In late May 2018, Alphabet announced plans to add up to 62,000 Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans to the fleet. Waymo also assembled vehicles at a former American Axle and Manufacturing plant in Detroit, using Magna as the vehicle assembler, though it later reverted to retrofitting existing models rather than pursuing a custom design. Morgan Stanley estimated the total vehicle cost per robotaxi at over $120,000, with at least one other source placing it above $150,000, once sensors, ride monitors, service personnel, and real estate are factored in.

  In April 2021, founding CEO John Krafcik, a former Hyundai Motor executive who had joined in August 2015, was replaced by two co-CEOs: Tekedra Mawakana, the company's COO, responsible for business operations, and Dmitri Dolgov, the CTO, responsible for technology. Dolgov had been part of the original team that built Stanley for the 2005 DARPA Challenge. By June 2021, Waymo had raised $2.5 billion in a new funding round, bringing total funding to $5.5 billion. A further $5.6 billion round closed in October 2024, led by Alphabet, bringing total capital to more than $11 billion. The February 2026 round of $16 billion, with $13 billion from Alphabet, lifted the company's valuation to $126 billion.

• 6. Technology Under the Hood

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  Sensors on a Waymo vehicle provide 360-degree views of the vehicle's surroundings. The lidar system can detect objects up to 300 meters away. Short-range lidar images objects close to the car, while radar allows the vehicle to see around other vehicles and track objects in motion. Google has invested heavily in specialized hardware, including Tensor Processing Units, to augment the Nvidia GPUs and Intel CPUs that run inside each vehicle.

  The software layer uses a deep-learning architecture called VectorNet to predict vehicle trajectories in complex traffic scenarios. VectorNet uses a graph neural network to model how vehicles interact with one another and has shown state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets for trajectory prediction. Behind VectorNet sits Waymo Carcraft, a virtual simulation environment named after the video game World of Warcraft. Inside Carcraft, 25,000 virtual self-driving cars navigate through models of Austin, Mountain View, Phoenix, and other cities, rehearsing situations the physical fleet might encounter.

  Remote human workers play a role the company long kept quiet. In February 2026, Waymo's chief safety officer confirmed that workers based in the United States and the Philippines are available to address situations the vehicles cannot independently solve. The company clarified that these remote workers do not drive the vehicles; they provide guidance, which the vehicle can accept or reject. That clarification arrived alongside the school bus investigations, at a moment when the NTSB released a preliminary report showing a Waymo car had stopped for a stopped school bus, then asked a remote operator whether the bus lights were still on, and proceeded after the operator said no.

• 7. Incidents and Opposition

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  A 2024 study published jointly by Waymo and insurance company Swiss Re estimated that Waymo generated 92% fewer bodily injury claims and 88% fewer property damage claims than human drivers over the same number of miles in the same locations. By the end of 2024, the study said, Waymo faced two potential bodily injury claims for incidents where it was potentially at fault, compared to an estimated 26 for human drivers. For property damage, the count was nine against an estimated 78 for human drivers. The sample covered 25 million miles. Experts noted that figure represents 0.0008% of the roughly 3 trillion miles human drivers log annually in the US, making direct comparisons statistically fragile.

  The incidents on record are varied and sometimes fatal. On the 11th of December 2023, two Waymo cars struck a tow truck minutes apart; the company recalled its software. On the 19th of January 2025, a speeding driver rear-ended a line of stopped cars that included an empty Waymo, killing a passenger and a dog in another vehicle. That was the first fatal crash involving a Waymo. In September 2025, a Waymo in Atlanta was recorded passing a stopped school bus, and Austin Independent School District later revealed the company's cars had illegally passed school buses 20 times between the start of the school year and December 1. The NHTSA opened an investigation on October 20. Waymo recalled its software on December 8 and a second federal investigation was opened on the 23rd of January 2026, after a child was hit in a school zone.

  Opposition has come from cities and residents as well as regulators. In February 2024, a mob vandalized, graffitied, and set fire to a Waymo car during Lunar New Year celebrations in Chinatown, San Francisco. During the June 2025 Los Angeles protests against mass deportation, several Waymo cars were set on fire. In July 2025, anti-Waymo protesters in Boston were joined by city officials; eight city councillors proposed an ordinance that would require safety drivers. The city of Santa Monica banned Waymo from charging its vehicles between 11 PM and 6 AM, citing noise and light pollution from nearby residents. Waymo continued using the stations and asked a court to rule the operations were not a nuisance. In 2024, the company spent $1.7 million on federal lobbying, and since 2019 has spent $1.8 million lobbying in New York State alone.

• 8. What Comes Next

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  Waymo's current fleet consists primarily of customized Jaguar I-Pace cars, with the last of a total order of 3,500 vehicles entering service during 2026. The sixth-generation robotaxi, called the Waymo Ojai, is based on the Zeekr Mix, a vehicle from Chinese automaker Zeekr, developed in a partnership announced in 2021. It is currently in driverless testing for Waymo employees in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Starting in 2028, Hyundai plans to deliver 50,000 Ioniq 5 units to Waymo, a commitment that would dwarf the existing fleet.

  Geographically, Waymo has announced expansion into Tokyo in 2026 and London in September 2026. The company told the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in February 2026 that unless the US reduces regulations that hamper innovation, American companies will lose a trillion-dollar global autonomous vehicle market to Chinese competitors. The Senate testimony also called for uniform nationwide standards for autonomous vehicle deployment, replacing the patchwork of state-by-state rules that has governed the industry since Nevada's first autonomous vehicle law went into effect in March 2012.

  In November 2025, Waymo introduced freeway travel for select riders, expanding what the vehicles could do. That service was paused in May 2026. The Southern California permit area, as approved by the California DMV, now stretches from the Mexican border to Ventura County, and expansion to San Diego is planned for mid-2026. Whether the Hyundai Ioniq 5 delivery, the Tokyo and London launches, and the Senate's response to the company's lobbying reshape the industry depends on questions that 25 million test miles and a $126 billion valuation have not yet resolved.