Autonomous vehicle company
Appears in 11 stories · Last updated Oct 28, 2026
Fleet Week geofence was lifted after October 11; announced on October 27 an expansion of Bay Area coverage to San Jose and Campbell
Fleet Week ended October 11, and the city's geofence on robotaxis along the northern waterfront was lifted with it. For three days, Waymo and Zoox could not pick up or drop off riders between the Marina and the Embarcadero, and the Presidio had no autonomous service at all.
Updated Oct 28
Reports 95% fewer serious-injury crashes across about 270 million driverless miles
Waymo says its driverless cars were involved in 95% fewer crashes that caused serious injury or death than human drivers, across about 270 million miles driven without a person at the wheel through June 2026. The company's September report covers Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco, and puts injury-causing crashes 82% below the human rate.
Updated Oct 23
As of September 2026: Operating in 15 US markets with more than 4,000 vehicles
Waymo began inviting public riders in Las Vegas on September 14, weeks after Nevada regulators approved paid driverless rides. It's the Alphabet-owned company's 15th market, and Amazon's Zoox is already operating there.
Updated Sep 15
As of June 2026: Testing its self-driving system on Tokyo roads
Go Inc. runs the most-used taxi app in Japan. On June 16, 2026, it sold shares to the public for the first time and raised about 88.6 billion yen, roughly $552 million. Shares jumped as much as 23% on day one.
Updated Jun 16
As of May 2026: Existing Uber AV partner in Phoenix and Austin; reference point for the Rivian deal
For most of its life, Uber has been a marketplace for human drivers with their own cars. On May 6, 2026, the company laid out the clearest version yet of a different model: a marketplace for robotaxis it neither owns nor operates.
Updated May 31
As of May 2026: Market leader with 400,000 weekly paid rides across 10 cities
Uber sold its self-driving car unit in 2020 after burning billions and killing a pedestrian. Now it's spending up to $1.25 billion to do it all over again — this time with Rivian building the cars. The deal commits Uber to purchasing up to 50,000 autonomous R2 sport utility vehicles for deployment across 25 cities by 2031, beginning in San Francisco and Miami in 2028.
Updated May 30
As of May 2026: Industry leader with 450,000+ weekly paid rides across five US cities
Nvidia and Uber announced plans to deploy 100,000 Level 4 autonomous robotaxis across 28 cities on four continents by 2028, using Nvidia's new DRIVE Hyperion 10 platform and Alpamayo, an open-source reasoning model. Five automakers—BYD, Geely, Stellantis, Lucid, and Mercedes-Benz—will manufacture vehicles with Nvidia's hardware pre-installed. Commercial rides begin in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the first half of 2027.
As of May 2026: Leading United States robotaxi operator, rapidly expanding
For years, autonomous vehicle companies kept a basic operational question unanswered: how many humans does it actually take to run a driverless fleet? On February 4, 2026, Waymo's chief safety officer told a Senate committee the number: roughly 70 remote agents oversee more than 3,000 vehicles in six American cities at any given moment—a ratio of about one per 43 robotaxis.
Updated May 29
As of May 2026: Operating fully driverless robotaxis in multiple cities
By April 2026, Tesla had expanded its unsupervised robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, bringing the combined Texas fleet to about 573 vehicles. Newly unredacted crash reports tell a messier story: two of the 17 Austin incidents involved remote teleoperators who drove vehicles into a fence and a construction barricade.
Updated May 23
As of May 2026: Market leader with 450,000 weekly paid rides across five U.S. cities
MIT Technology Review named robotaxis a breakthrough technology on January 3, 2025, marking the moment driverless cars moved from lab experiments to real-world service. Waymo provides 450,000 paid rides weekly across five U.S. cities, while Baidu's Apollo Go matches that in China, operating across 22 cities from Wuhan to Dubai, with Tesla, Zoox, and others racing to catch up.
Updated May 19
As of May 2026: Service resumed Dec 21; acknowledged operational failures; rolled out software updates Dec 24 to handle regional power failures
San Francisco is the kind of city that feels unstoppable—until the lights go out. On Saturday, a substation fire near 8th and Mission helped trigger a blackout that spread across neighborhoods and knocked out traffic signals. Restoration took more than two days and sparked political backlash and raised questions about whether a modern city can tolerate single-point failures in critical infrastructure.
Updated May 16
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