Autonomous vehicle subsidiary of Alphabet
Appears in 7 stories
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 15 hours ago
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. Alongside its first-quarter results—gross bookings of $53.7 billion, up 25% from a year earlier—Uber said it would deploy 10,000 Rivian R2 robotaxis on its network through Hertz's Oro Mobility unit, starting in San Francisco and Miami in 2028.
Updated May 6
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 Mar 20
Industry leader with 450,000+ weekly paid rides across five US cities
Nvidia and Uber announced a plan to deploy 100,000 Level 4 autonomous robotaxis across 28 cities on four continents by 2028, using Nvidia's new DRIVE Hyperion 10 computing platform and an open-source reasoning model called Alpamayo. 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.
Updated Mar 17
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. At any given moment, roughly 70 remote agents oversee Waymo's entire fleet of more than 3,000 vehicles across six American cities — a ratio of about one human for every 43 robotaxis.
Updated Feb 21
Operating fully driverless robotaxis in multiple cities
Tesla promised its robotaxis would be safer than human drivers. Seven months into its Austin pilot, the company's own crash reports tell a different story: one collision per 55,000 miles, roughly nine times worse than the human average. Every crash occurred with a trained safety monitor in the vehicle who could intervene—yet the system still failed. On February 3, 2026, Tesla executives defended the program before a Senate committee, insisting autonomous systems are safer than human drivers despite the data.
Updated Feb 5
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 now provides 450,000 paid rides weekly across five U.S. cities. Baidu's Apollo Go matches that in China, operating across 22 cities from Wuhan to Dubai. Tesla, Zoox, and others are racing to catch up.
Updated Jan 8
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