The U.S. robotaxi map grew quickly in September. Waymo opened rides to the public in Denver, San Diego and Tampa on Sept. 1 and launched in Las Vegas on Sept. 14, which TechCrunch counts as its 15th market. Amazon's Zoox, which began charging fares in Las Vegas in August, extended service to the city's airport in early September. And Nevada regulators have authorized Waymo, Tesla and Uber to put up to 7,000 robotaxis between them on Clark County roads over the next year.
Waymo's September push
In Denver, San Diego and Tampa, Waymo is inviting riders on a rolling basis from waitlists that it says number in the tens of thousands in each city, before opening service to everyone. With those three, Waymo said, it now provides fully autonomous trips in 14 cities, and it worked with local first responders ahead of the launches so they could learn how to interact with its vehicles.
The Las Vegas service covers the Strip south of Highway 589 and into Boulder Junction, using "dozens" of Waymo's new Ojai robotaxis at first, TechCrunch reported. The public must request an invitation for now; the publication noted Waymo typically opens service to everyone within a month or two of launch. Nevada authorized Waymo to run up to 1,000 vehicles there over the next year. TechCrunch put Waymo's total fleet at more than 4,000 robotaxis spread across more than a dozen cities, and noted that the company launched and then paused service in San Antonio.
Waymo is also adding vehicle suppliers. In July it said it had begun driving a growing fleet of Hyundai IONIQ 5s autonomously, with a specialist on board, under a multiyear partnership announced in 2024. Hyundai said at the time that the Waymo-bound IONIQ 5s would be assembled at its Metaplant America EV factory in Georgia.
Scale, and the bill for it
Alphabet said in April that Waymo had surpassed 500,000 fully autonomous rides a week. On its July 22 earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai said Waymo had introduced Ojai, the first vehicle powered by its sixth-generation Waymo Driver, to public riders. The expansion is expensive. Alphabet's Other Bets segment, which includes Waymo, posted $382 million in second-quarter revenue and a $1.8 billion operating loss, which chief financial officer Anat Ashkenazi tied to continuing to expand Waymo's business and other investments.
Zoox, Tesla and Uber
Zoox, whose purpose-built robotaxi has no traditional driving controls, started charging for rides in Las Vegas on Aug. 10 under a two-year federal exemption from eight motor vehicle safety standards that allows up to 2,500 vehicles a year, according to TechCrunch. It now picks up and drops off near baggage claim at both terminals of Harry Reid International Airport, and it plans to begin testing in Houston and San Diego.
Tesla said in its second-quarter update that its Robotaxi service was live in seven metro areas. It listed Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando and Tampa as ramping unsupervised operation, the San Francisco Bay Area as operating with a safety driver, and Phoenix and Las Vegas with preparations underway. Nevada cleared Tesla for up to 5,000 robotaxis, though Cybercab chief engineer Eric Early told state regulators in August that the company would be "extremely happy and satisfied if we could get ourselves up to 2,500, maybe a bit higher than that in the next year," TechCrunch reported.
Uber, approved for up to 1,000 robotaxis in Nevada, is preparing its own service with Lucid and Nuro. Lucid said in August that the program is in active testing with a fleet of nearly 100 vehicles in the San Francisco Bay Area and Houston, and that it has begun delivering production-validation Lucid Gravity SUVs to Nuro. In January, the partners said they expected to launch in the San Francisco Bay Area later this year.
The safety record and its limits
The strongest independent evidence so far covers Waymo. An IIHS study published July 23 found that Waymo's driverless vehicles in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Austin were involved in 68% fewer police-reportable crashes per mile than human drivers, based on crash reports filed with NHTSA from 2021 to 2024. Waymo's own analysis of more than 270 million fully autonomous miles in five cities through June 2026 claims an 82% reduction in injury-causing crashes compared with human drivers.
"The results show that, on a limited scale, these driverless cars are safer than human drivers — who can be impaired or drowsy or suffer lapses in attention. However, the present data collection system isn't good enough to allow continuous monitoring of a large-scale expansion." — David Harkey, president, IIHS
IIHS noted that companies must report robotaxi crashes to NHTSA but are not required to report how many miles they drive, and that Waymo is the only operator that shares driverless mileage voluntarily. That gap matters more as Tesla, Zoox and the Uber partnership scale up. For automakers, the rollout is becoming a vehicle-supply business as well: Hyundai and Lucid are building the hardware, and the operators that win the most cities will need thousands more vehicles to fill them.