Overview

• Waymo operates paid, no‑safety‑driver robotaxis in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta, with rollouts to Washington and Miami flagged as next.
• Waymo executive Vincent Vanhoucke says the service is handling about 250,000 paid trips each week and is preparing programs in more than a dozen U.S. cities.
• Reported cumulative driving totals conflict, with Vanhoucke citing 71 million miles while EL PAÍS reports the company’s claim as just over 32 million kilometers (about 20 million miles).
• Experts contrast Waymo’s LiDAR‑radar‑camera fusion and high‑precision maps with Tesla’s camera‑centric strategy, describing Waymo’s approach as yielding better safety results; Waymo‑cited studies report large reductions in injury‑related metrics.
• Tesla is running limited trials in Austin and San Francisco and touts 2.23 billion FSD miles collected by its fleet, while China’s Baidu runs robotaxis in multiple cities with strong state support and Uber has partnered with Pony.ai.