Waymo opened its driverless ride-hailing service to the general public in Denver, San Diego, and Tampa on Monday, bringing the Alphabet-owned company to 14 US cities.
Tens of thousands of people in each market had already signed up before the doors opened, and Waymo says it will let them in gradually over the coming weeks.
From waitlist to public in under two months
This isn’t the first time these three cities have shown up in a Waymo announcement. We reported in July that Waymo had flipped Las Vegas to fully driverless and lined up Denver, San Diego, and Tampa as the next markets. Back then, the service was still limited to employees and invited guests.
Now anyone can hail a ride. Riders in Denver and San Diego are getting Waymo’s new Zeekr-built vehicle, the roomier minivan-style platform running the company’s next-generation Waymo Driver, while the fleet fills out over the coming months.
Waymo has launched commercial service in seven new cities since March 2025, and it’s doing all of this while pushing toward a stated goal of 1 million paid rides a week by the end of the year. In May, the company expanded its coverage area by more than 20% to over 1,400 square miles, and in August it won California approval to operate across 18 counties.
The company leaned on its safety record for the rollout, saying its vehicles have been involved in 94% fewer serious-injury crashes than human drivers over the miles it has driven. To be fair, Waymo’s service mainly operates in lower-speed areas.
“From coast to coast, we’re focused on making everyday transportation safer, easier, and more accessible,” said Suzanne Philion, Waymo’s chief marketing officer.
Local officials showed up for the launch. Colorado Governor Jared Polis tied it to air quality, saying “Waymo’s launch helps us achieve cleaner air sooner,” and Tampa Mayor Jane Castor called it “another effective – and exciting – way to get around.” Waymo also worked with AARP Florida and the San Diego chapter of the National Federation of the Blind on accessibility ahead of the launch.
Tampa is where it gets interesting
One of these three cities isn’t like the others. Tampa is now a market where Waymo and Tesla are both running paid, “driverless” ride services at the same time.
Tesla added Tampa and Orlando to its Robotaxi service in July, but the comparison isn’t close. Tesla’s active fleet is extremely limited, and its own Q2 chart showed the service’s growth going flat even as the company insisted it was expanding. Waymo is showing up in the same city with no one in the driver’s seat and tens of thousands of people already on the list.
Electrek’s Take
It does feel like Waymo is seriously scaling now. Adding three metros at once, with tens of thousands pre-signed in each, and now 14 cities total. Waymo isn’t running a pilot anymore. It’s running a business, and it’s compounding.
The Tampa overlap is the clearest scoreboard we’ve had. Tesla has spent two years promising that its camera-only approach would let it scale robotaxis faster and cheaper than anyone. Instead, it’s the one still babysitting a couple dozen cars with remote monitoring, while Waymo drops a fully driverless, public service into the same Florida market and moves on to the next one. The gap isn’t closing. It’s widening.
None of this means Waymo has won. The Zeekr-built vehicle needs to prove it can be produced at the volume a million weekly rides demands, and the unit economics of a hardware-heavy sensor stack across a growing but still limited market are still an open question.
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