Waymo’s power climb in one chart

Waymo now offers 500,000 paid robotaxi rides each week across 10 US cities, the company said. shared the post on X this week. A very vivid picture shows how the Alphabet company is growing rapidly. But it’s Waymo’s growth in ridership and market share that provides an encouraging story.

In less than two years, the company’s weekly paid robotaxi trips will increase tenfold, from 50,000 per week in May 2024 to 500,000 per week today. In the same two years, Waymo has expanded in its original markets of Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles – and beyond them to Austin, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando. A total of seven Sun Belt cities were added in the past year.

Waymo’s robotaxi fleet has also grown, though the company has guarded those numbers and wouldn’t provide updates. More information to give in December 2025 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows the company had 3,067 robotaxis equipped with the 5th generation self-driving car. The company still operates a fleet numbering “more than 3,000” today. This may change soon introduction of the 6th generation self-driving system, which will debut on Zeekr’s minivan, called Ojai, and the Hyundai Ioniq 5.

The fixed fleet number of 3,000, combined with the growth of weekly paid rides, shows that Waymo is squeezing a lot out of each robotaxi. The usage figure is important because Waymo’s empty cars that roam San Francisco or elsewhere don’t make money either increasing density.

That growth comes with challenges. Waymo has come under a lot of scrutiny in recent months from the public and regulators. For example, NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating the illegal behavior of Waymo robotaxis around school buses. Meanwhile, San Francisco city officials have raised concerns about the company’s operations, including the use of Waymo in some cases. police and firemen cleaning his cars.

Waymo’s ride numbers are still a fraction of Uber’s human-powered business. Uber completed about 13.5 billion trips in 2025, a figure that includes the last trips for passengers to ride and deliver, according to safety records. The closest snow number was shared when Uber received it in August 2024 when the company said it completed more than. 1 million trips per hour.

In other words, Waymo isn’t kicking Uber’s tires right now.

However, every month, the company’s lead in the rise of robotaxi grows.

Several companies are vying for a piece of the robotaxi pie, though many have yet to offer an autonomous ride-hailing service that pays. There are some Chinese robotaxi companies, including Pony.ai and WeRide, that charge for robotaxi rides, but none operate in the United States.

Tesla started employees a paid robotaxi service in Austin in January, and while CEO Elon Musk said the company is close to an autonomous ride-hailing service in California, they don’t have the necessary permissions to do so. Other companies, including Avride, Hyundai Traveland Zoox, both pushing to pay robotaxi services in various markets by the end of the year.

They all have things to do.