A Waymo vehicle leaves a charging station in Austin, Texas, on January 15, 2026.
Brandon Bell | Getty Images
alphabetWaymo, a subsidiary of Waymo, has launched robo-taxi service to select civilian passengers in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando, the company announced Tuesday.
With its multi-city expansion, Waymo now operates in 10 U.S. cities, extending its lead in the North American driverless ride-hailing market. Google’s sister company aims to corral loyal passengers and win over skeptics, including a 2025 survey by the American Automobile Association that found six in 10 U.S. drivers fear driverless cars.
Rivals appear in the expanded version tesla, AmazonZoox, owned by , and startups Waabi and Nuro are working to bring their commercial robotaxi services online to the U.S. market. Asia’s robotaxis leaders, including Baidu-owned Apollo Go and listed company WeRide, are gaining market share overseas.
Waymo said “selected passengers” in four cities who downloaded the company’s app “will receive an invitation to their first local ride.” The company plans to invite more passengers in stages and make the service generally available in these markets by the end of 2026.
Waymo said in a blog post that Tuesday’s expansion “further deepens our commitment to Texas and Florida.”
Waymo began serving passengers in Miami in January, and the company partnered last year to begin serving passengers in Austin. Uber. In addition, Waymo operates in the Atlanta, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco Bay Area markets.
On the market starting Tuesday, Waymo will use its fifth-generation driver system in the base model Jaguar I-PACE sedan. Earlier this month, the company began offering rides to employees and their guests in California using Waymo’s sixth-generation driver system, which is built on Geely’s Ojai base model.
The company also announced in February that it had raised a $16 billion funding round, with Alphabet as a “lead investor,” valuing the company at $126 billion.
As of the end of January, Waymo had just over 3,000 self-driving cars in service, according to filings with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Motor vehicle safety regulators have launched an investigation into the behavior of the company’s vehicles around schools and school buses.
The company has also faced criticism for how its vehicles operated during a December power outage in San Francisco at the height of the storm. Waymo vehicles stopped in the middle of some roads, contributing to traffic congestion.
Waymo said in a letter to Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., this month that it already provides more than 400,000 paid trips a week across the U.S. and has taken more than 20 million trips during its lifetime.
Markey called on Waymo and other AV developers to be more transparent about how driverless cars rely on humans, or “remote assistants,” to give instructions to the cars from a distant customer service center when they encounter difficult situations.
–CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed reporting
