Waymo

Google's development of self-driving technology began on January 17, 2009, at Google X lab, run by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The project was launched at Google by Sebastian Thrun, the former director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) and Anthony Levandowski, founder of 510 Systems and Anthony's Robots.

The initial software code and artificial intelligence (AI) design of the effort started before the team worked at Google, when Thrun and 15 engineers, including Dmitri Dolgov, Mike Montemerlo, Hendrik Dahlkamp, Sven Strohband, and David Stavens, built Stanley and Junior, Stanford's entries in the 2005 and 2007 DARPA Challenges. Later, aspects of this technology were used in a digital mapping project for SAIL called VuTool. In 2007, Google acqui-hired the entire VuTool team to help advance Google's Street View technology.

As part of Street View development, 100 Toyota Priuses were outfitted with Topcon digital mapping hardware developed by 510 Systems.

In 2008, the Street View team launched project Ground Truth, to create accurate road maps by extracting data from satellites and street views.

In February 2008, a Discovery Channel producer for the documentary series Prototype This! phoned Levandowski. The producer requested to borrow Levandowski's Ghost Rider, the autonomous two-wheeled motorcycle Levandowski's Berkeley team had built for the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge that Levandowski had later donated to the Smithsonian. Since the motorcycle was not available, Levandowski offered to retrofit a Toyota Prius as a self-driving pizza delivery car for the show.

As a Google employee, Levandowski asked Larry Page and Thrun whether Google wanted to participate in the show. Both declined, citing liability issues. However, they authorized Levandowski to move forward with the project, as long as it was not associated with Google. Within weeks Levandowski founded Anthony's Robots to do so. He retrofitted the car with light detection and ranging (lidar) technology, sensors, and cameras. The Stanford team behind the Stanley car provided the project with its codebase. The ensuing episode depicting Pribot delivering pizza across the San Francisco Bay Bridge under police escort aired in December 2008.

The project's success convinced Google to greenlight its own self-driving car program in January 2009. …

In 2017, Waymo highlighted four business uses for its autonomous technology: robotaxis; trucking and logistics; urban public transportation; and passenger cars. As of 2023, trucking is no longer a focus.

As of October 2026, Waymo serves select metropolitan areas in the United States, and has announced expansion into several other countries.

The service is accessed in most locations by using the Waymo iOS app or Android app, while Waymo service in Austin and Atlanta is available by using the Uber app; service in Nashville is available on both the Waymo app and the Lyft app. Once a Waymo vehicle arrives, riders push a button to "start ride", and have optional "help", "lock", and "pull over" buttons. Rides usually complete without riders pressing any optional buttons. The car's steering wheel turns as the car makes turns, and a passenger may sit in the right-front passenger seat, but not in the driver's seat. Some information gathered by the car's sensors is displayed on a screen.

As of March 2026, Waymo has 3,000 robotaxis in service, provides 500,000 paid rides per week, and drives 4 million rider-only miles per week.

In September 2025, Waymo and the city of Chandler, Arizona, announced that Waymo would be integrated into Chandler's public microtransit service.

In 2020 Waymo launched a self-driving truck development division designated as Waymo Via, to work with OEMs to integrate its technology into commercial vehicles. The company began testing Class 8 tractor-trailers in 2018 in Atlanta, expanding in 2019 to southwest shipping routes across Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas. The company opened a trucking hub in Dallas, Texas in 2021. It partnered with Daimler to integrate autonomous technology into a fleet of Freightliner Cascadia trucks. Waymo operated 48 Class 8 autonomous trucks with safety drivers.

Waymo tested its technology in commercial delivery vehicles with United Parcel Service. In July 2020 Waymo and Stellantis expanded their partnership, including the development of Ram ProMaster delivery vehicles.

In July 2023, Waymo announced that it was moving away from commercial development of self-driving trucks to focus on the ride-hailing Waymo business, and shuttered the Waymo Via trucking program. …

Google has invested heavily in matrix multiplication and video processing hardware such as the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) to augment Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs) and Intel's central processing units (CPUs) used in Waymo vehicles.

Waymo manufactures a suite of self-driving hardware developed in-house. This includes sensors and hardware-enhanced vision system, lidar, and radar. Sensors give 360-degree views while lidar detects objects up to 300 metres (980 ft) away. Short-range lidar images objects near the vehicle, and radar is used to see around other vehicles and track objects in motion.

Waymo uses a deep-learning architecture called VectorNet to predict vehicle trajectories in complex traffic scenarios. It uses a graph neural network to model the interactions between vehicles and has demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on several benchmark datasets for trajectory prediction.

Waymo Carcraft is a virtual world in which Waymo simulates driving conditions. The simulator was named after the video game World of Warcraft. With Carcraft, 25,000 virtual self-driving cars navigate through models of Austin, Texas; Mountain View, California; Phoenix, Arizona; and other cities.

As of October 2024, Morgan Stanley estimated the total vehicle cost at over $120,000, and another source estimated $150,000. As of June 2025, a third source estimates it to be above $100,000. Other costs include ride monitors, service personnel, and real estate for storing and servicing the vehicles.

In February 2026, Waymo's chief safety officer confirmed that the company employs remote assistance workers in the United States and the Philippines to address situations that the vehicles cannot independently solve. The company stated that the remote workers do not drive the vehicles, simply providing guidance to the vehicle, which can accept or reject it.

From California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) data, as of September 2025, Waymo delivered 4.75 million Passenger Miles Traveled (PMT) monthly, which required 6.57 million Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT). This is a threefold growth from September 2024 in both PMT and VMT, with the ratio staying roughly equal.

Vehicles have an average passenger occupancy of 0.75. In 70% of the trips, only one passenger is in the car. For 44% of miles, the vehicle is empty, and 4.6% of requested trips are cancelled.

In 2024, Waymo and insurance company Swiss Re published a study which estimated that Waymo generated 92% fewer bodily injury claims and 88% fewer property damage claims than human drivers over the same number of miles in the same locations. The study said that by the end of 2024, the company faced two potential bodily injury claims (accidents where the Waymo vehicle was potentially at fault) and estimated that human drivers would have generated 26 bodily injury claims. For property damage claims, Waymo logged nine versus an estimated 78 for human drivers. Experts noted that the sample size in the study of 25 million miles driven is extremely small (0.0008%), compared to the 3 trillion miles logged annually by human drivers in the US.

A July 2026 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety compared AVs from Waymo to human drivers from 2021 to 2024 in the US states of Arizona, California, and Texas, and found that the total AV crash rate per vehicle-miles traveled was 68% lower than the human driver rate, the single-vehicle crash rate was 85% lower, and the rate of crashes which caused injury or fatality was 81% lower (though many times the AVs had no people on board to be injured). In crashes serious enough to report to police, the Waymo vehicle was at fault in 8% of cases, and in another 8% of cases fault was unclear. The AVs did not operate on interstate highways during the study period.

In July 2021, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) started requiring autonomous vehicle companies to report any accidents which result in injury or property damage that occur within 30 seconds of the vehicle operating in autonomous mode. As of August 17, 2026, the (NHTSA) has logged 2,308 accidents (cumulative since July 2021), involving Waymo vehicles. From July 2021 to January 2025, Waymo's vehicles have been involved in about 30 accidents with injuries, though the NHTSA reports do not ascribe fault.

In September 2025, a Waymo in Atlanta was recorded illegally passing a stopped school bus. Georgia State Representative Clint Crowe and State Senator Rick Williams criticized Waymo, with Williams stating his support for higher fines for self-driving cars.

In 2018, after the death of Elaine Herzberg — the first recorded case of a pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car (an Uber test vehicle) — there were several cases of Waymo cars being vandalized.

In 2023, the San Francisco group Safe Street Rebel used a practice called "coning" to trap Waymo and Cruise cars with traffic cones as a form of protest after stating that the cars had been involved in hundreds of incidents.

In February 2024, during Lunar New Year celebrations in Chinatown, San Francisco, a mob of vandals attacked, graffitied, and set fire to a Waymo car. No one was injured.

In February 2024, a pair of Waymo passengers described an attack by an onlooker who attempted to cover the car's sensors.

In July 2024, Waymo sued two people who allegedly vandalized their cars.

During the June 2025 Los Angeles protests against mass deportation, several Waymo cars were set on fire when riots broke out. Officials including California Governor Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass condemned the destruction, attributing it to extremists infiltrating otherwise-peaceful protests.

Waymo has been criticized for law enforcement agencies' use of its camera footage. According to Waymo, it "does not provide information or data to law enforcement without a valid legal request".

In July 2026, the San Mateo Police Department had stated that Waymo had reported to them that 15-year-old passengers were drinking alcohol and firing a black gun from inside the vehicle towards other vehicles. …