Waymo scales — and stumbles
Waymo now runs more than 400,000 robotaxi rides weekly in the U.S. and is expanding internationally, but real-world use is drawing mixed signals: vehicles are being repurposed as pothole detectors while separate incidents — like a wrong-way drive-through that needed police intervention — highlight reliability gaps. California legislators are considering rules that would require more human operators on standby after such failures, creating a potential regulatory headwind. (insightnews.com) (autoweek.com) (futurism.com) (aol.com)
A police officer had to help a Waymo robotaxi after it drove the wrong way into a Whataburger drive-through in Tempe, Arizona, and the video spread because there was no human behind the wheel to wave over and fix it. The company said a remote team gave support and the car exited after the officer intervened. (futurism.com) That clip landed at the same moment Waymo was showing how big its business has become. The company said in March 2026 that it was providing 500,000 paid robotaxi rides each week across 10 United States cities, up from 200,000 weekly paid rides reported in February 2025. (techcrunch.com, techmeme.com) Waymo is not a lab project anymore. Its cars are carrying paying riders on public streets, and Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai said in February 2026 that Waymo had completed more than 4 million paid trips in 2025. (blog.google) The company is also pushing outside the United States for the first time. Waymo said in December 2024 that its Jaguar I-PACE vehicles would arrive in Tokyo in early 2025 with taxi company Nihon Kotsu and ride-hailing app GO handling local operations. (waymo.com) What makes the story messier is that the same sensor stack that can miss a weird edge case can also spot problems cities miss. Waymo and Waze announced a pilot in Austin that uses robotaxi sensor data plus Waze reports to find potholes faster and send that information to city crews. (autoweek.com) That is the promise of robotaxis in one picture: a car that works like a taxi, a street camera, and a road inspector at the same time. But every extra job depends on the basic one working first, and that is where lawmakers are starting to press. (autoweek.com, futurism.com) In California, Senator Dave Cortese is backing a bill that would require remote assistants or remote drivers for commercial autonomous vehicles to be based in the United States, licensed in California, and staffed at a ratio of one human for every three vehicles. The proposal would also require a local incident technician to reach a scene within 10 minutes when first responders ask for help. (aol.com, trackbill.com) That is a direct challenge to the robotaxi pitch that software lets one company scale without adding drivers car by car. If California forces more humans into the loop, Waymo keeps the cars on the road but loses some of the labor savings that make the model attractive in the first place. (aol.com, trackbill.com) Waymo has already had to patch problems at fleet scale before. In 2025, the company issued a recall for 1,212 vehicles to update software tied to detecting and avoiding roadway barriers such as chains, gates, and similar obstacles. (huschblackwell.com) So the company now has two clocks running at once. One clock says robotaxis are arriving faster than almost anyone expected, with half a million paid rides a week and a Tokyo foothold; the other says every wrong turn, frozen car, or police call creates fresh arguments for regulators to slow that rollout down. (techcrunch.com, waymo.com, futurism.com, aol.com)
