Waymo expands and sells sensor data
Waymo quietly launched in Nashville and has begun testing and mapping in downtown Chicago, expanding its robotaxi footprint. Its cars are now also tracking potholes and sharing that data with Waze and city authorities, turning vehicles into mobile sensor platforms as well as transport services. ( )
Waymo’s cars are no longer just selling rides. In April 2026, the company opened public robotaxi service in Nashville and, on the same week, began testing and mapping streets in downtown Chicago. (waymo.com, wttw.com) The Nashville launch started on April 7 and covers about 60 square miles, including Downtown, Midtown, East Nashville, and Music Row. Waymo said riders are being invited in on a rolling basis through its own app instead of a one-day citywide switch. (waymo.com, newschannel5.com) Chicago is a different stage. Waymo vehicles have been spotted in the Near North Side and downtown with human drivers behind the wheel because Illinois still does not broadly allow fully driverless commercial service on public roads. (wttw.com, my.ilga.gov) That legal detail matters because mapping is how Waymo usually enters a city. The cars first learn lane markings, curb space, traffic patterns, and tricky intersections before the company asks regulators and riders to trust a car with nobody in the front seat. (nbcchicago.com, wttw.com) Now Waymo is adding a second business on top of that street learning. On April 9, Waymo and Waze said they are piloting a program that sends pothole data collected by robotaxis into Waze’s city platform so local governments can see road damage faster. (techcrunch.com, theverge.com) Waze already has a system that cities use to watch crashes, slowdowns, and driver reports. Waymo plugs into that system with car-mounted sensors instead of waiting for a human driver to tap “pothole” on a phone screen. (support.google.com, techcrunch.com) That turns every robotaxi into a road inspector that works while it is doing its regular job. A fleet that is already driving passengers around Nashville, Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando can also scan pavement block by block. (waymo.com, techcrunch.com) Waymo has enough cars on the road for that extra data stream to be useful. TechCrunch reported on March 27 that the company is now averaging 500,000 paid robotaxi trips a week across its markets, up from 50,000 weekly trips in May 2024. (techcrunch.com) The company has been hinting at this shift for years by publishing the Waymo Open Dataset, which packages sensor recordings from its vehicles for outside researchers. The new pothole deal is the commercial version of the same idea: first collect the street, then sell pieces of what the car learns about the street. (waymo.com, github.com) So the expansion into Nashville and the scouting run in Chicago are not just about adding more pickup dots on a map. They also enlarge the territory where Waymo can gather road-condition data and hand cities a live maintenance feed built from the same cameras and lasers that keep the car driving straight. (waymo.com, techcrunch.com)
