Waymo will bring its robotaxi service to Atlanta after the summer

Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary dedicated to developing hardware and software for passenger transport using fully autonomous vehicles, has quite ambitious plans for the year that has just begun. As we have just learned, the US city of Atlanta is its next target, where its robotaxis have already begun to circulate, although for now in a testing phase and available only to its employees.

Waymo’s service in Atlanta will, however, have some peculiarities compared with the one it offers in other cities such as San Francisco, Phoenix or Los Angeles, where it has been operating for some time. In Atlanta, the company has chosen to partner with Uber, which will be responsible for the fleet of autonomous vehicles that will carry passengers from one point to another in the city. In this way, customers of this service in Atlanta will not be able to use the Waymo app to request a vehicle to pick them up, but will have to do so through the Uber app.

This collaboration between Waymo and Uber debuted in the city of Phoenix, Arizona, where users could book rides through both apps, and now, ahead of Atlanta, it will also extend to the city of Austin, Texas, where initially only a select group of users could access Waymo’s robotaxis through its own app. In Austin, the full transition to the service through Uber is underway, coinciding with the entry of a new competitor, Tesla, which plans to launch its own robotaxi service in June.

Robotaxis are spreading across the United States

Waymo’s plans, as we have said, are however much more ambitious. The company plans to begin testing its autonomous passenger transport service in at least ten other US cities, starting with San Diego in California and Las Vegas in Nevada.

Waymo thus plans to evaluate how its autonomous driving system adapts to different traffic, weather and local driving conditions. Las Vegas will thus pose, for example, a much greater challenge for the company, with its dense traffic and its distinctive urban layout. While San Diego will serve to validate whether it is possible to deploy the service with a considerably smaller volume of previously accumulated data.

Already in 2026, Waymo also plans to expand to some other US cities, such as Miami in Florida. In this case thanks to a collaboration with Moove, a Nigerian startup specializing in financial services and fleet management for the mobility sector.