Waymo will end the second quarter of 2026 with paid robotaxi service in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, Miami, and Washington DC. The company crossed 7 million paid rides in 2025 and is on track to do 11 million in 2026. The Waymo One app has 2.8 million active users. The fleet stands at roughly 1,700 vehicles in service across all markets. The numbers are not speculation anymore. They are operating numbers from a service people are using every day.
Cruise restarted in late 2025 after the suspension that followed the 2023 incident in San Francisco. The relaunch has been deliberate. Two cities, San Francisco and Phoenix, with reduced operating hours, smaller fleets, and a heavy emphasis on safety operators in the loop. The pace is slower than Waymo, intentionally. General Motors has framed the relaunch as a multi year rebuild rather than a race. Cruise crossed 100 thousand paid rides in the first quarter of 2026, which sounds small next to Waymo and is small. It is also a real product back in the market.
Tesla launched its robotaxi service in June 2025 in Austin and expanded to four additional Texas cities through the rest of the year. The service uses a modified Model Y fleet with hardware updates rolled out under the Full Self Driving v13 software stack. Tesla's approach is meaningfully different from Waymo's. The Tesla cars rely on cameras only, no lidar, no high definition mapping. Whether that approach scales as well as Waymo's remains the open question. The Texas data so far shows fewer interventions per mile than expected.
The competitive picture is starting to shake out by approach. Waymo represents the maximum sensor approach. Lidar, radar, cameras, high definition maps, slow conservative deployment, very high safety record. Tesla represents the minimum sensor approach. Cameras only, no maps, faster deployment, leaning on the volume of data Tesla generates from its consumer fleet. Cruise sits in the middle. The market is going to find out which approach is right by 2027 or 2028, when one of them either pulls ahead or fails to scale.
Pricing has been the surprise. Waymo rides in San Francisco run roughly 18 percent below comparable Uber rides, factoring in surge pricing on the Uber side. Tesla's robotaxi in Austin runs about 25 percent below Uber for similar trips. The unit economics work because the cost of a human driver is taken out of the cost stack, and that cost was a substantial share of the ride hailing fare structure. As the fleets scale, prices are likely to drop further.
The labor implications have been the most underdiscussed part of the conversation. Uber and Lyft drivers in the US numbered roughly 2.4 million in 2025. The robotaxi expansion is happening city by city, not all at once, but the trend is clear. In San Francisco specifically, the share of ride hailing miles done by Waymo is now estimated at 8 to 11 percent of the total ride hailing market, up from under 1 percent in 2023. Driver earnings in those markets have come under pressure as a direct result.
Cities are responding in different ways. San Francisco has effectively let the market work, with regulators stepping in only when safety incidents occur. Austin has been the most permissive, allowing Tesla to launch with less oversight than Waymo faced in California. Atlanta has moved fast and pulled in Waymo through a tax incentive package. Phoenix has been the longest tenured robotaxi market and has the most data on what the long run looks like. The picture across cities is highly uneven.
Insurance has been the quiet barrier. Robotaxi operators self insure or work with commercial fleet insurers. The premiums per mile are still significantly higher than for human driven fleets, mostly because the actuarial data set is still small. Some insurers, including Travelers and AIG, have launched specific robotaxi insurance products in the past year. As the data set grows, premiums are expected to decline. That decline matters because insurance is one of the few cost lines that scales with miles.
For investors, the question is who wins. Waymo is owned by Alphabet, which is a 1.9 trillion dollar company where robotaxis are a small but high growth division. Tesla is its own ticker and the robotaxi business is starting to show up in earnings disclosures. Cruise is owned by GM, which has put roughly 10 billion dollars into the program over the last six years. None of the three are pure play robotaxi stocks. That cleanup, in the form of public listings or spinoffs, is something analysts are watching for in 2027.
The technology that scales nationally will reshape urban transportation in ways that are hard to predict precisely. What is predictable is that the cars will get cheaper to operate, the cities that allow them will get more service, and the labor markets that depended on ride hailing will adjust. The era when robotaxis were a research project is over. The era of robotaxis as commercial infrastructure has begun. The market just has not finished pricing it yet.