By Ben Cohen

The website of the California Public Utilities Commission is not the first place you would go looking for signs of progress in one of the world's sexiest industries.

But every few months, this agency tasked with regulating passenger transportation publishes a bunch of spreadsheets with valuable information about self-driving cars and how many people are riding in them. And in the latest data that was recently dumped online, there was a telling update about a company identified simply as PSG0038152.

It's better known as Waymo.

Unless you live in one of the few cities where you can hail a ride from Waymo, which is owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet, it's almost impossible to appreciate just how quickly their streets have been invaded by autonomous vehicles.

Waymo was doing 10,000 paid rides a week in August 2023. By May 2024, that number of trips in cars without a driver was up to 50,000. In August, it hit 100,000. Now it's already more than 250,000.

After pulling ahead in the race for robotaxi supremacy, Waymo has started pulling away.

This is not just because Waymo is expanding into new markets. It's because of the way existing markets have come to embrace self-driving cars.

In California, the most recent batch of quarterly data reported by the company was the most encouraging yet. It showed that Waymo's number of paid rides inched higher by roughly 2% in both January and February -- and then increased 27% in March. In the nearly two years that people in San Francisco have been paying for robot chauffeurs, it was the first time that Waymo's growth slowed down for several months only to dramatically speed up again.

The numbers also showed that Waymo's cars are self-driving toward an inflection point: They were novel -- and now they're becoming normal.

This is a crucial phase of the classic diffusion curve that explains how people adopt new technology. From the Model T to ChatGPT, there is a long history of magical products that come along and follow a similar path to success.

At first, these innovations appeal to a niche market of tech geeks and early adopters. Only then do some of those products become part of everyday life. It tends to happen gradually, then suddenly, so it can be hard to recognize those breakthroughs in real time.

But if you study the Waymo data, you can see that curve taking shape.

It cracked a million total paid rides in late 2023. By the end of 2024, it reached five million. We're not even halfway through 2025 and it has already crossed a cumulative 10 million. At this rate, Waymo is on track to double again and blow past 20 million fully autonomous trips by the end of the year.

"This is what exponential scaling looks like," said Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo's co-chief executive, at Google's recent developer conference.

Waymo's autonomous taxis are only available in a few cities right now, including Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco, where self-driving cars are more of a tourist attraction than cable cars.

But the trajectory suggests what's happening there might just happen everywhere -- and sooner than you think.

"I'm confident that in a year, we'll look back at this stage and realize Waymo was just getting started," Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana told me.

The real competition is just getting started, too. In the coming weeks, Tesla is planning to unveil the robotaxi service that Elon Musk has long promised. Waymo has the first-mover advantage, but the company is not profitable and it has burned through billions of dollars to make the surreal dream of self-driving cars a reality. The world's richest man is betting that he has a less expensive strategy to help Tesla catch up.

But the longer that Waymo has the only driverless cars on the road, the bigger its lead gets.

It's becoming more popular in the places that it has already conquered even as it pushes into new cities. Earlier this year, it entered Austin, Texas, through a partnership with Uber. This summer, it's planning to launch in Atlanta. Next on the list are Miami and Washington, D.C. The cars are now mapping Boston, Nashville, New Orleans, Dallas, Las Vegas and San Diego. This past week, the company announced that it's testing Orlando, Houston and San Antonio. Waymos have even crossed the ocean to begin collecting data in Tokyo.

And that kind of exponential scaling was made possible by months, years and even decades of incremental steps along the way.

"Waymo's growth is a direct result of compounding progress across the company," Mawakana said.

It all began when students and professors from a Stanford artificial-intelligence laboratory built a robot named Stanley and won the Darpa Grand Challenge driverless-car competition in 2005. The team's key members were later recruited to lead Google's self-driving-car project, which the company revealed in 2010. The next milestones included the first completely autonomous ride on a public road in 2015 and driverless cars opening for business in 2020.

But it's 2025 that might just be remembered as the Waymo moment.

I recently took my first Waymo on a visit to San Francisco, where I ordered a sleek white Jaguar topped with a spinning lidar sensor that looked like a crown. The car parked itself right in front of me. I unlocked the doors with my phone, buckled up and prepared to brave the uncanny. Then I confirmed that I was ready for a very strange ride.

I knew how it would work. But I had to get inside a Waymo to understand how it would feel.

As the car started moving with an empty driver's seat, I was intrigued, slightly freaked and intensely aware of my surroundings. At first, I paid attention to upcoming stop signs from the back seat like I was behind the wheel. The only thing that made me more nervous than going up one of the city's treacherous hills was going down. But that unease lasted only a few blocks. Waymo's robotic drivers tend to be careful and deferential, which helps build trust with humans who are naturally skeptical. By the time we rolled up to my destination, I was busy scrolling on my phone and barely noticed.

The weirdest thing about the Waymo experience was that it no longer felt weird.

The next day, I needed a ride and faced a choice: driver or driverless? I tapped the Uber and Waymo apps. The wait times were similar. So were the prices.

I picked the Waymo.

The success of robotaxis will ultimately depend on this sort of change in human behavior -- and the latest data indicates the shift is already under way.

"This isn't science fiction," Mawakana recently told CNBC. "It's not the future. It's happening now."

Even people in San Francisco weren't especially psyched when it was starting to happen. Before they were novel or normal, self-driving cars were mostly a nuisance.

Waymo began offering paid driverless rides there on a limited basis in 2023 before opening to everyone in 2024. They have since won over the city.

Ubers and Lyfts generally cost less than Waymos, but the prices end up being comparable because you don't have to worry about tipping Waymo drivers. (Or making small talk with them.) The fleet has gotten larger -- the company says it now has more than 600 cars in San Francisco -- and wait times have gotten shorter. Its territory is wider, too, now that Waymo is available in parts of Silicon Valley, the patch of land with the highest concentration of early adopters anywhere on the planet.

These days, the main complaint from users is that they can't Waymo everywhere.

Despite receiving the green light from state regulators last year, the company does not yet offer the public driverless rides on the freeways around San Francisco. In the Waymo-crazy Bay Area, people are eager to be ferried by self-driving cars to the airport. If they fly to Phoenix, they can already get picked up by a Waymo and dropped off curbside for their flight back. The company has finished mapping San Francisco International Airport but hasn't given a timeline for Waymos operating there.

Of course, you don't need a Waymo's lidar, radar and 29 cameras to spot all the obstacles on the road ahead.

The company now has a safety record over more than 50 million driverless miles -- the equivalent of driving across America roughly 20,000 times. There are millions of car crashes in the U.S. every year that kill more than 100 people every day, but one terrible accident is all it would take to slam the brakes on Waymo's momentum.

Then there is the competition.

Most companies that tried to beat Waymo have given up. Uber and Lyft ditched their efforts to develop self-driving cars. General Motors scrapped its Cruise robotaxi program. Amazon has Zoox, but Waymo's most formidable rival in America at this point appears to be Tesla.

Six years ago, Musk tantalized investors and consumers with his prediction that robotaxis were just a year away. Now it might be a matter of days. His company is planning a June launch of its own ride-hailing service in Austin, where empty Teslas could soon find themselves at traffic lights next to driverless Waymos.

The two companies have taken radically different approaches to the technology and economics of autonomous cabs. Tesla's model runs on cameras and AI. In addition to loads of AI, Waymo's system also relies on maps, sensors and human feedback, which makes it so expensive. The company raised $5.6 billion of funding last year, when Alphabet's "Other Bets" division, which includes Waymo, reported a $4.4 billion loss.

"The issue with Waymo's cars," Musk said in April, "is they cost way-mo money."

"For us, it's really important to focus on safety and then cost," Mawakana said on CNBC. "Not cost and then safety."

She added: "There's probably a lot of ways it can be done. But we're the only ones that have done it."

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May 30, 2025 20:03 ET (00:03 GMT)

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