Waymo dominated U.S. robotaxi market in 2024, but Tesla and Amazon’s Zoox loom
A Waymo rider-only robotaxi is seen during a test ride in San Francisco, California, U.S., December 9, 2022.
Paresh Dave | Reuters
Despite General Motor’s decision to shutter its Cruise robotaxi business earlier this month, the U.S. has never been closer to a driverless future.
For the autonomous vehicle industry, 2024 will be remembered as the year that at least one major U.S. player — Alphabet-owned Waymo — saw glimmers of mainstream adoption and made strides toward commercial viability.
That came after a rocky start for the self-driving car industry domestically.
Following a decade of sizable venture investments in AV companies, Uber sold off its self-driving business in 2020 after a fatal collision, and two years later Ford abandoned its stake in its robotaxi developers Argo.AI. In 2023, Cruise paused all of its driverless operations after collisions led to investigations and a suspension of its licenses in California. When GM decided to retreat from the robotaxi business earlier this month, it had already poured $10 billion into Cruise.
Waymo may have outlasted Cruise to lead the U.S. market but domestic competitors are working to catch up, too — most notably Elon Musk’s automaker Tesla and Amazon-owned Zoox.
At stake is a share of a massive market for ride-hailing services in and beyond the U.S. According to research by Fortune Business Insights, the global ride-sharing market is projected to grow from an estimated $123.08 billion in 2024 to $480.09 billion by 2032.
As 2025 approaches, here’s where these major players stand.
Hyundai Motor and Waymo have agreed to a multiyear, strategic partnership that includes the self-driving company adding the South Korean automaker’s Ioniq 5 electric vehicle to its robotaxi fleet.
Courtesy image
Waymo pulls way ahead
What began as “project chauffeur” at Google in 2009 became a publicly available, commercial robotaxi service across multiple U.S. cities this year.
The project, rebranded as Waymo in 2016, has now completed more than 4 million paid autonomous trips in total, the company said Wednesday. That’s more than triple the number a year ago, when Waymo said it had completed around 700,000 driverless ride-hail trips.
Waymo’s service now operates in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, covering more than 500 square miles of public roads.
The company dropped its digital velvet rope in June and opened its robotaxi service to all San Franciscans, allowing them to hail rides via the Waymo One app. Opening to the general public proved to riders, and internally, that the company’s fleet of AVs can work well in the traffic conditions of a complex urban environment.
In July, Alphabet’s then-CFO, Ruth Porat, announced a multiyear investment by Google’s parent into Waymo on an earnings call, which amounted to $5.6 billion in total, with $5 billion of that coming from Alphabet.
Waymo co-CEOs, Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov, told employees at an all-hands meeting in November that they should scale up as aggressively as possible but do so with safety at the forefront of all their efforts, company insiders told CNBC.
A big focus for Waymo in 2025 will be expanding its robotaxi service to more cities, winning over riders and continuing research and development on newer technology that will allow the company’s AVs to operate in more weather and traffic conditions.
Waymo plans to launch a commercial service in Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, with rides available through the Uber app next year. It’s also begun testing in Miami with plans to offer rides to the public there in 2026.
Earlier this month, Waymo announced its first international testing destination in Tokyo. Waymo said it’s partnered with the taxi app GO and one of Japan’s largest taxi operators, Nihon Kotsu, and will commence test rides in early 2025.
Waymo showed off its next generation of self-driving vehicles, which it will be making with Chinese auto giant Geely, in August. Waymo’s custom hardware and software will be integrated into the Geely Zeekr electric SUVs. For this new robotaxi, Waymo was able to reduce the number of cameras on board from 29 to 13 and lower the number of costly lidar sensors on board from five to four.
The company also announced a partnership with Hyundai in October to integrate the automaker’s Ioniq 5 SUV into Waymo’s fleet of vehicles. The companies said they will begin testing the Waymo Ioniq 5s by late 2025.
Waymo is already conducting testing and validation drives in Detroit, Buffalo, New York, and at a test track in Columbus, Ohio, with its Jaguar I-Pace and newer Geely Zeekr vehicles to understand how these systems will perform in different types of traffic and weather.
Given its progress and increasing presence on U.S. streets, Waymo received plenty of social media and publicity in 2024, stirring delight and controversy.
In a Reddit channel, R/Waymo, users document every incident involving the company, including one in February where a crowd attacked a Waymo vehicle and set it on fire. The forum also dissected instances when Waymo vehicles were involved in collisions or backed up traffic.
A separate incident went viral when a woman posted on X in September that she was stuck in her Waymo robotaxi when two men stopped it by standing outside of the vehicle, asking for her phone number.
To maintain public trust in the safety of its service, Waymo has built a large public affairs operation, published more detailed safety reports in 2024, and is working closely with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, first responders and authorities in the cities where it operates.
Tesla’s Cybercab robotaxi is displayed during the AutoMobility LA 2024 auto show at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles, November 21, 2024.
Robyn Beck | AFP | Getty Images
Tesla unwraps its robotaxi concept
Musk, Tesla’s CEO, has been promising “robotaxi-ready” cars for about a decade. Each year since 2016, he has declared the company is about a year away from making his vision a reality, but Tesla still doesn’t manufacture robotaxis or run a driverless ride-hailing service.
While Tesla didn’t deliver on its robotaxi promises in 2024, Musk revealed the look and feel of Tesla’s “dedicated robotaxi” at an event in October held at a movie studio lot in Burbank, California. He called the vehicle the Cybercab and said Tesla wants to produce it by 2027 and sell it for under $30,000.
The fan-pleasing robotaxi concept was a two-seater with butterfly doors and no steering wheel or pedals. The Petersen Automotive Museum already added a preproduction Cybercab to its collection earlier this month.
At the October event, Tesla also showed off the Robovan, a low-clearance autonomous bus with an art deco design aesthetic.
Musk has promised that Tesla’s Model Y and other vehicles will be able to function as robotaxis as early as 2025 once their systems are upgraded. Model Y vehicles, without safety drivers on board, also circulated in the closed environment of the studio lot at the Burbank event, showing how Tesla envisions they will function as robotaxis.
At the time of that “We, Robot” event, Tesla had not applied for licenses and permits that would allow it to operate a commercial robotaxi service in major U.S. markets where they are required by city or state authorities.
Despite the lack of permits and licenses, Musk told analysts in an October earnings call that Tesla had already built a “development app” allowing employees to request a ride that would take them anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Bullish investors say Tesla will make good on its driverless technology promises as early as next year, but critics remain skeptical in part because of Musk’s many missed deadlines on robotaxis.
Tesla currently sells driver assistance systems, including its standard Autopilot option and a premium paid option called Full Self-Driving supervised. In correspondence with government agencies, Tesla calls these “partially automated” systems that are not robotaxi-ready. In fine print in its EV manuals, Tesla says FSD and Autopilot require a human driver at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at all times.
This year, Tesla corresponded with authorities in Austin regarding safety expectations for its autonomous vehicle technology.
Musk has repeatedly painted regulation as a hurdle that prevented Tesla from putting self-driving cars on U.S. roads. On a Tesla earnings call on Oct. 23, Musk said he would use his sway with now President-elect Donald Trump to establish a “federal approval process for autonomous vehicles.”
However, AV policy expert Bryant Walker Smith rejected the notion that regulation has curtailed any robotaxi business in a post for Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society. Pointing to Waymo as an example, Walker Smith wrote, “AVs can be — and in fact are — lawfully deployed and regulated under existing federal statutory law.”
A Zoox autonomous robotaxi in San Francisco, California, US, on Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Zoox ‘toasters’ heat up
Well before Tesla showed off its Robovan and Cybercab designs, Zoox in February secured important permits allowing it to carry members of the public in its autonomous vehicles in Foster City, California, this year.
Founded in 2014 and acquired by Amazon in 2020 in a deal worth around $1.3 billion, Zoox has developed a unique self-driving shuttle that features big side windows, inward-facing seats and no steering wheel, driver’s seat or traditional windshield.
Zoox in March expanded the environmental conditions its AVs can handle on public roads to include “nighttime driving, driving under light rain and damp road conditions, and at speeds up to 45 mph,” a spokesperson told CNBC.
The company’s vehicles can carry four adults and luggage comfortably, and the small shuttles feature calming lighting, ambient music and interior cameras to monitor what’s happening inside the cabin. Some early riders have described the look of the Zoox vehicles as “futuristic hot dog toasters” or “toasters on wheels.“
Led by CEO Aicha Evans, Zoox is aiming to offer free rides to more members of the public early next year, before opening up to paying customers and the general public.
The service will start in Las Vegas and expand to San Francisco, the company told CNBC. It will begin with an early rider program called Zoox Explorers, allowing select users to ride in a Zoox for free and provide feedback.
With its robotaxis currently on public roads in Las Vegas, San Francisco and Foster City, this summer, Zoox also began testing in Austin and Miami, where its test fleet is still driving.
The company has also been attracting senior talent. One notable recent hire was Zheng Gao, previously the leader of Tesla’s autopilot hardware design team, now director of hardware engineering for Zoox.
A in San Francisco, California, US, on Thursday Aug. 10, 2023.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Cruise’s closure
Despite clear demand for robotaxi rides in the U.S. market, GM surprised some longtime industry observers when it announced earlier this month that it was exiting the business.
“Cruise was well on its way to a robotaxi business, but when you look at the fact you’re deploying a fleet, there’s a whole operations piece of doing that,” GM CEO Mary Barra said on a call announcing the strategic change.
The Detroit automaker will now focus on the development of what it calls “personal autonomous vehicles” instead of robotaxis. GM has yet to determine how many of Cruise’s 2,300 employees will move into its broader tech team.
“In case it was unclear before, it is clear now: GM are a bunch of dummies,” Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, who sold Cruise to GM in 2016 and left the company in November 2023, posted on X after the automaker’s exit announcement.
An early entrant in the U.S. robotaxi market, Cruise grounded its driverless operations in October 2023, shortly before Vogt’s departure. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration fined Cruise $1.5 million after the company failed to disclose details of a serious crash that month involving a pedestrian.
A third-party probe into the incident ordered by GM and Cruise found that culture issues, ineptitude and poor leadership led to the accident.
Technology
‘Robotaxi has reached a tipping point’: Baidu, Nvidia leaders see momentum as competition rises
Chinese tech company Baidu announced Monday it can sell some robotaxi rides without any human staff in the vehicles.
Baidu
BEIJING — Chinese robotaxi companies are expanding abroad at a faster clip than U.S. rivals Waymo and Tesla — at a time when industry leaders say autonomous driving is finally near an inflection point.
“I think robotaxi has reached a tipping point, both here in China and in the U.S.,” Baidu CEO Robin Li said Tuesday on an earnings call, according to a FactSet transcript.
“There are enough people who have [had the] chance to experience driverless rides, and the word of mouth has created positive social media feedback,” he said, noting that the wider public exposure could speed up regulatory approval.
His comments echoed similar notes of optimism in the last few weeks from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Xpeng Co-President Brian Gu — who reversed his previously cautious stance after faster-than-anticipated tech advances. Xpeng is launching robotaxis in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou next year.
It’s a global market with significant growth potential, likely worth more than $25 billion by 2030, according to Goldman Sachs’ estimates in May.
To seize that opportunity, Chinese companies are aggressively expanding overseas and claim they are close to making robotaxis a viable business, rather than simply burning cash to grab market share.
In the last 18 months, Baidu, Pony.ai and WeRide landed partnerships with Uber that allow users of the ride-hailing app to order a robotaxi in specific locations, starting in the Middle East.
Such tie-ups “will be critical to success” as they enable robotaxi companies to operate more efficiently and reach profitability more quickly, said Counterpoint Senior Analyst Murtuza Ali.
Once we can generate profit for every single car in a second-tier city [like Wuhan] in mainland China, we can generate profits in lots of cities across the world.
Halton Niu
General manager for Apollo Go’s overseas business
Expanding on experience at home
Baidu says that since late last year, its Apollo Go robotaxi unit has reached per-vehicle profitability in Wuhan, where the company has operated over 1,000 vehicles in its largest deployment in China.
That means ridership is enough to offset a Wuhan taxi fare that’s 30% cheaper than in Beijing or Shanghai, and far below prices in the U.S. or Europe. Besides developing autonomous driving systems, Baidu has also produced electrically-powered robotaxi vehicles — without relying on a third-party manufacturer — that are 50% cheaper.
“Once we can generate profit for every single car in a second-tier city [like Wuhan] in mainland China, we can generate profits in lots of cities across the world,” Halton Niu, general manager for Apollo Go’s overseas business, told CNBC.
“Scale matters,” he said. “If you only deploy, for example, 100 to 200 cars in a single city, if you only cover a small area of the city, you can never become profitable.”
How U.S. rivals stack up
Scale remains the dividing line. In the U.S., Alphabet-owned Waymo operates more than 2,500 vehicles and is expanding rapidly from major cities in California to Texas and Florida, with plans to enter London next year, following its first overseas venture in Tokyo.
Tesla sells its electric cars in China, and reportedly showed off its Cybercab in Shanghai this month. But it began testing its robotaxis in Texas only in June, and this week obtained a permit to operate in Arizona.
Amazon’s Zoox is also ramping up its expansion in the U.S., but has not released overseas plans.
The three companies have not disclosed plans to break even on their robotaxis.
Baidu Apollo Go’s Niu did not rule out an expansion into the U.S. But for now, the robotaxi operator plans to enter Europe with trials in parts of Switzerland next month, following their expansion in the Middle East this year.
Abu Dhabi last week gave Apollo Go a permit to charge fares to the public for fully driverless robotaxi rides, which are operated locally under the AutoGo brand, eight months after local trials began in parts of the city.
But Chinese startup WeRide said it received a similar permit on Oct. 31 to charge fares for its fully driverless robotaxi rides in Abu Dhabi, and claimed that removing human staff from the cars would allow it to make a profit on each vehicle.
That puts Pony.ai furthest from profitability among the three major Chinese robotaxi operators. Its CFO Leo Haojun Wang told The Wall Street Journal in mid-September that the company aimed to make a profit on each car by the end of this year or early next year.
Pony.ai plans to launch a fully autonomous commercial robotaxi business in Dubai in 2026, after receiving a testing permit in late September. The company plans to roll out in Europe in the coming months and has also outlined an expansion into Singapore.
Pony.ai and WeRide are set to release quarterly earnings early next week.
“Currently, companies like Waymo, Baidu, WeRide and Pony.ai are leading in terms of fleet size, which positions them advantageously in the race for profitability,” said Yuqian Ding, head of China Autos Research at HSBC.
Scale and safety
Fleet size is becoming a competitive marker. Pony.ai reportedly said it plans to release 1,000 robotaxis in the Middle East by 2028, while WeRide aims to operate a fleet of 1,000 robotaxis in the region by the end of next year.
Niu said Apollo Go operates around 100 robotaxis in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and plans to double its vehicle fleet in the next few months.
“Apollo Go has had a head start with significantly more test rides than the other two,” Kai Wang, Asia equity market strategist at Morningstar, said in an email. “The more testing and data you can collect from trips taken, the more likely the AI sensors are able to recognize the objects on the road, which means better safety as well.”
He cautioned that despite some initial progress, the robotaxi race remains uncertain as “no one has truly had mass adoption for their vehicles.”
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Coverage remains limited. Even in China, robotaxis are only allowed to operate in selected zones, though Pony.ai recently became the first to win regulatory approval to operate its robotaxis across all of Shenzhen, dubbed China’s Silicon Valley. In Beijing, self-driving taxis are mostly limited to a suburb called Yizhuang.
Anecdotally, CNBC tests have found Pony.ai offered a smoother ride than Apollo Go, which was prone to hard braking.
As for safety — which is critical for regulatory approval — none of the six operators has reported fatalities or major injuries caused by the robotaxis so far. But Apollo Go and Waymo have begun advertising low airbag deployment rates.
Even if that’s not enough to convince regulators worldwide, Beijing is expected to ramp up support at home.
HSBC’s Ding predicts the number of robotaxis on China’s roads could multiply from a few thousand to tens of thousands between the end of this year and 2026, a shift that would give operators more proof that their model works.
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., during the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025.
Stefani Reynolds | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In the weeks leading up to Nvidia’s third-quarter earnings report, investors debated whether the markets were in an AI bubble, fretting over the massive sums being committed to building data centers and whether they could provide a long-term return on investment.
During Wednesday’s earnings call with analysts, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang began his comments by rejecting that premise.
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Huang said. “From our vantage point we see something very different.”
In many respects, Huang’s remarks are to be expected. He’s leading the company at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom, and has built its market cap to $4.5 trillion because of soaring demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units.
Huang’s smackdown of bubble talk matters because Nvidia counts every major cloud provider — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle — as a customer. Most of the major AI model developers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Meta, are also big buyers of Nvidia GPUs.
Huang has deep visibility into the market, and on the call he offered a three-pronged argument for why we’re not in a bubble.
First, he said that areas like data processing, ad recommendations, search systems, and engineering, are turning to GPUs because they need the AI. That means older computing infrastructure based around the central processor will transition to new systems running on Nvidia’s chips.
Second, Huang said, AI isn’t just being integrated into current applications, but it will enable entirely new ones.
Finally, according to Huang, “agentic AI,” or applications that can run without significant input from the user, will be able to reason and plan, and will require even more computing power.
In making the case of Nvidia, Huang said it’s the only company that can address the three use cases.
“As you consider infrastructure investments, consider these three fundamental dynamics,” Huang said. “Each will contribute to infrastructure growth in the coming years.”
Reversing the slide
In its earnings release, Nvidia reported revenue and profit that sailed past estimates and issued better-than-expected guidance. Last month, Huang provided a $500 billion forecast for sales of the company’s AI chips over calendar 2025 and 2026.
The company said on Wednesday that its order backlog didn’t even include a few recent deals, like an agreement with Anthropic that was announced this week or the expansion of a deal with Saudi Arabia.
“The number will grow,” CFO Colette Kress said on the call, saying the company was on track to hit the forecast.
Prior to Wednesday’s results, Nvidia shares were down about 8% this month. Other stocks tied to the AI have gotten hit even harder, with CoreWeave plunging 44% in November, Oracle dropping 14% and Palantir falling 17%.
Some of the worry on Wall Street has been tied to the debt that certain companies have used to finance their infrastructure buildouts.
“Our customers’ financing is up to them,” Huang said.
Specific to Nvidia, investors have raised concerns in recent weeks about how much of the company’s sales were going to a small number of hyperscalers.
Last month, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet all lifted their forecasts for capital expenditures due to their AI buildouts, and now collectively expect to spend more than $380 billion this year.
Huang said that even without a new business model, Nvidia’s chips boost hyperscaler revenue, because they power recommendation systems for short videos, books, and ads.
People will soon start appreciating what’s happening underneath the surface of the AI boom, Huang said, versus “the simplistic view of what’s happening to capex and investment.”
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