First public driverless robotaxi
2020-10Waymo
Waymo One opened fully driverless rides to the public in Phoenix.
All fields
Autonomous Driving
How close are driverless cars to scale?
Live Updated 2026-05
Distance to goal
The single most intuitive view — current position against the end goal, on a log scale.
Weekly paid robotaxi rides
Metric detailnow
450,000
Waymo
goal
~0.0 orders of magnitude to go
Headline indicators
Who leads
Standings by actor, within this field only.
Paid rides / week
Metric detailAutonomous miles
Metric detailMilestone timeline
Clear-cut events: crossed or not crossed.
8 achieved 0 in progress 1 locked
Paid driverless approved in San Francisco
2023-08Waymo
Regulators allowed 24/7 paid driverless service in a major dense city.
Tesla launches a robotaxi pilot
2025-06Tesla
Tesla began a limited robotaxi pilot in Austin — early and small-scale.
China freezes new robotaxi permits after Baidu outage
2026-04China (MIIT) / Baidu
After 100+ Baidu Apollo Go robotaxis failed simultaneously in Wuhan (a cloud outage stranded riders up to two hours), China suspended all new autonomous-driving permits on 29 Apr 2026 — the first nationwide robotaxi licensing freeze.
First robotaxi rides with no in-car safety monitor
2026-01Tesla
Tesla began public Austin robotaxi rides with no human safety monitor in the car (22 Jan 2026); by June it covered the entire Austin metro (~245 sq mi, ~13–20 Model Ys), though remote operators can still intervene.
Waymo pauses all freeway robotaxi rides
2026-05Waymo
Waymo suspended all freeway rides (San Francisco, LA, Phoenix, Miami) to improve construction-zone handling, after recalling 3,791 vehicles over flooded-roadway incidents — a notable safety pullback on its hardest driving domain.
100M fully autonomous miles
2025-07Waymo
Crossed 100M rider-only miles, doubling from 50M in seven months.
450,000+ paid rides per week
2025-12Waymo
Roughly 1M rides a month across 10+ US cities, widening its lead.
Profitable, nationwide robotaxi service
~ 2030s—
Driverless service that is broadly available and economically self-sustaining.
Related news & analysis
Analysis 2026-03-27
Who's actually winning robotaxis? Waymo leads on paid driverless rides and miles; Tesla is betting on a camera-only, mass-market path; Cruise exited in 2024. We weigh the very different strategies. (Our opinion, not investment advice.) Explainer 2026-03-20
Why autonomous miles matter Cumulative rider-only miles are the experience base behind safety claims: more real, driverless miles means more rare situations seen and handled. It's the denominator under every crash-rate comparison. Explainer 2026-03-13
Robotaxi vs driver-assist: the SAE levels “Self-driving” spans everything from lane-keeping (Level 2) to no-human-needed robotaxis (Level 4). Waymo runs Level 4 in set areas; most consumer “autopilot” is Level 2. The gap is the whole game. i
Every figure links to a primary source. We publish no invented scores. Tracker numbers are neutral; analysis is labelled separately.