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About Robotaxis

For decades the driverless taxi was a demo that always seemed five years away. Then it quietly became a real way to get across town. In a growing list of cities, riders summon a car with no one in the driver's seat, watch the steering wheel turn itself and arrive without having made small talk. Robotaxis are now a business with fleets, fares and quarterly targets, and this page follows the companies racing to scale them and the regulators and residents deciding how far they may go.

The modern effort traces back to the DARPA challenges of the mid-2000s, whose alumni seeded Google's self-driving project, later spun out as Waymo. Waymo opened public driverless rides in the Phoenix area and expanded to San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities. Rivals rose and fell along the way: Uber sold its program, and General Motors shut down Cruise's robotaxi business after a 2023 crash in which a pedestrian was dragged by one of its cars. Amazon-owned Zoox built a purpose-made, bidirectional pod without a steering wheel, and Tesla began offering rides in Austin with its own camera-only approach and a dedicated Cybercab.

China is running a parallel race at enormous scale, with Baidu's Apollo Go, Pony.ai and WeRide operating large fleets at home and pushing into the Middle East, Europe and Southeast Asia. The open questions are the same everywhere: whether the cars are safer than human drivers, how they behave around emergency scenes and construction, what happens to taxi and ride-hail jobs, and whether the economics work once the expensive hardware and remote-assistance staff are counted.

The headlines here follow city launches, permits, ride counts, safety incidents and recalls, partnerships with ride-hailing apps and automakers, and the expansion of autonomous trucking. It is one of the fastest-moving stories in transportation, and the map changes almost monthly. Whether the result is a transportation revolution or a niche service for dense, sunny cities, the next few years of permits, incidents and ridership numbers will settle arguments that engineers and skeptics have been having for two decades.