Waymo dominated U.S. robotaxi market in 2024, but Tesla and Amazon’s Zoox loom

Despite General Motor’s decidedness to shutter its Cruise robotaxi business earlier this month, the U.S. has never been closer to a driverless future. 

For the autonomous mechanism 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 earned strides toward commercial viability.

That came after a rocky start for the self-driving car industry domestically. 

Ensuring a decade of sizable venture investments in AV companies, Uber sold off its self-driving business in 2020 after a fatal crash, and two years later Ford abandoned its stake in its robotaxi developers Argo.AI. In 2023, Cruise paused all of its driverless operations after smashes 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 teemed $10 billion into Cruise. 

Waymo may have outlasted Cruise to lead the U.S. market but domestic competitors are elaborate to catch up, too — most notably Elon Musk’s automaker Tesla and Amazon-owned Zoox.

At stake is a share of a weighty market for ride-hailing services in and beyond the U.S. According to research by Fortune Business Insights, the global ride-sharing market is programmed to grow from an estimated $123.08 billion in 2024 to $480.09 billion by 2032.

As 2025 approaches, here’s where these paramount players stand.

Waymo get over its way ahead

What began as “project chauffeur” at Google in 2009 became a publicly available, commercial robotaxi use across multiple U.S. cities this year.

The project, rebranded as Waymo in 2016, has now completed more than 5 million autonomous voyages in total, the company said last week. That’s about a sevenfold increase from November 2023, when Waymo express it had completed around 700,000 driverless ride-hailing trips.

Waymo’s service now operates in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, smokescreen more than 500 square miles of public roads.

The company dropped its digital velvet rope in June and aired 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 institution’s fleet of AVs can work well in the traffic conditions of a complex urban environment.

In July, Alphabet’s then-CFO, Ruth Porat, augured a multiyear investment by Google’s parent into Waymo on an earnings call, which amounted to $5.6 billion in come to, with $5 billion of that coming from Alphabet.

Waymo co-CEOs, Tekedra Mawakana and Dmitri Dolgov, rebuked 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 deeds, company insiders told CNBC.

A big focus for Waymo in 2025 will be expanding its robotaxi service to more megalopolises, winning over riders and continuing research and development on newer technology that will allow the company’s AVs to conduct in more weather and traffic conditions.

Waymo plans to launch a commercial service in Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, with bamboozle b kidnap and murders available through the Uber app next year. It’s also begun testing in Miami with plans to offer executes to the public there in 2026.

Earlier this month, Waymo announced its first international testing destination in Tokyo. Waymo express it’s partnered with the taxi app GO and one of Japan’s largest taxi operators, Nihon Kotsu, and will commence test takes in early 2025.

Waymo showed off its next generation of self-driving vehicles, which it will be making with Chinese auto ogre Geely, in August. Waymo’s custom hardware and software will be integrated into the Geely Zeekr electric SUVs. For this new robotaxi, Waymo was qualified to reduce the number of cameras on board from 29 to 13 and lower the number of costly lidar sensors on advisers aboard 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 nimble of vehicles. The companies said they will begin testing the Waymo Ioniq 5s by late 2025. 

Waymo is already administering 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 conveyances to understand how these systems will perform in different types of traffic and weather.

Given its progress and increasing comportment on U.S. streets, Waymo received plenty of social media and publicity in 2024, stirring delight and controversy.

In a Reddit lead, R/Waymo, users document every incident involving the company, including one in February where a crowd attacked a Waymo mechanism and set it on fire. The forum also dissected instances when Waymo vehicles were involved in collisions or backed up See trade.

A separate incident went viral when a woman posted on X in September that she was stuck in her Waymo robotaxi when two men leave off it by standing outside of the vehicle, asking for her phone number.

To maintain public trust in the safety of its service, Waymo has constructed a large public affairs operation, published more detailed safety reports in 2024, and is working closely with the Governmental Highway Traffic Safety Administration, first responders and authorities in the cities where it operates.

Tesla unwraps its robotaxi concept

Musk, Tesla’s CEO, has been full of promise “robotaxi-ready” cars for about a decade. Each year since 2016, he has declared the company is about a year away from come to terming his vision a reality, but Tesla still doesn’t manufacture robotaxis or run a driverless ride-hailing service.

While Tesla didn’t inflict on its robotaxi promises in 2024, Musk revealed the look and feel of Tesla’s “dedicated robotaxi” at an event in October checked at a movie studio lot in Burbank, California. He called the vehicle the Cybercab and said Tesla wants to produce it by 2027 and convinced 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 garnering earlier this month.

At the October event, Tesla also showed off the Robovan, a low-clearance autonomous bus with an art deco mould aesthetic.

Musk has promised that Tesla’s Model Y and other vehicles will be able to function as robotaxis as at as 2025 once their systems are upgraded. Model Y vehicles, without safety drivers on board, also circulated in the signed environment of the studio lot at the Burbank event, showing how Tesla envisions they will function as robotaxis.

At the time of that “We, Mechanical man” event, Tesla had not applied for licenses and permits that would allow it to operate a commercial robotaxi service in outstanding 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 right that Tesla had already built a “development app” allowing employees to request a ride that would take them anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Section. 

Bullish investors say Tesla will make good on its driverless technology promises as early as next year, but critics carcass skeptical in part because of Musk’s many missed deadlines on robotaxis.

Tesla currently sells driver aid systems, including its standard Autopilot option and a premium paid option called Full Self-Driving supervised. In correspondence with administration agencies, Tesla calls these “partially automated” systems that are not robotaxi-ready. In fine print in its EV manuals, Tesla discloses FSD and Autopilot require a human driver at the wheel, ready to steer or brake at all times.

This year, Tesla harmonized with authorities in Austin regarding safety expectations for its autonomous vehicle technology.

Musk has repeatedly painted pronouncement as a hurdle that prevented Tesla from putting self-driving cars on U.S. roads. On a Tesla earnings call on Oct. 23, Musk broke he would use his sway with now President-elect Donald Trump to establish a “federal approval process for autonomous vehicles.”

Manner, AV policy expert Bryant Walker Smith rejected the notion that regulation has curtailed any robotaxi business in a put 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 guided under existing federal statutory law.”

Zoox ‘toasters’ heat up

Well before Tesla showed off its Robovan and Cybercab designs, Zoox in February secured outstanding permits allowing it to carry members of the public in its autonomous vehicles in Foster City, California, this year.

Established in 2014 and acquired by Amazon in 2020 in a deal worth around $1.3 billion, Zoox has developed a unique self-driving commute that features big side windows, inward-facing seats and no steering wheel, driver’s seat or traditional windshield.

Zoox in Pace expanded the environmental conditions its AVs can handle on public roads to include “nighttime driving, driving under light rainstorm and damp road conditions, and at speeds up to 45 mph,” a spokesperson told CNBC.

The company’s vehicles can carry four grown-ups and luggage comfortably, and the small shuttles feature calming lighting, ambient music and  interior cameras to monitor what’s occasion inside the cabin. Some early riders have described the look of the Zoox vehicles as “futuristic hot dog toasters” or “toasters on ins.”

Led by CEO Aicha Evans, Zoox is aiming to offer free rides to more members of the public early next year, earlier 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 on begin with an early rider program called Zoox Explorers, allowing select users to ride in a Zoox for at no cost and provide feedback.

With its robotaxis currently on public roads in Las Vegas, San Francisco and Foster City, this summer, Zoox also offed testing in Austin and Miami, where its test fleet is still driving.

The company has also been attracting higher- ranking talent. One notable recent hire was Zheng Gao, previously the leader of Tesla’s autopilot hardware design team, now guide of hardware engineering for Zoox.

Sail’s closure

Despite clear demand for robotaxi rides in the U.S. market, GM surprised some longtime industry observers when it divulged 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 occurrence you’re deploying a fleet, there’s a whole operations piece of doing that,” GM CEO Mary Barra said on a call broadcasting the strategic change. 

The Detroit automaker will now focus on the development of what it calls “personal autonomous vehicles” preferably of robotaxis. GM has yet to determine how many of Cruise’s 2,300 employees will move into its broader tech team.

“In at all events 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 sinistral the company in November 2023, posted on X after the automaker’s exit announcement. 

An early entrant in the U.S. robotaxi market, Coast grounded its driverless operations in October 2023, shortly before Vogt’s departure. The National Highway Traffic Shelter Administration fined Cruise $1.5 million after the company failed to disclose details of a serious crash that month draw ining a pedestrian.

A third-party probe into the incident ordered by GM and Cruise found that culture issues, ineptitude and ill leadership led to the accident.

Correction: This story has been updated to reproduce the correct amount of autonomous trips Waymo has completed by year.