Autonomous vehicle subsidiary of Alphabet
Appears in 7 stories
Existing Uber AV partner in Phoenix and Austin; reference point for the Rivian deal
For most of its life, Uber has been a marketplace for human drivers with their own cars. On May 6, 2026, the company laid out the clearest version yet of a different model: a marketplace for robotaxis it neither owns nor operates.
Updated May 31
Market leader with 400,000 weekly paid rides across 10 cities
Uber sold its self-driving car unit in 2020 after burning billions and killing a pedestrian. Now it's spending up to $1.25 billion to do it all over again — this time with Rivian building the cars. The deal commits Uber to purchasing up to 50,000 autonomous R2 sport utility vehicles for deployment across 25 cities by 2031, beginning in San Francisco and Miami in 2028.
Updated May 30
Industry leader with 450,000+ weekly paid rides across five US cities
Nvidia and Uber announced plans to deploy 100,000 Level 4 autonomous robotaxis across 28 cities on four continents by 2028, using Nvidia's new DRIVE Hyperion 10 platform and Alpamayo, an open-source reasoning model. Five automakers—BYD, Geely, Stellantis, Lucid, and Mercedes-Benz—will manufacture vehicles with Nvidia's hardware pre-installed. Commercial rides begin in Los Angeles and San Francisco in the first half of 2027.
Leading United States robotaxi operator, rapidly expanding
For years, autonomous vehicle companies kept a basic operational question unanswered: how many humans does it actually take to run a driverless fleet? On February 4, 2026, Waymo's chief safety officer told a Senate committee the number: roughly 70 remote agents oversee more than 3,000 vehicles in six American cities at any given moment—a ratio of about one per 43 robotaxis.
Updated May 29
Operating fully driverless robotaxis in multiple cities
By April 2026, Tesla had expanded its unsupervised robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, bringing the combined Texas fleet to about 573 vehicles. Newly unredacted crash reports tell a messier story: two of the 17 Austin incidents involved remote teleoperators who drove vehicles into a fence and a construction barricade.
Updated May 23
Market leader with 450,000 weekly paid rides across five U.S. cities
MIT Technology Review named robotaxis a breakthrough technology on January 3, 2025, marking the moment driverless cars moved from lab experiments to real-world service. Waymo provides 450,000 paid rides weekly across five U.S. cities, while Baidu's Apollo Go matches that in China, operating across 22 cities from Wuhan to Dubai, with Tesla, Zoox, and others racing to catch up.
Updated May 19
Service resumed Dec 21; acknowledged operational failures; rolled out software updates Dec 24 to handle regional power failures
San Francisco is the kind of city that feels unstoppable—until the lights go out. On Saturday, a substation fire near 8th and Mission helped trigger a blackout that spread across neighborhoods and knocked out traffic signals. Restoration took more than two days and sparked political backlash and raised questions about whether a modern city can tolerate single-point failures in critical infrastructure.
Updated May 16
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