Waymo, Google's Autonomous Driving Company, Reaches 1.4 Million Monthly Ride Orders in California
Waymo, Google's autonomous driving company, has reached 1.4 million monthly ride orders in California, marking its entry into a high-frequency commercial operation phase for its driverless taxi business.
With 1.4 million monthly orders, Waymo completes approximately 47,000 rides per day in California; over 30 days, this scale equates to about 32 paid autonomous rides per minute.
Waymo is currently expanding its driverless taxi services in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area. In August, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a significant expansion of its service area in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, opening up geographical space for continued order growth.
The company completes over 500,000 paid rides weekly across more than ten cities in the U.S.; the 1.4 million monthly orders in California indicate that its core market contributes a significant portion of the national weekly order volume, and its fleet is still being deployed to more cities.
Waymo previously relied on partnerships with Uber to enter some markets, but its subsequent plans are more focused on directly operating independent services, retaining user access, dispatch data, vehicle utilization, and trip revenue.
In market mechanisms, passengers determine demand flow based on wait times, coverage areas, and fares; Waymo increases vehicle turnover by adding operational vehicles and expanding service areas, and order growth helps Alphabet dilute fixed costs related to sensors, remote support, maps, and fleet operations. Traditional ride-hailing driver supply and peak pricing pressures from Uber and Lyft face challenges, but platforms may maintain order share by integrating autonomous vehicle fleets.
Source: Public Information
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Waymo originated from Google's autonomous driving project and became an independent company under Alphabet in 2016. Its early strategy was not to sell autonomous driving software to car owners but to accumulate closed testing, high-definition maps, simulation training, and safety operational capabilities over the long term; it launched commercial driverless taxi services in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2018. This approach is costly and slow to expand but avoids the risk exposure structure of Tesla collecting data from consumer vehicles and gradually advancing FSD.
In terms of capital, Alphabet has borne the long-term investments in Waymo's early R&D, sensors, computing power, maps, and fleet operations, after which Waymo introduced external financing to convert autonomous driving capabilities into measurable revenue per ride. Unlike Uber, which relies on a light-asset model to match drivers, Waymo owns or controls vehicles, autonomous driving software, dispatch systems, and safety operational processes, meaning that order growth primarily increases the utilization of its own assets rather than mainly sharing revenue with drivers.
Historically, Uber and Lyft built their ride-hailing platforms through subsidies and network effects before shifting to increase commissions and monetizing ads; Waymo first addressed the safety and licensing of driverless vehicles and then established supply barriers through fleet density. Cruise, which received support from General Motors, SoftBank, and Microsoft, paused its driverless operations in San Francisco after safety incidents, indicating that this industry has shifted from "technology demonstration" to "scale operation, regulatory tolerance, and accident cost management" stage.
Essentially, this is a restructuring of the industry chain. The core cost of traditional ride-hailing is driver labor hours, while autonomous driving changes the cost structure to vehicle depreciation, computing, maintenance, insurance, remote support, and capital costs; only when order density is sufficiently high can fixed investments be diluted. Therefore, the focus of competition will shift from subsidizing passengers and recruiting drivers to obtaining city permits, deploying dense fleets, controlling maps and computing power, and increasing daily orders per vehicle.
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