Waymo dominated U.S. robotaxi market in 2024, however Tesla, Zoox loom | USAEMALL.com

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

For the autonomous vehicle 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 made strides toward commercial viability.

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

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

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

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

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

Waymo pulls way ahead

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

The project, rebranded as Waymo in 2016, has now completed more than 4 million paid autonomous trips in total, the company said Wednesday. That’s more than triple the number a year ago, when Waymo said it had completed around 700,000 driverless ride-hail trips.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To maintain public trust in the safety of its service, Waymo has built a large public affairs operation, published more detailed safety reports in 2024, and is working closely with the National 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 promising “robotaxi-ready” cars for about a decade. Each year since 2016, he has declared the company is about a year away from making his vision a reality, but Tesla still doesn’t manufacture robotaxis or run a driverless ride-hailing service.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zoox ‘toasters’ heat up

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

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

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

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

Led by CEO Aicha Evans, Zoox is aiming to offer free rides to more members of the public early next year, before 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 will begin with an early rider program called Zoox Explorers, allowing select users to ride in a Zoox for free and provide feedback.

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

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

Cruise’s closure

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

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

“In case 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 left the company in November 2023, posted on X after the automaker’s exit announcement. 

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

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