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Last Updated on: 8th May 2025, 03:04 am
Waymo is on a roll. It keeps rolling into new markets. It keeps proving that its robotaxis are safer than human drivers. And now it’s also scaling up via US manufacturing and its partnership with Uber, which is going very well.
Waymo announced this week that it is now providing more than 250,000 paid robotaxi trips per week — across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin. That’s going to increase a lot soon, though. Aside from natural growth in those first four cities, in 2026, Waymo will be launching its robotaxi services in Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, D.C.
The company’s Waymo Driver system may be AI powered, but it still needs a vehicle to put humans into. The company is going to be manufacturing many of these in Arizona. “To support our growing U.S. ridership, we’re investing in our American manufacturing operation with a new autonomous vehicle factory in Metro Phoenix with our partners at Magna,” the company wrote this week.
The company has 1,500 vehicles in its fleet at the moment, and it took its last delivery of I-PACE SUVs earlier this year. Through next year, Waymo plans to build more than 2,000 more of these vehicles. All things equal, that would bring the company to well above half a million paid trips a week.
“The Waymo Driver integration plant will build thousands of Jaguar I-PACEs equipped with our fully autonomous technology, which we design and assemble in the U.S. At 239,000 square feet, this factory is a multi-million dollar investment and has created hundreds of jobs in Mesa, AZ that support our future growth plans,” the company writes.
Longer term, Waymo and partners will be able to build “tens of thousands of fully autonomous Waymo vehicles per year” at this Arizona facility, the company notes.
It is interesting to see that Waymo is sticking with this I-PACE vehicle, as there have also been announcements in the past year of Waymo using the (cheaper) Hyundai IONIQ 5 and a Zeekr model made for this kind of robotaxi service. We’ll see what comes of those partnerships — and Waymo does mention that Zeekr RT in its blog post — but, for now, Magna and Arizona are winners in Waymo’s growth and development.
“The new Waymo and Magna manufacturing facility in Mesa is the latest example of Arizona being the new home for technology to innovate and grow,” says Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs. “I’m proud to see autonomous vehicles on our streets every day, helping get people where they need to be safely. The new manufacturing facility will enhance this presence, and the local jobs it’s creating will help Arizona’s tech economy continue to rise on the world stage.”
“The Waymo Driver integration plant in Mesa is the epicenter of our future growth plans,” says Ryan McNamara, Vice President of Operations, Waymo. “With our partners at Magna, we’ve opened a manufacturing site that enables the cost efficiency, flexibility, and capacity to scale our fleet to new heights.”
Funny enough, and just emphasizing how futuristic this all feels, Waymo adds that the vehicles produced at this facility can drive themselves off of the premises when done and go into commercial robotaxi in under half an hour…. “This new strategic capability allows vehicles assigned to our Phoenix fleet to drive themselves out of the facility and directly into service. In fact, these vehicles can pick up their first public passengers less than 30 minutes after leaving the factory. For vehicles intended for other cities, they can be deployed into public service in a matter of hours after being shipped to their local depot.”
Impressive.
Adding on to all of this good news, Uber highlighted this week that its Waymo vehicles are outperforming its human-driven vehicles. The ~100 Waymo vehicles exclusively available on the Uber app in the Austin area “are now busier than over 99% of all drivers in Austin in terms of completed trips per day,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi stated from prepared remarks on the company’s Q1 financials call.
In a city with Waymo robotaxis? Or visiting one soon? Get the Waymo One app and experience the future today.
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