Waymo robotaxis can now be greeted by the public in Miami.
The company said Thursday that it will initially open the service, on a rolling basis, to the nearly 10,000 area residents on its waiting list. Once accepted, riders will be able to hail a robotaxi within a 60-square-mile service area in Miami that covers neighborhoods such as the Design District, Wynwood, Brickell and Coral Gables.
Waymo said it plans to eventually expand to Miami International Airport, but didn’t provide a timeline beyond that it’s coming “soon.”
Waymo has had a presence in Miami for months in anticipation of the commercial launch. After mapping and then testing its autonomous vehicles on Miami’s public roads, the company removed safety operators from the fleet in November. The driverless service was initially open to employees.
This step-by-step approach is part of Waymo’s startup playbook, and one that’s being practiced far more often than it was a year ago. Waymo first opened its robotaxis to the general public in Phoenix in 2020. It expanded to San Francisco and Los Angeles, eventually opening it up to all riders in 2024. As the company continued to expand in those metro areas — pushing into the greater Bay Area and Silicon Valley, for example — it also opened up to new markets.
Waymo opened a robotaxi service in the spring of 2025 in partnership with Uber in Atlanta and Austin, and expanded its service area in existing markets to include freeways.
Waymo has laid out an aggressive plan to bring its robotaxi service to nearly a dozen more cities over the next year. These plans include Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Nashville, London, San Diego, Seattle and Washington, DC. The company has already begun testing in some of these cities using a mix of its Jaguar I-Pace electric vehicles and the newer Zeekr RT vans that have been renamed “Ojai.”
Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said during an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt last October that “by the end of 2026, you should expect to be offering 1 million trips per week.”
The expansion was not without problems. Residents in cities like San Francisco have recorded videos of Waymo vehicles causing traffic jams, most notably during a widespread power outage in December.
It has also drawn the attention of federal safety regulators.
The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration’s Office of Injury Investigation (ODI) opened an initial investigation into the company last October over how its robotaxis operated around a stopped school bus in Atlanta. School district officials in Austin shared video and complaints about the same issue of Waymo passing school buses even when the lights are on and the stop sign is activated.
The company has issued a voluntary software recall to fix this problem. However, new videos showing Waymos illegally passing school buses suggest the problem is far from over.
