Waymo, Alphabet’s Self-Driving Taxi Company Gets $5.6B In Additional Funding For Expansion

Waymo is one of the few companies currently using self-driving cars in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles. While these cars have had a substantial amount of controversy in use, the actual training and on-the-road experience they are getting is unprecedented. I was initially interested in them not so much because of their autonomous driving technology, which is very good, but because they chose Jaguar I-Paces as the cars to modify, and I was the Dell designated launch analyst for that car and owned two of them myself—excellent cars when they weren’t having battery issues.

They recently received $5.6B in additional funding to significantly expand their Taxi services in 2025. They may become the first autonomous taxi company to reach critical mass, bringing into question, again, the need to own a car at all. 

While they plan to move Hyundai Ioniq 5 vehicles in the future (one of the most popular electric car vehicles and best values in the market at the moment), this money will allow them to move to additional cities, including Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia, while expanding in LA, San Francisco, and Phoenix, Arizona.

They are currently carrying around 100K paid passengers per week, or 10 times more than they carried in 2023, making them one of, if not the most successful, autonomous electric cab companies in the world.

Making Owning A Car Obsolete

In many ways, Waymo and Tesla are currently on opposite paths. While Tesla is also aggressively pushing its fast-advancing autonomous driving technology to market to assist its car buyers, Waymo is entirely focused on autonomous car taxis, which, should they reach sufficient scale, should make car ownership largely unsustainable.

This is because autonomous cars like the ones Waymo is bringing to market are like horizontal elevators, and some countries, including Luxembourg, Estonia, Malta, Belgium, France, and Germany, provide free public transport today. Should these countries include autonomous taxis in the future in these programs, which is likely, being able to justify the purchase of a personal vehicle will become far more complex. 

When we own a car, typically, this asset sits and depreciates much of the time, while a taxi is in nearly constant use, spreading its cost across a vast number of users, making it, without a paid driver, potentially far less costly and far more convenient (no looking for parking places or having the issues of maintaining and storing your vehicle. The resulting experience, particularly if you have a subscription like you can get from Uber (Waymo and Uber are partnered), is that the need to own a car should largely be eliminated. 

Uber

As noted, Uber and Waymo are partnered, and Uber has long planned to replace their human-driven fleet of cars with autonomous vehicles. While this seems ill-suited to Uber’s current car owner customers (Uber’s primary customer is the driver, not the passenger, but it behaves as if this is inverted), the result of these autonomous cars entering the Uber feet should be far lower costs and far higher ride availability. There is a potential for individuals to buy the car and then assign the car to Uber to generate a return. In that case, Uber car owners get what amounts to an annuity requiring very little work and allowing them to scale up to owning multiple self-driving cars, each providing more significant income and lower costs than they would have ever been able to achieve when they drive the cars themselves.

Wrapping Up: Waymo Funding Means A Car Owning Revolution.

 AI and Robotics are fast changing our future to make it very different from the world of today. The most high-volume autonomous robots for consumers are and likely will be autonomous cars over the short term. But once these cars hit critical mass, for most of us, the need to own them will be dramatically reduced, and most of us will likely choose to use a car service like Uber instead of owning a car. Younger generations started showing this preference way back in 2016.  

This $5.6B additional Waymo investment will accelerate this trend and make it even more likely that by 2035, car ownership will become the exception rather than the rule, and most cars will be not only electric but autonomous.

Rob Enderle is a technology analyst at Torque News who covers automotive technology and battery development. You can learn more about Rob on Wikipedia and follow his articles on Forbes, X, and LinkedIn.