Waymo

What is Waymo?

Waymo is a company that makes self-driving cars. These cars can drive themselves without a person sitting behind the wheel to control them. Waymo is based in Mountain View, California and is part of Alphabet Inc., the same company that owns Google.

How Did Waymo Start?

Waymo began from a team at Stanford University that took part in car races organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in 2005 and 2007. In 2009, Google started working on self-driving technology. By 2016, this project became Waymo, a separate company under Alphabet.

Waymo’s Self-Driving Cars

Waymo makes special cars that can drive themselves. These cars use many tools like cameras, lidar, and radar to see the world around them. The cars can detect other vehicles, bicycles, and even small objects far away. Waymo uses a smart system to help the car decide where to go next in busy traffic.

Most of Waymo’s cars are Jaguar I-Pace models. They also plan to use cars made by Hyundai and Zeekr in the future.

Where Can You Ride in a Waymo Car?

Waymo offers rides in several cities in the United States. People can call a ride using a special app on their phones. In some places, like Austin and Atlanta, people can also use the Uber app to get a Waymo ride.

Some of the cities where you can ride Waymo cars include:

Waymo is also planning to bring its services to other places like Japan and the United Kingdom.

Safety and Growing

Waymo works hard to keep its rides safe. The company has done millions of miles of testing and has fewer problems than regular human drivers. Waymo cars sometimes need help from people, but these helpers only give advice that the car can choose to follow or ignore.

Waymo’s services are growing fast. By September 2025, Waymo was giving about 4.75 million passenger rides each month. This means the cars were driving many miles to give people places to go.

Waymo is always working to make its cars better and safer for everyone.