Analysis
Waymo and Amazon's Zoox both announced expansions into new US markets on Sept. 1, intensifying a robotaxi race that increasingly looks like a two-horse contest for driverless-ride share outside Tesla's own more limited rollout, CNBC reported. Waymo is now offering fully driverless rides in Denver, San Diego and Tampa -- its first commercial operations in Colorado -- bringing its footprint to more than 4,000 vehicles across 14 US cities. Zoox said it will begin testing, with human safety operators on board, in Houston and San Diego this month, extending its presence to 12 US locations, per TechCrunch.
Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary that traces its roots to Google's self-driving car project launched in 2009, has been covered extensively by Pulse through its Series D earlier this year -- a $16 billion round at a $126 billion valuation that alone accounted for close to a third of all physical-AI venture funding in the first half of 2026.
Zoox, which Amazon acquired in 2020 for roughly $1.2 billion, has taken a more deliberate path toward commercial deployment, still relying on manually supervised test vehicles in its newest markets rather than the purpose-built, no-driver vehicles it eventually plans to deploy.
“## The competitive field after Cruise The field looks very different than it did two years ago.”
The competitive field after Cruise
The field looks very different than it did two years ago. General Motors shut down Cruise's robotaxi operations at the end of 2024 after years of safety incidents and mounting losses, leaving Waymo with a multi-year head start that Zoox and Tesla's own more recent robotaxi launch in Austin are both still working to close. Waymo's more than 500,000 weekly rides dwarf what either competitor has disclosed, and its 14-city footprint versus Zoox's 12 planned locations -- several still in supervised-testing mode rather than full commercial operation -- understates how far ahead Waymo's actual ride volume runs relative to its city count.
Scale alone doesn't settle the competition, however. Zoox's purpose-built vehicle -- with no steering wheel and a symmetrical cabin design -- is a genuinely different bet than Waymo's retrofitted commercial vehicles, and if it clears remaining regulatory and manufacturing hurdles, it could scale faster once deployed than a fleet built on adapted third-party cars. The near-term risk for both companies is the same one that sank Cruise: a serious safety incident during this expansion phase would draw regulatory scrutiny fast, and neither company's current commercial footprint is large enough yet to absorb a Cruise-style shutdown without ceding the category entirely to Tesla.
Whether Zoox can convert its Houston and San Diego supervised testing into full driverless commercial service on a timeline that keeps pace with Waymo's expansion is the more important number to track than either company's current city count.
