It has been a busy week for autonomous cars, and Waymo is keeping the pace up. Fresh off announcing that its driverless service will open to the public next year in Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando, the company said it is also heading to Minneapolis, Tampa, and New Orleans. Manual testing in those cities begins in the coming days.
Waymo $GOOGL ( ▼ 0.65% ) currently operates in five U.S. markets but plans to more than quadruple that footprint, with even more cities on deck. The company typically follows a familiar playbook: announce the city, run tests with drivers, transition to fully driverless, and then open to riders. That process is getting faster. In Atlanta, Waymo launched through Uber less than a year after announcing its expansion.
The moves keep Waymo firmly ahead of the competition in terms of reach. But Tesla $TSLA ( ▼ 1.04% ) is trying to close the gap. The company secured approval this week to launch its robotaxi service in Phoenix, adding another market to its planned rollout list that includes Las Vegas, Houston, and Miami.
Tesla currently operates ride-hailing in Austin with a safety monitor in the passenger seat and in the Bay Area with supervised full self-driving. As of this week, its app in those cities is open to all iPhone users, not just invite-only testers. Elon Musk said on the last earnings call that Tesla aims to be in eight to ten markets by year-end.
Autonomous driving was already having a big week. Now it has turned into a race to see who can scale the fastest.hink their playbook, and even aging nuclear plants are getting a second look.