Waymo opens public robotaxi rides in Denver, San Diego and Tampa

Waymo started welcoming its first public riders in Denver, San Diego and Tampa on Monday, the company said on its Waypoint blog. The three launches bring to 14 the number of cities where Waymo runs fully autonomous, driverless trips for the public.

This is not an overnight open door. Waymo says tens of thousands of people in each city have already signed up, and it will "steadily offer more and more riders Waymo access" while it works toward opening the service to everyone. If you are in one of the three cities, that means joining through the app and waiting for an invite, not hailing a car today.

"Launching public rides in San Diego, Tampa, and in my home state of Colorado brings our newest vehicle platform and next-generation driver to more riders who are ready to experience the future of mobility," said Suzanne Philion, Waymo's chief marketing officer.

The safety figure Waymo leads with

Waymo pairs the launch with a claim about its record: the Waymo Driver is involved in 94% fewer serious injury or worse crashes than human drivers over the same distance. That is a company figure, drawn from Waymo's own crash data rather than an independent audit, so weigh it as a vendor number and not a settled fact. The system leans on the same kind of machine perception behind Gemini's agentic video understanding, applied to a moving vehicle instead of a screen.

Getting to launch took months of groundwork in each metro: mapping and street validation, outreach to first responders, and meetings with local officials and community groups before a single public rider got in.

What actually rolls out first

Two details worth holding, both from TechCrunch rather than the Waymo post. Denver and San Diego riders get only the Ojai, Waymo's newest sixth-generation platform built with Zeekr, for now, while Waymo's overall fleet of Jaguar I-Pace and Ojai vehicles now tops 4,000. Tesla is also running paid driverless Model Y rides in several markets including Tampa, so at least one of these three cities opens with a direct rival already on the road.

The takeaway

Vendor-reported safety math deserves the same caution you would apply to any company grading its own homework, the way you would read a frontier lab's own enterprise safeguard commitments. But the operational fact is concrete: Waymo now runs public robotaxis in 14 cities, and three more just opened their waitlists to tens of thousands of people. If you run fleet or mobility operations in Denver, San Diego or Tampa, get on the waitlist now and map which corridors open first before you lock any vendor SLAs to a specific service area.