November 3, 2025 - Waymo Heads to Motown

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for  November 3, 2025, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry.  

Waymo is, without question, the current global leader in deploying automated robotaxi services. The subsidiary of Alphabet, parent company of Google, is now operating in five U.S. cities, with more coming in 2026, as well as expansions to the UK and Japan, is now heading to Detroit. Waymo is already providing several hundred thousand driverless rides a week in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay area, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta. 

Waymo already has more than a decade of history in Detroit, beginning when leaders of what was originally called the Google Self-Driving car project tried to convince Detroit automakers to put its system in their vehicles in about 2013. While no deal was done then, the team leader struck a deal with Chrysler to purchase a fleet of Pacifica plug-in hybrid minivans and have the automaker prepare them from the factory to ease upfitting with the sensors, compute, and actuators required for automated driving. Later, Waymo partnered with Magna to use a Detroit-area factory for upfitting its fleet. Over the years, Waymo has engineering offices in Michigan and has conducted winter weather testing in the state. 

Waymo retired the Chrysler fleet a couple of years ago and now exclusively uses electric vehicles. The current fleet consists of Jaguar i-Paces and the new Zeekr RT, with Hyundai Ioniq 5s to be added soon. Beginning this week, Waymo staff will begin manual driving the Jaguar and Zeekr vehicles around Detroit to conduct mapping and software validation. Among the challenges is learning some of the more unique intersections and road configurations around the city. While this may not include the suburbs yet, Waymo vehicles will eventually need to learn how to handle unique Michigan lefts and, of course, our potholes, among other things. Once Waymo is confident that its system can safely drive without supervision in the vehicle, commercial services will be deployed. Detroit could end up being one of the first four-season cities to get commercial robotaxis at scale, although Ann Arbor-based May Mobility has been running vehicles here for many years.

Thanks for listening.