Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov said the Alphabet subsidiary is now offering fully autonomous rides in ten US cities — while reaffirming its preparation for the first right-hand drive (RHD) markets such as London and Tokyo.
The company targets one million paid rides per week by the year end.
Dolgov, who co-leads Waymo alongside Tekedra Mawakana, made the remarks during an interview with Stripe co-founder and President John Collison on Cheeky Pint podcast released this Tuesday.
The engineer oversees the development and deployment of Waymo‘s autonomous driving technology, while Mawakana has been handling the company’s commercial strategy.
500k Rides Per Week
The co-CEO disclosed that Waymo now has “about 3,000 cars on the roads” completing roughly half a million rides per week — translating to “over four million fully autonomous miles” weekly.
“We are operating in a fully autonomous mode in 11 cities in the US. And 10 of those, we have riders,” Dolgov said.
The exception is Nashville, Tennessee, where Waymo recently began testing without passengers.
“The ghost city is Nashville. We just started there,” he noted.
Tennessee marks the sixth state in which Waymo deploys its robotaxis.
The company currently serves riders in Phoenix (Arizona), San Francisco and Los Angeles (California), Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio (Texas), Miami and Orlando (Florida), and Atlanta (Georgia).
Waymo expanded to Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Orlando roughly a month ago — the first time the company opened service in multiple cities simultaneously.
Dolgov reflected on the milestone as a sign of how far the company’s deployment capabilities have come.
“How long did it take us from the first time we started fully autonomous rider-only operation to the first time we had external riders in four cities?” he asked. “It was about eight years. And then, you know, the other week, we just launched four in one day.”
Accelerated Global Scaling
Dolgov characterized Waymo‘s current phase as one of “accelerated global scaling and deployment,” noting that the company has moved beyond fundamental research.
“I would say it’s not like we’re done with engineering. I would say that we’ve clearly moved past the stage of scientific research and deep core technology development,” he said.
Asked whether Waymo‘s driving technology is now sufficient, the co-CEO said the core system supports every aspect of driving.
“It’s good enough that I can’t think of any aspect of driving that is not supported by the fundamental technology,” he stated.
With Washington, DC, lined up as the next domestic market, Waymo is also turning its attention overseas.
The company is preparing to begin operations in London and Tokyo, though Dolgov cautioned that deploying in new geographies requires significant additional work.
“There is a lot of work to do in specialization and in validation before we can deploy responsibly,” he said. “The signs are different in both of those places.”
Still, early results have been encouraging.
Dolgov noted that while the San Francisco system cannot simply be transplanted abroad, the underlying technology transfers well.
“What we’re seeing is incredibly encouraging from the perspective of is the core technology there,” he said. “Now it’s a matter of collecting the data, doing some specialization and validation.”
Ojai
Last month, Waymo began integrating its sixth-generation driverless system into its fleet using Ojai vehicles — custom electric vans developed by the Geely-backed Zeekr brand.
The company is currently offering rides to employees and their guests in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles, with plans to open the service to the public later this year.
“It is a custom design vehicle,” Dolgov said. “We put a lot of thought into moving away from a car that’s designed around the driver to a car that’s designed around the passenger.”
Waymo had previously relied on modified Jaguar I-PACE vehicles, while competitors Zoox and Tesla have developed purpose-built autonomous vehicles.
Dolgov described the sixth-generation hardware as simpler, more capable, and “much lower cost” than its predecessor — calling it “a fraction of the cost.”
The software, he added, “is pretty much the same.”
The Safety Debate With Tesla
The interview comes amid an ongoing industry dispute over the right technical approach to autonomous driving — and how safety should be measured.
Earlier this month, co-CEO Mawakana called for federal regulators to establish a national standard requiring autonomous vehicle developers to demonstrate their safety.
Questioned about competing services such as Tesla‘s and Zoox’s, she argued that shared roads demand shared accountability.
In October, Mawakana had questioned whether some developers were doing what is necessary to “earn the right to make the roads safer” — a remark widely seen as aimed at Tesla.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly dismissed LiDAR as an expensive add-on.
During last year’s first-quarter earnings call, he joked that “the issue with Waymo’s cars is it costs Way-mo[re] money.”
Over the summer, he claimed on X that “LiDAR and radar reduce safety due to sensor contention” and that Waymo vehicles cannot drive on highways.
Co-CEO Mawakana has been pushing back against these comments, saying “it’s really important to focus on safety, not on safety and then cost, not cost and then safety.”
Foundation Model, but Not Camera-Only
In a separate interview with Understanding AI last December, Dolgov confirmed that Waymo‘s commercial fleet now runs on a foundation model trained end-to-end, built on Google’s Gemini AI.
However, unlike Tesla‘s camera-only approach, Waymo pairs that model with a separate, faster module that fuses data from LiDAR, radar, and cameras to locate every object around the vehicle in real time.
Dolgov was direct about why the company refuses to go camera-only.
“Imagine a latency-critical safety scenario where maybe an object appears from behind a parked car,” he said. “Milliseconds really matter. Accuracy matters.”
Earlier this year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) opened a probe into Waymo to examine how its vehicles interact with school buses that are stopped for loading and unloading students.
The company recently disclosed for the first time that approximately 70 human agents are on duty at any given time to provide guidance to its robotaxis, with “approximately half” of them located in two cities in the Philippines.
