Overview
Waymo is Alphabet’s driverless taxi company, and by February 2026 it was carrying paying passengers in ten US cities. Service opened to public riders in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando that month, alongside the San Francisco Bay Area, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Miami and Nashville. Denver, Las Vegas, San Diego and Tampa are being prepared, and the company has said it wants ride-hailing in more than twenty further cities during 2026, including Tokyo and London. Weekly paid rides climbed from roughly 175,000 to over 450,000 across 2025, on a fleet that grew to about 2,500 vehicles.
The safety record is the part most people get wrong, in both directions. An Insurance Institute for Highway Safety benchmark published in July 2026 found Waymo’s rider-only vehicles involved in 68 percent fewer police-reportable crashes per mile than human drivers in the same cities and years. The gap was largest in Phoenix, at 76 percent, and 71 percent in Los Angeles. In San Francisco it narrowed to 35 percent. In Austin, Waymo’s rate was 4 percent worse than the human benchmark. Waymo’s own published figure is a 90 percent reduction in serious-injury crashes over 127 million autonomous miles. Take the independent number rather than the company one, and the picture is still a genuine safety improvement that varies a lot by city.
So this entry is not about a product that does not work. It is about what the working version costs you.
What It Knows About You
Every Waymo carries cameras facing out and cameras facing in, plus microphones. Waymo’s own rider documentation describes the interior cameras as serving trip quality, customer support, checking whether the car is clean, confirming seatbelts and finding items left behind. Footage can be reviewed later by employees and, during a ride, watched live by the remote operators who supervise the fleet. Your rides are tied to your account, which is tied to a payment method.
The outward-facing cameras are the bigger collection story. They record continuously in 360 degrees, and the Nashville Banner reported in August 2026 that a parked Waymo with nobody aboard keeps recording the street around it. Multiply that by a few thousand vehicles circulating through city centres all day and the fleet is a moving camera network that happens to also sell rides.
Waymo has not published a fixed retention schedule. Reporting on its practices describes retention decided case by case, for as long as the company considers reasonable for improving the driving system, which tells a rider nothing they can plan around. In one San Francisco burglary investigation, police obtained a warrant and found the relevant footage had already been deleted, so deletion clearly does happen on some timeline. Waymo has also declined to say publicly whether it has provided recordings to federal law enforcement, and it publishes no transparency report of the kind Google itself has issued for years.
In April 2025 the researcher Jane Manchun Wong found unreleased privacy-policy text in Waymo’s app code contemplating the use of interior camera footage, linked to rider identity, for training generative AI models, along with language about sharing rider data to personalise advertising. Waymo did not dispute that the draft was genuine. It did dispute the reading, saying it has no plans to use the data for targeted ads or to identify individuals, and that riders would be able to opt out of sale, sharing and AI training under California’s CCPA. As of September 2026 the strongest defensible statement is that the language was drafted and the company walked back the advertising interpretation.
The Real Risks
Your ride is evidence, and police already know it. Bloomberg reported in June 2023 that nine search warrants had been issued to Waymo for footage in San Francisco and Maricopa County, Arizona, in cases where a vehicle happened to drive past a crime scene. Waymo says it requires a warrant or court order and will challenge, limit or reject requests it considers unlawful or overbroad. That policy is better than nothing and it is not a limit you control. You are recorded whether or not you are the subject, and a rider who wants none of this has no setting that turns the cameras off.
The car can decide to report you. In July 2026, San Mateo police said Waymo had alerted them to suspected criminal activity by two 15-year-old riders, accused of drinking and firing toy guns from the vehicle. Waymo’s systems flagged the behaviour, the company disabled the car and called police, and the teenagers were held and released to their parents with charges pending a review of the in-cabin video. Whatever you think of the conduct, the mechanism is worth naming plainly: in-cabin monitoring acting on its own judgement, before any warrant, on a passenger who thought they were alone.
Driving is not finished, and the failures are specific. In December 2025 Waymo recalled 3,067 vehicles over a software fault that let cars slow or stop for a stopped school bus and then pull around it anyway. Austin Independent School District had logged 19 such passings during the 2025-26 school year, and Atlanta’s district counted six by 5 December. NHTSA had opened an investigation in October after a similar failure in Atlanta, and gave Waymo until 20 January 2026 to say whether the fix was fully deployed and sufficient. Separately, a pedestrian died in August 2026 after contact with a Waymo that had slowed to around 5mph. Police said no party was at fault and the available reporting suggests the vehicle was likely not the cause, so treat that one as an open question rather than an indictment.
It takes driving jobs, and the numbers are visible already. Hourly pay for Uber and Lyft drivers fell between July 2024 and July 2025 in the regions where robotaxis operate, with the sharpest drops in San Francisco at 6.9 percent and Austin at 5.3 percent. Atlanta’s rideshare drivers union reports lower pay, longer waits and fewer fares since Waymo arrived. Some of that work comes back as depot jobs cleaning, charging and repositioning cars, and a Lyft depot in Nashville was reported to have staffed about half its 72 workers with former drivers. Fewer jobs, differently distributed, at whatever wage a depot pays.
Alternatives
- Uber or Lyft with a human driver. Same trip, and the fare supports someone’s income. You are still tracked by an app with its own retention policy, and there is no interior camera tied to your account.
- A licensed taxi paid in cash. The lowest data trail available for a car you did not park yourself. Harder to find in most American cities than it was ten years ago.
- Public transit, cycling, or walking. Transit agencies run cameras too, but they do not link the footage to your name and payment method unless you tap a registered card. For short urban trips this is usually faster than people expect.
- Driving your own car. Worth noting that most cars sold since about 2020 collect and transmit telematics as well, so this is a smaller privacy win than it sounds.
One honest point in Waymo’s favour on this list: for people who cannot drive, should not drive, or have had bad experiences with drivers, a car with no stranger in it is a real gain. That is a reason the service is popular, not marketing.
Our Verdict
Grade C. Waymo is the strongest counterexample on this index to the idea that AI products are uniformly reckless. Independent crash data says it is safer than the humans it replaces in most of its cities, it recalls software when it finds a fault, and it does not pretend to be something it is not. The privacy score of 7 and the job-displacement score of 8 are what hold it here rather than higher, and both are earned by documented behaviour rather than by suspicion.
What would move this to a B: a published retention schedule with a hard maximum, a regular transparency report covering law-enforcement and government requests, a binding commitment that interior footage never trains models and never touches advertising, and a closed NHTSA school bus inquiry with evidence the fix held. None of those are technically difficult. Google publishes request transparency for its other products already.
What would move it to a D: the April 2025 draft language shipping as written, a pattern of the fleet proactively reporting riders to police rather than responding to warrants, or a second safety recall in the same failure class before the first inquiry closes.
If you take a Waymo this week, the practical advice is short. Assume the interior camera and microphone are on for the whole ride, assume the exterior camera is recording the street whether or not you are aboard, and assume both could be produced to police later under a warrant. Then decide whether the trip is worth it, which for most trips it probably is.