Waymo and Uber expand their robotaxi partnership to Austin and Atlanta

Waymo and Uber – once bitter enemies, now uncomfortably polite work friends – announced that they are expanding their two-year robotaxi partnership to two new cities starting in early 2025: Austin, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia.

The two companies have been working together since last year in Phoenix, Arizona – but there are no offices in California, San Francisco or Los Angeles. It's a mutually beneficial partnership that gives Waymo access to Uber's huge customer base while Uber can serve as a platform for a futuristic mode of transportation.

Once launched, Waymo's robotaxi will be available for rides through the Uber app “only” in Austin and Atlanta. This means that Waymo's own ridehail app, Waymo One, will not be operational in either city. The Alphabet-owned company is currently testing its self-driving cars in both cities.

Waymo employees in Austin have been using the company's Waymo One app to order rides as part of early testing. Waymo spokesman Ethan Teicher said the company will “invite a limited number of initial riders to the Waymo One app in the next few weeks before fully transitioning to the Uber app next year.”

The scope of the partnership will be significantly different in those two cities than in Phoenix. Waymo and Uber will share responsibility for operating a fleet of driverless ride-hail vehicles: Uber will handle fleet management services, including vehicle cleaning, repairs and other general depot operations, and Waymo will provide the driverless vehicles and handle roadside assistance (when the robotic Jaguar I-Paces inevitably get stuck) and customer service.

Of course, they will share the costs and revenue of the robotaxi service, but Teicher declined to split the revenue between the two companies.

Waymo currently operates its own ride-hail service, Waymo One, in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. The company recently reached the milestone of 100,000 rides per week in all three cities. Studies have shown that Waymo has better customer retention than human-powered ride-hail services like Uber and Lyft.

The robotaxis business is difficult because of restrictions on where the vehicles can operate and the cost of expensive hardware. Human-driven services like Uber and Lyft have no such restrictions. And customers can be fickle and quickly switch to another service that promises shorter wait times and fewer restrictions on where they can operate.

Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said she was “excited to launch this expanded network and operations partnership with Uber in Austin and Atlanta to bring the benefits of fully autonomous driving to more riders.” And Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said he was “very excited to build on our successful partnership with Waymo, which has already delivered fully autonomous rides to tens of thousands of riders in Phoenix.”

The two companies haven't always praised each other so highly. In February 2017, Waymo sued Uber and its subsidiary, self-driving truck startup Otto, alleging trade secret theft and patent infringement. The case went to trial nearly a year later, but ended quickly when the two parties reached a surprise settlement after just a week of deliberations.

Uber later admitted that it had misused some of Waymo's technology and promised to license it for future use. Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer and founder of Otto, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing Waymo's trade secrets, but was later pardoned by former President Donald Trump.

Uber and Waymo already have a partnership in autonomous long-haul trucking. This ongoing project allows fleet owners to use trucks equipped with Waymo's autonomous “driver” for on-demand delivery routes offered by Uber Freight, the company's trucking division.

Waymo also had a partnership with Lyft to deploy its robotaxis on the smaller ride-hail company's app, but that ended in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. And Waymo isn't the only robotaxis company to appear on Uber's app. Motional, owned by Hyundai, has its vehicles available for ordering on Uber's app in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Uber famously developed its own fleet of autonomous vehicles with the intention of eventually replacing all human drivers. However, the program was halted after a woman was killed by one of the company's vehicles in 2018. A federal investigation later found that Uber was partially responsible for the incident.

Correction, September 13: An earlier version of this story listed the wrong year for the Uber self-driving vehicle crash in Arizona. It was 2018, not 2017.