Waymo now runs roughly 4,000 robotaxis in 15 U.S. cities, and I would argue the most interesting number in that sentence is not the fleet but the vehicle that is filling it. TechCrunch’s analysis of Waymo’s fleet data, published September 24, finds the company at about 500,000 paid rides a week, up from operations in three cities in September 2024.
Start with the car. The Ojai is a minivan built by Zeekr, a brand owned by China’s Geely Holding Group, and finished at Waymo’s own factory in Arizona. It carries what Waymo calls its sixth-generation self-driving system, along with a sturdier interior, a redesigned rider interface and a Gemini-based assistant from Google. Think of the sixth-generation system as the same driver in a new body: fewer, cheaper sensors are meant to do the work that a larger set did in earlier cars.
Now the pace. Registered autonomous vehicles in Texas reached 1,102, up 49 percent in three weeks. The Texas fleet stood at about 600 vehicles in June and just over 700 in August. Roughly a third of the Texas fleet is now Ojai. About 80 percent of the national fleet sits in California and Texas, and the next targets named in the analysis are Florida, with three cities, and Las Vegas.
Here is the catch. Because the Ojai is built abroad, import tariffs add cost to a vehicle designed to bring cost down. TechCrunch reports projected 2026 imports of 5,100 units. The data does not say what the tariff adds per vehicle, and Waymo has not published a figure for that.
So the story is a driving system that is getting cheaper to build and a supply chain that is not. If the Texas curve holds, the constraint in 2027 may be less about software than about where the next thousand chassis come from.
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