Waymo, a unit of Alphabet, has reported that its robotaxis have driven over 100 million miles without human drivers.

This milestone represents an increase, as the company has doubled its autonomous mileage in around six months.

The service operates around 1,500 vehicles in cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, Atlanta, and parts of the Bay Area.

Waymo plans to expand to Washington, D.C., in 2026 and has applied for a permit to operate in New York.

In New York, the company intends to begin manual driving until it receives approval for autonomous operations.

Waymo’s achievement occurs amid increasing competition in the autonomous vehicle sector.

Tesla has expanded its small robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, and plans to scale operations in more US cities by 2025.

🔗 Source: Reuters

🧠 Food for thought

1️⃣ Autonomous vehicles’ exponential progress follows decades of incremental development

Waymo’s achievement of 100 million driverless miles represents remarkable acceleration in what has historically been a very slow-moving technology.

While autonomous vehicles seem like a recent innovation, their conceptual foundations date back centuries. For example, Leonardo da Vinci designed a self-propelled cart in the 16th century that is considered an early precursor to robotics1.

The modern AV era began with university research programs in the 1980s, including Carnegie Mellon’s Navlab and the DARPA-funded Autonomous Land Vehicle, which laid crucial technical groundwork but achieved limited real-world capabilities2.

After the 2004-2007 DARPA Grand Challenges catalyzed major technological breakthroughs, Google’s self-driving car project (now Waymo) launched in 2009, taking nearly 14 years to reach its first million autonomous miles in January 20233.

The acceleration from 1 million miles in early 2023 to 100 million miles today demonstrates how AV development follows an exponential rather than linear growth pattern as core technologies mature and fleet deployments expand.

2️⃣ Competing technical philosophies reflect fundamentally different approaches to solving autonomy