Home / News / Waymo (Alphabet) · Zoox (Amazon) · Sep 3, 2026
Waymo and Zoox both widen the robotaxi map, days before Tesla's own reveal
Waymo went live with paid driverless rides in Denver, San Diego, and Tampa on Sept 1; Zoox began supervised testing in Houston the same week. Goldman Sachs projects the U.S. robotaxi market growing from roughly $3B to $48B by 2035.
Published
Sep 3, 2026
Companies
Hub · Category
Type
News · Report
Format
Original write-up
New markets
Denver, San Diego, Tampa (Waymo) · Houston (Zoox, supervised)
Source
MATR, via CNBC reporting
Reviewed by
unit.report editorial review · Sep 3, 2026
Two operators, one expansion week
On Sept 1, 2026, Waymo began offering paid, fully driverless rides to the public in Denver, San Diego, and Tampa — its first new markets since a prior wave of launches, and enough to bring the company's footprint to 14 cities, according to CNBC's reporting carried by MATR. Waymo says it now operates more than 4,000 vehicles and delivers over 500,000 paid rides a week across its combined service areas, with access in the three new cities rolling out gradually rather than all at once.
Zoox, Amazon's robotaxi subsidiary, moved on a parallel track the same week: the company started supervised testing in Houston, adding to its existing supervised program in San Diego, while its only fully driverless-to-the-public service remains Las Vegas (paid) and San Francisco (free, invite-only). Supervised testing means a safety operator is still behind the wheel or in the vehicle — a materially earlier stage than the driverless service Waymo is now running in its new cities.
The market bet behind the map
Goldman Sachs projects the U.S. robotaxi market scaling from roughly $3 billion to $48 billion by 2035.
Both companies are expanding into a market that analysts expect to grow sharply this decade. Goldman Sachs' published estimate has the U.S. robotaxi market moving from single-digit billions in the next couple of years toward $48 billion in annual value by 2035 — a roughly fifteenfold increase that assumes continued regulatory approval, falling per-mile operating costs, and consumer willingness to ride driverless. That projection is the backdrop against which both companies' city-by-city rollouts should be read: neither Denver, San Diego, Tampa, nor Houston is a huge market on its own, but each new metro is a data point in the argument that the driverless model generalizes beyond the handful of Sun Belt cities where it was first proven out.
Source
Figures and city/date details in this entry are drawn from CNBC's Sept 1, 2026 reporting (byline: Lora Kolodny) on the Waymo and Zoox expansions, as carried by MATR on Sept 3, 2026, and cross-referenced against Waymo's and Zoox's own service-area disclosures.
Cited on this site as: "Waymo and Zoox Expand Robotaxi Services Across U.S. Cities," matr.net, Sept 3, 2026 (11:31 UTC)
Why the timing matters
The expansion lands just days before Tesla is scheduled to hold an event detailing its own Cybercab and Robotaxi service plans, a coincidence in timing that several outlets covering the launches flagged directly. Tesla already runs a limited, safety-monitor-attended robotaxi service in Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa — meaning Tampa and Houston are now cities where more than one of the three major U.S. robotaxi operators has an active presence, giving riders in those metros an unusually direct point of comparison between approaches heading into the back half of 2026.
Where this fits on unit.report
Earlier and later signals
What this entry is not: it is not a review of ride quality or safety performance for either operator, and it does not change either company's status on the Compliance Tracker. It is a record of the city launches each company announced this week, with figures attributed and sourced.
Once confirmed, this record is not silently rewritten. A later development becomes a new, separately dated entry. Spotted an error? See our correction policy.