How Google's Waymo Won the Self-Driving Race

In 2015, a man named Steven Mahan took the world’s first fully self-driving ride on public roads in Austin, TX. Steve is legally blind. The car he rode was Waymo and it had LiDAR sensors, computers, cameras, and braking, but no steering wheel or pedals.

Around the Phoenix Metro area Waymo asked the citizens to join their first public trial of autonomous ride-hailing in 2016. Even the then governor of Arizona took the ride. Today, in 2025, Waymo provides over 250,000 paid trips each week across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, and the company is preparing to bring their fully autonomous ride-hailing to Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, D.C. in 2026. While Cruise and Tesla struggled, it took Waymo only 7 years to evolve from Google's Project Chauffeur to its launch as a standalone Alphabet company in 2016.

So, how did this company go from an idea on a pitch deck to a fully-autonomous ride-hailing service competing alongside Uber and Lyft?

DISCLAIMER: We apologize about the numerical error at 0:51, it should have been 250,000 not 250,0000 (extra zero). We suffered a major editing software crash and some elements were hard to edit over.

00:00 Opening
1:38 Beginning as a Google's car project
5:15 Infrastructure of Waymo
5:50 Waymo's test-in-sim strategy
7:54 Why is it called Waymo?
12:04 Tesla sucks
13:16 Waymo patents
15:54 Waymo is destined to dominate self-driving

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