Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
John Quiggin 
Waymo, Google’s robotaxi subsidiary, is steadily expanding in US cities. Initially it was just in Phoenix, now in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and Austin, with testing under way in others including Washington DC (target 2026) and Tokyo. One analyst claims Waymo had captured 22% of the rideshare market in San Francisco by last November. https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/13/waymos-quickly-taking-more-market-share-than-i-expected/
Waymo’s culture is thankfully a complete contrast to Tesla’s erratic hype and under-performance, the tortoise versus the hare. They are belt-and-braces conservative on technology, safety-oriented, and good at working with regulators and carmakers. Look at the photo in the link of their practical and unglamorous concept taxi. In the end they decided not to produce their own vehicles but to continue adapting models on the market. Again typically, they paused work on autonomous trucks in 2023 to focus on the demanding car rollouts.
When Waymo decides to come to Australia, you can be confident the service will work. It will be interesting to see how much their robotaxis change patterns of use, ownership, and accidents. What about emissions? If robotaxis displace manually driven EVs, the direct change is small. Indirectly, robotaxis widen options for non-drivers, leading to more traffic congestion. On the other hand, robotaxis are likely to clock up more miles than privately owned cars, cutting the numbers needed for the transition and hopefully speeding it up. Geeks will be able to work on the spreadsheets while being wafted around he city in silent solipsistic bubbles.