Waymo adds three cities to its robotaxi network. Zoox adds two. Neither company disclosed which cities want this.
The robotaxi race heats up. That's the framing. Two companies fighting for dominance in a market that doesn't exist yet. Waymo operates maybe a few hundred vehicles across a handful of neighborhoods where drunk people need rides at 2 AM. Zoox operates nowhere at scale. Amazon owns Zoox, which means Jeff Bezos looked at his pile of money and decided the best use was funding cars that drive themselves to pick up nobody.
The expansion strategy makes perfect sense. Waymo looked at its current markets and thought, "We've saturated demand in Phoenix." So they're bringing the service to places where people will film the empty cars, post the videos, and call it innovation. Zoox looked at Waymo and thought, "We should also do that."
Retail traders see this headline and start Googling "How to invest in Waymo." They can't. It's owned by Alphabet. So they'll buy shares of Alphabet instead, a company worth $2 trillion that just added a rounding error's worth of robotaxi revenue. They'll tell themselves they're early. They're not early. They're buying a search engine that sometimes drives a Jaguar I-PACE around San Francisco while a safety driver reads a magazine.
The race heats up. Both companies race toward the same finish line: breaking even in 2037. Waymo burns Google's cash. Zoox burns Amazon's cash. The winner gets to burn slightly less cash in slightly more cities. The prize is a market where human Uber drivers already work for $6 an hour after expenses.
Three more cities get driverless rides, and two cities get testing, which means five cities total get to watch cars stop in the middle of intersections because a plastic bag confused the LIDAR.
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