Waymo’s robotaxi service is going live at its fourth airport today: San Antonio International. The company said its vehicles will drop off riders curbside at the terminals, and pick up passengers at the airport’s designated ride-share area.
This is the first airport Waymo is servicing in Texas, where the company currently operates in San Antonio, Austin, Dallas and Houston. Waymo has been offering airport pickups and drops at Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International for a few years now, and has started servicing the San Francisco and San Jose Mineta International airports over the past few months.
Waymo launched its San Antonio robotaxi service in February, though it’s still not fully available to the public yet. The company has been operating an invitation-based system that it is scaling on a rolling basis — an approach it used in Dallas, Houston and Orlando, too. The company said on Tuesday that its waitlist in San Antonio is now “[t]ens of thousands of people” long and that it plans to make its service available to “all public riders soon.”
This phased approach is one way that Waymo is still being cautious in a year of otherwise rapid expansion. The company has said it wants to launch in around 20 new cities this year, including in Tokyo and London. Its robotaxi service is currently live in 10 cities and is running more than 500,000 paid rides per week, roughly double the number it was operating at this time last year. Waymo is expected to start offering rides in its newest vehicle, the Zeekr-built van called Ojai, at some point this year.
The company has shared data that it says proves its robotaxis are already safer than human drivers and reducing serious crashes. Still, Waymo keeps running into new obstacles as it expands.
Waymo’s robotaxis have illegally passed school buses that were picking up or dropping off children, a problem that is being investigated by both the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). It has issued software updat …