Waymo opens its robotaxi service to riders in Las Vegas

Waymo has started carrying members of the public in Las Vegas, opening its 15th robotaxi market with an invitation-only rollout along the Strip. The Alphabet-owned company announced the launch on Monday 14 September, weeks after Nevada regulators approved commercial driverless services in Clark County.

Riders can hail a Waymo from Boulder Junction up Las Vegas Boulevard to Sahara Avenue, an area of nearly 24 miles that also reaches from the edge of Spring Valley to Winchester. The fleet starts with dozens of Ojai minivans, the company’s sixth-generation vehicle, and Waymo says more than 100,000 people registered an interest during months of testing on Vegas roads. Access codes go out on a rolling basis, and the company says it will open the service to everyone “steadily” — in most of its previous markets that has taken a month or two.

Las Vegas is the latest stop, not the last

Las Vegas joins Denver and San Diego as the first cities where most of the fleet is Ojai, the roomier minivan Waymo has been phasing in. The company’s head of marketing, Jackie Hyun, said the vehicle offers “a spacious cabin, large screens and a load of customizations”, while Las Vegas mayor Shelley Berkley framed the rollout as part of the city’s push for “cleaner, safer urban mobility”.

The robotaxi race is getting crowded in Clark County

Waymo is not alone on the Strip. Nevada’s Transportation Authority approved commercial robotaxi operations for Waymo, Tesla and Uber in August, permitting up to 1,000 vehicles each for Waymo and Uber — the latter running through partnerships with Hyundai-backed Motional and Amazon-owned Zoox — and up to 5,000 for Tesla over the next year. Waymo already runs more than 4,000 robotaxis across a dozen-plus cities and added Denver, San Diego and Tampa earlier this month.

Our opinion

The headline statistic — Waymo says its driver is involved in 94% fewer crashes causing serious injury or worse than a human driver over the same distance — is the company’s own number, measured and published by the company itself. That is not a reason to dismiss it, but it is a good reason to keep asking who else is checking it. What makes Las Vegas interesting is the venue rather than the technology: a city built around visitors who arrive without a car, drink more than they should and need to get from a stadium to a casino at two in the morning. If driverless cars are going to earn their keep anywhere, it is on streets like these. The caveat is that an invite-only queue and a 24-mile service area are a marketing story wearing the clothes of a launch, and Europe — where licensed driverless services of this scale are still thin on the ground — will be watching to see which one it turns out to be.