Tampa’s might be getting a little bit freakier thanks to driverless taxi company Waymo.
TechCrunch said the Bay area is among three new cities on its radar (Minneapolis and New Orleans are the others). The company—owned by Google’s parent company Alphabet—already has plans to expand to Orlando in early-2026, according to Orlando Weekly.
Tampa city officials told WTSP that Waymo “is coming at no cost to the city and will be funded and implemented by private enterprise,” adding that it could be a year before Tampa residents will actually be able to ride in a driver-free taxi.
Waymo vehicles, powered by artificial intelligence technology, are fully self-driving, so don’t expect to see a driver or human supervisor behind the steering wheel of one of these suckers. Waymo’s so-called “robotaxis” are already in operation in Atlanta, Austin, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Waymo safety concerns
Waymo has received criticism elsewhere for risks to public safety and for its potential to undermine publicly owned and operated transit systems (despite incentives Waymo has offered for people to use both).
Labor unions such as the Teamsters and Transport Workers Union, both of which represent professionals in the trucking and transportation industries, have similarly called out Waymo for threatening their members’ jobs.
“New Yorkers be warned, Waymo will turn pedestrians into cannon fodder and will block streets for emergency responders,” said Transport Workers Union president John Samuelsen in a recent statement on Waymo’s expansion to New York City. “Waymo isn’t ready for NYC’s streets and the end goal is to replace rideshare drivers, taxi drivers, and transit workers with robots.”
Waymo, just one of several companies that have rolled out autonomous vehicles, has faced protests from drivers for companies like Uber and Lyft in cities such as in Seattle, where Waymo has also looked to expand.
A Teamsters local in Boston last month joined a labor coalition in support of a city ordinance there that would regulate and study the potential impact of autonomous vehicles. “I regularly transport patients to Boston hospitals, and if robotaxis block us, freeze in place, or don’t know how to yield, they could kill people,” said Abby O’Brien, a Teamster and paramedic for a local ambulance company.
Waymo for its part has pushed back on critical assessments of its safety and its potential impact on the transportation workforce. “Transportation is a team sport, and we believe autonomous vehicles, professional drivers, and the wider ecosystem will thrive together as we increase transportation options for everyone,” Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher told Axios in a statement. Driving and trucking is one of the most common occupations among young men without a college degree, a 2024 analysis from the Pew Research Center found.
As far as safety, Waymo has faced its fair share of concerns — even recalling some 1,200 of its vehicles last year after “minor collisions” — yet has continued to defend the safety and integrity of its software. The company recently released the results of an independent safety audit that determined Waymo’s procedures for determining the safety of their vehicles met industry standards.
A probe by the federal government, launched last May to investigate a “series of minor collisions and unexpected behavior” from Waymo vehicles, concluded this past July with federal safety regulators reportedly opting not to take any further action.
However, as of last month, the company is once again under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration over reports that its vehicles may not be complying with traffic safety rules around stopped school buses. A Waymo spokesperson told news service Reuters that they had “already developed and implemented improvements related to stopping for school buses and will land additional software updates in our next software release.”
An independent analysis of federal crash data by the Substack publication Understanding AI found that, from February to August of this year, most of the 41 crashes that reportedly involved Waymo’s robotaxis weren’t the fault of Waymo’s software itself, but rather actions by other drivers or — as The Atlantic put it — “seemingly an act of God.”
Waymo has argued that its robotaxis are actually safer than vehicles with human drivers, stating their “Driver” (unlike actual humans) is “always alert, follows speed limits, promotes seat belt use, and operates some of the safest vehicles on the road.”
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This article appears in Nov. 27 – Dec. 03, 2025.