Uber and Waymo Begin Taking Sign-Ups for Atlanta Robotaxi

Uber has launched an “interest list” for riders wishing to use its Atlanta robotaxi service.

Customers based in that city can sign up for the wait list beginning Tuesday (April 15) to boost their chances of getting matched with an autonomous vehicle (AV) operated by Google-owned Waymo, the company said in a statement provided to PYMNTS.

“With 14 AV partners to date — and tens of thousands of autonomous trips happening every month — we’re excited to expand our years-long partnership with Waymo, recently bringing autonomous rides to Austin, and soon Atlanta, exclusively through the Uber app,” Uber said.

“In Austin, we’re already seeing positive signals with the vast majority of Uber riders choosing to ride with a Waymo autonomous vehicle when given the opportunity, and most riders have been rating their trip as 5-stars.”

According to the statement, riders will be able to travel across 65 square miles of Atlanta — from Downtown to Buckhead to Capitol View — with plans to expand the operating territory. Customers will pay the same rates as UberX, Uber Green, Uber Comfort, or Uber Comfort Electric when matched with a Waymo vehicle and will get upfront pricing on the Uber app.

Waymo said earlier this year it plans to test its vehicles — with a driver behind the wheel — in 10 new cities during 2025 so that it can see how its self-driving cars adapt to the traffic patterns, road design, weather conditions and other factors in a variety of locales.

In the company’s core markets of San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles, these vehicles have already traversed millions of miles.

PYMNTS examined the challenges of AV operations in an interview last month with Jesse Levinson, co-founder and CTO at Zoox, Amazon’s robotaxi subsidiary.

“In the olden days of 20 years ago, AI wasn’t very popular, and most people thought it was a stupid thing to work on,” Levinson said. He thought inventing a self-driving car was “cool,” adding that “I was pretty convinced that someday in my lifetime, cars would drive themselves.”

Now, 11 years after helping to launch Zoox, Levinson discovered that autonomy is “a super-hard problem. If you really want to remove the driver, it has to be just profoundly good. It can’t just be like, ‘Oh, if you drive it for an hour, sometimes it works.’ That’s cool if it’s a driver assistance system. But if there’s no driver, it has to work … 99.9% [of the time] — a lot of nines.”