Best Tech 2025: Waymo One Advances the Robotaxi Future
This is how developing self-driving cars is supposed to be done—ready to go for a ride?
As if the sight of a stealthy-looking EV clad in whirring sensors wasn’t otherworldly enough, realizing that there isn’t a driver behind the wheel might be enough to convince you you just had a close encounter of the third kind with a roadgoing UFO. It's a valid reaction for anyone happening upon a Waymo One vehicle for the first time, but denizens of the cities where these robotaxis now roam hardly bat an eye anymore. That’s because Waymo One provides reliable, practical, user-friendly, and dare we say increasingly normal transportation. It’s a combination of trustworthy technology and ever-increasing capabilities that have earned Waymo One our 2025 MotorTrend Best Tech award in the Robotaxi category.
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Waymo is Google’s autonomous driving subsidiary, and Waymo One is the name of its commercial robotaxi service. Offering Level 4 autonomous rides in Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Austin, Waymo One robotaxis now operate over more than 400 square miles. In 2024, Waymo One quadrupled the number of rides it provided, with its driverless vehicles traveling more than 4 million electric-powered miles at an average of 4.1 miles per trip, saving some 10 million pounds of CO2 emissions as a result, according to Waymo estimates.
This comes after many years of Waymo laying a foundation for its Waymo One vehicles to be able to run safely and efficiently in day-to-day driving scenarios. The company has completed millions of real-world miles and billions more miles in simulations, providing a vast set of road data on top of baseline, high-definition geographic maps. Waymo One vehicles are equipped with a multitude of radar, lidar, and optical sensors, which provide real-time perception for the onboard artificial intelligence to make moment-by-moment decisions as it autonomously navigates through standard city traffic. And like any autonomous driving technology developer, Waymo One uses data from every ride to continually improve its capabilities.
With that hardware and software foundation in place, Waymo One is actualizing the robotaxi visions prophesied by science fiction. In our experience riding with Waymo One, its vehicles drive with deftness indicative of a product well beyond the prototype stage. Aside from a generally cautious (and perhaps appropriate) driving demeanor and the occasional unnecessary lane change, there’s nothing odd about how Waymo One vehicles navigate the open road. Rather, they demonstrate keen situational awareness and a balance of defensive and assertive techniques.
Once aboard, you’ll quickly get over the novelty of riding in a driverless car and settle into relaxation, a state aided by the Jaguar I-Pace EV crossovers that make up Waymo One’s fifth-generation robotaxi fleet—a far more stylish and luxurious vehicle than the typical ride-hail workhorse. Adding to the experience is the Waymo One app that’s as simple and user-friendly as that of any other ride-hail service to book a ride and track your progress during a journey. And unlike other human-based services, you’ll never have to contend with a driver’s distraction, conversation, music, or aromas. Touchscreens in the Waymo One robotax allow passengers to change music and climate settings or contact support; cameras are always monitoring the vehicle’s interior, and microphones activate only when necessary.
It’s not all driverless rainbows and unicorns, though. While Waymo has a strong safety record, its vehicles have occasionally clogged roads and impeded first responders. The robotaxi rollout is also fraught with socioeconomic implications, presenting challenges that are proving as hard to solve as autonomous driving itself. Some residents of cities where Waymo One operates have expressed their opinions by vandalizing its vehicles. The notion of a driverless car is still highly unusual, and humans tend to react to change with skepticism or worse.
The best way to assuage those fears and increase trust is to get people in the cars. Experiencing how well Waymo’s robotaxis work in real life might change perceptions and open minds to the myriad potential benefits including safer roads as well a slower energy consumption, more efficient infrastructure usage, and lower transportation costs. If Waymo can make these ambitions a reality, its robotaxis will ease the detrimental aspects of the personal-transportation status quo.
There will be a place for human drivers for a long time to come, no doubt. But Waymo One’s commitment to elevating the robotaxi state of the art shows how autonomous vehicles can take their place next to us on the road. Like any good human driver, they move with respect and safety at the core of their code. Because of that, they’ve become our trusted neighbors here in Los Angeles and soon will be in Miami and elsewhere as Waymo One expands.
Although Waymo One doesn’t currently have any viable competition, theoretical rivals would need to demonstrate a tremendously impressive track record of good road behavior and corporate governance to outdo what’s become the most established provider of autonomous transportation. It’s the leap from rolling UFO to ho-hum driverless operation that makes Waymo One the worthy winner of our inaugural MotorTrend 2025 Best Tech Award for robotaxis.
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Alex's earliest memory is of a teal 1993 Ford Aspire, the car that sparked his automotive obsession. He's never driven that tiny hatchback—at six feet, 10 inches tall, he likely wouldn't fit—but has assessed hundreds of other vehicles, sharing his insights on MotorTrend as a writer and video host.
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