The minivan pulling up to the curb in San Francisco has no steering wheel for passengers to grab, no driver to greet them, and a design goal that has nothing to do with looking like a luxury car. It is built to be cheap enough to scale.
Waymo said on Aug. 19 that its next-generation robotaxi, the Ojai, is now available to all riders in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix, ending a period when the vehicle was reserved for select test users. The Ojai, built by China’s Zeekr on its SEA-M platform, is the first Waymo vehicle designed from the ground up for autonomous service, and the company says it is cheaper to build and operate than the Jaguar I-Pace cars that preceded it.
The cost story is the real news. Robotaxi economics have always come down to a simple equation: the price of the vehicle and its sensors, divided by the miles it can cover. The Ojai attacks both sides of that equation. Its sixth-generation Waymo Driver system uses 13 cameras, four lidar units and six radar sensors, a 42 percent reduction in sensor count from the previous generation, cutting the cost of the hardware that made early robotaxis impractical. The Zeekr-built platform is designed for high-volume manufacturing, with a flat floor, sliding doors and a cabin laid out for passengers rather than drivers.
The vehicle is a product of a global supply chain that is itself remarkable. Zeekr builds the Ojai in China, and Waymo imports the vehicles to the United States, paying a tariff of roughly 127 percent on Chinese electric vehicles, before converting them at a facility in Mesa, Arizona, where its sensors and software are installed. The company has imported thousands of the vehicles through the Port of Los Angeles since 2024, and it says production capacity at the Arizona plant is being scaled toward tens of thousands of units a year.
The scale of the operation is growing quickly. Waymo has about 300 Ojai vehicles in service, according to a company spokesperson, with hundreds more staged at its Arizona factory, and the company expects thousands of additional vehicles to arrive by the end of the year. It continues to run its fleet of roughly 3,700 Jaguar I-Pace vehicles alongside the new platform. Riders in the three launch cities may be matched with either vehicle type for now, with the option to choose once enough Ojai units are in service.
The numbers behind the service are the industry’s most closely watched. Waymo says it is running about 500,000 paid rides per week across roughly a dozen cities and is targeting 1 million weekly rides. The expansion plan for the Ojai includes Denver, Las Vegas and San Diego later this year, with the company betting that the lower-cost platform will make new markets profitable sooner than the Jaguar fleet could. Las Vegas, where demand is concentrated in a dense strip, is expected to become a major test of the economics.
The sensor reduction deserves attention for what it says about the technology. Early autonomous systems were burdened with expensive, redundant sensors because the software could not be trusted. Waymo’s sixth-generation system relies on fewer, higher-resolution components, a sign that its perception stack has matured enough to work with a leaner hardware suite. That maturation is what makes the cost curve bend downward, and it is the reason the company can now talk about serving millions of weekly rides.
The commercial stakes are high for Alphabet. Waymo is the leader in the race to make robotaxis a real business, but it has burned through billions of dollars along the way, and the pressure to show a path to profit has grown. The Ojai’s cheaper bill of materials, combined with rising ride volumes, is the company’s clearest answer to that pressure. Analysts said the vehicle’s cost structure, not the technology, will determine whether robotaxis become a meaningful business or remain a subsidized experiment.
Competitors are watching from close behind. Tesla, Amazon’s Zoox and a field of Chinese operators are all pursuing driverless ride-hailing, and the economics of each approach are being compared on every metric. Waymo’s advantage is its operating record and its regulatory approvals; the Ojai’s advantage is that it makes those approvals worth more by lowering the cost of serving each city. If the Arizona factory ramps as planned and the new markets open on schedule, Waymo will have answered the industry’s hardest question: not whether the cars can drive, but whether the business can make money.
The launch also rests on regulatory groundwork laid over years. Waymo holds permits in California, Arizona and other states to operate without safety drivers, and it has published data showing its vehicles are involved in fewer injury-causing collisions per mile than human drivers in comparable urban environments. Those credentials, accumulated during the years when the Jaguar fleet carried passengers, are what make a mass-produced vehicle like the Ojai possible: regulators approve the company, not just the car. The free-ride period for the new platform, which ran for months before this week’s opening, served the same dual purpose the company has always pursued, gathering real-world data on the new hardware while building public familiarity with a vehicle type most riders have never seen. Now that the training wheels are off, the question is whether the cheaper vehicle delivers the economics that turn a celebrated demonstration into a durable business.
