It's Waymo's world. We're all just riding in it.

Waymo's taxis are only available in a few cities right now, including Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco

- Ben Cohen

The website of the California Public Utilities Commission is not the first place you would go looking for signs of progress in one of the world's sexiest industries.

But every few months, this agency tasked with regulating passenger transportation publishes a bunch of spreadsheets with valuable information about self-driving cars and how many people are riding in them. And in the latest data that was recently dumped online, there was a telling update about a company identified simply as PSG0038152. It's better known as Waymo.

Unless you live in one of the few cities where you can hail a ride from Waymo, which is owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet, it's almost impossible to appreciate just how quickly their streets have been invaded by autonomous vehicles.

Waymo was doing 10,000 paid rides a week in August 2023. By May 2024, that number of trips in cars without a driver was up to 50,000. In August, it hit 100,000. Now it's already more than 250,000.

After pulling ahead in the race for robotaxi supremacy, Waymo has started pulling away.

This is not just because Waymo is expanding into new markets. It's because of the way existing markets have come to embrace self-driving cars.

In California, the most recent batch of quarterly data reported by the company was the most encouraging yet. It showed that Waymo's number of paid rides inched higher by roughly 2% in both January and February—and then increased 27% in March. In the nearly two years that people in San Francisco have been paying for robot chauffeurs, it was the first time that Waymo's growth slowed down for several months only to dramatically speed up again.

The numbers also showed that Waymo's cars are self-driving toward an inflection point: They were novel—and now they're becoming normal.