WHICH OF THESE SELF-DRIVING TAXIS WOULD YOU RIDE IN? WE COMPARE THE TESLA ROBOTAXI AGAINST WAYMO

Today, Waymo is the biggest player in the self-driving car space-at least the ride-hailing portion of it-and has run in various cities around the nation since 2017.

- ALEXANDER STOKLOSA

Its service expanded into a more publicly available realm in recent years after beginning with more limited ridership, but the basics are this: Waymo, a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet, has ferried passengers without human drivers for nearly a decade, not including eight years of development.

In most Waymo cities, riders hail one of the driverless cars via the company's own app; in some newer locations, namely Austin, Texas, and Atlanta (and, next year, Dallas), Waymos are fewer in number and simply mixed into the potential options you might otherwise get randomly paired with from Uber's ride-hailing app.

With Waymo and Tesla both operating in overlapping zones of Austin, what better opportunity to see how the Robotaxi lines up to the current standard in autonomous ride-hailing services? After all, Waymo is a Motor Trend Best Tech awardee for self-driving cars.

Motor Trend technical director Frank Markus, author of the preceding Robotaxi story, and I arrived in Austin armed with the Uber app and Tesla's unfinished Robotaxi app on our smartphones to hail rides on both services. With a Tesla for me and a Waymo for Markus, we hailed rides from the same spot and set the same destination. It wouldn't be a race, because there was little guarantee we could line up a Tesla Robotaxi and a Waymo (in Austin, these are all Jaguar I-Paces with funny-looking lidar arrays and sensors all over them) at precisely the same time.