You guys need to read this because it’s wild how much money has been poured down robotaxi rabbit holes while only a few players are actually winning! The article names Waymo and Zoox as frontrunners, alongside Ford owning Argo (not Argol) and VW investing in Mobileye. Even Tesla is in the mix with Optimus bot. But there's also a massive graveyard of failed startups — NuTonomy bought by Uber, Level 5 acquired by Toyota, Embark spun off into Armature, Motivar dissolved after raising $13M before Launch20, and Argo Partner was shuttered after $768M raised! This is real money gone.
Alphabet/Google backs Waymo heavily — they're the only ones with consistent commercial operation in Phoenix and San Francisco. The fleet is expanding to Austin this year too, and the plan is to launch 10k cars by 2025. Elon Musk is pushing FSD at Tesla and planning Optimus for factory work alongside robotaxis (he's already deployed several). Uber partnered with Hertz on an autonomous rental experiment in Phoenix starting late August 2024. This shows how the industry has bifurcated: large companies building their own fleets versus startups that either get bought or quietly fail.
The article also highlights smaller players — Avride operating a car service, Argo producing electric robotaxis by Tesla Supercharger stations, and Zoox's pod-based system in Los Angeles on May 2024. It touches on how autonomous driving is the hardest problem computers will ever solve and why San Francisco was the epicentre of this debate for years. These details make it clear that while everyone talks about robotaxis as inevitable, only a handful of companies are actually getting them onto roads in volume. This isn't just one company — this entire ecosystem tells you where things stand.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/12/techcrunch-mobility-a-robotaxi-ultimatum/
Alphabet/Google backs Waymo heavily — they're the only ones with consistent commercial operation in Phoenix and San Francisco. The fleet is expanding to Austin this year too, and the plan is to launch 10k cars by 2025. Elon Musk is pushing FSD at Tesla and planning Optimus for factory work alongside robotaxis (he's already deployed several). Uber partnered with Hertz on an autonomous rental experiment in Phoenix starting late August 2024. This shows how the industry has bifurcated: large companies building their own fleets versus startups that either get bought or quietly fail.
The article also highlights smaller players — Avride operating a car service, Argo producing electric robotaxis by Tesla Supercharger stations, and Zoox's pod-based system in Los Angeles on May 2024. It touches on how autonomous driving is the hardest problem computers will ever solve and why San Francisco was the epicentre of this debate for years. These details make it clear that while everyone talks about robotaxis as inevitable, only a handful of companies are actually getting them onto roads in volume. This isn't just one company — this entire ecosystem tells you where things stand.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/12/techcrunch-mobility-a-robotaxi-ultimatum/