- The most autonomous miles were covered in Phoenix, followed by some more in San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and Austin, the company said.
- The autonomous ride market is fast getting populated with players including Tesla and Rivian.
- Evercore said on Thursday that Uber increasingly looks like an "AV winner" after its recent Rivian investment.
Alphabet Inc.’s (GOOG, GOOGL) robotaxi unit Waymo said on Thursday that its autonomous vehicle (AV) fleet drove 170.7 miles without a human at the wheel as of Dec. 2025, up from 127 million reported through Sept. 2025.
The most autonomous miles were covered in Phoenix, followed by San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles and Austin, the company said. Waymo’s autonomous system was involved in 13 times fewer serious injury or worse crashes than human drivers in those same cities, the company added.
However, in a recent note, Evercore ISI said Uber Technologies (UBER) seemed to be taking the lead on AVs after it announced a partnership with Rivian.
Waymo’s Lead Against Competitors
Waymo has been scaling its business rapidly as competition builds.
EV giant Tesla (TSLA) entered the robotaxi segment with a small number of vehicles in Texas last year and a safety rider in the front seat to take over as required. However, in January, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the company has started testing fully autonomous driving in Texas with no safety drivers, highlighting that it's fast catching up to Waymo who already operates autonomous rides across cities.
Meanwhile, EV maker Rivian announced a partnership with Uber Technologies earlier on Thursday under which it expects to to deploy up to 50,000 fully autonomous R2 robotaxis on the Uber ride-hailing platform starting with San Francisco and Miami in 2028. The company also said that it will expand its robotaxis to 25 cities by 2031, with the help of up to $1.25 billion investment from Uber towards building a robotaxi fleet.
Evercore ISI analyst Stephan Lingnau kept an ‘Outperform’ rating on Uber (UBER) after the company announced the partnership with Rivian. Evercore continues to view Uber as the global leader in rideshare and one of the leaders in online delivery. The company increasingly looks like an "AV winner" as the Rivian investment "suggests sufficient capacity to support Uber's planned AV fleet scale-up," the firm contended.
Uber does not develop its own autonomous driving tech like Waymo, but instead relies on partnerships to scale robotaxis on its platform. The ride-hailing giant also has a partnership with Waymo which allows users to hail fully autonomous, all-electric Waymo vehicles directly through the Uber app in select cities like Austin and Atlanta.
How Did Stocktwits Users React?
On Stocktwits, retail sentiment around GOOG stock rose from ‘extremely bearish’ to ‘bearish’ territory over the past 24 hours, while message volume stayed ‘low’.
Meanwhile sentiment around UBER and RIVN stayed within ‘extremely bullish’ and ‘bearish’ territory, respectively, at the time of writing.
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