Mapped: Where Google’s Waymo is, will be, and might go

As Tesla stakes its future on autonomous cars and as self-driving competitors like Amazon’s Zoox start popping up, Google’s Waymo remains the elephant in the room.

Currently, Waymo is publicly operating more than 2,000 autonomous vehicles in five markets — Los Angeles, Atlanta, Austin, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area — and the company already intends to launch in five more: Dallas, Denver, Miami, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

It has also tested, or is currently testing, the service in a dozen other markets. We’ve comprehensively mapped Waymo’s operations for the first time, showing that the service has quietly made inroads across the country:

Meanwhile, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is pushing to surpass Waymo with the flip of a switch, as he theorizes that once the technology is tested sufficiently, many Teslas can drive themselves autonomously with the parts and software they already have.

“I think we’ll probably have autonomous ride-hailing in probably half of the population of the US by the end of the year,” Musk said on the company’s earnings call in July.

Tesla currently operates approximately 30 autonomous ride-hailing vehicles in Austin with safety monitors sitting in the passenger seat. The company is also operating a more traditional ride-hailing service in the Bay Area, where people can pay to be driven around by a person in the driver’s seat using the company’s supervised full self-driving tech.

While the public can download the app and join the waitlist for both, the company hasn’t stated how many people it’s allowing to use the program. (I’m still on the waitlist.)

Musk has repeatedly said Tesla will be able to scale its autonomous driving service far faster than Waymo, as Tesla owners will be able to add their personal vehicles to the robotaxi network for extra income. On the last earnings call, he pegged that milestone for “next year.”

But for now at least, Waymo is far in the lead.