Waymo Hits a Rough Patch In Washington, DC

Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary that develops self-driving vehicle tech, has picked up speed. The company now operates robotaxis in six cities and has announced plans to launch in a dozen others this year. It just raised $16 billion in a new round of funding and says it has served over 20 million rides since the company launched its service in 2020, 14 million of them in 2025 alone.

But Waymo’s mostly smooth operations have hit a rough patch in Washington, DC, where the company first began testing in 2024. Despite frequent District sightings of the now-familiar white, electric Jaguars, and despite spending tens of thousands of dollars in payments to at least four outside lobbying firms last year, according to filings, the company’s robotaxis are stuck in regulatory limbo. It has no firm debut date in the city, though DC is still listed on its website as launching in 2026. Waymo declined to comment.

The legal logjam is a highly visible test for a company—and industry—that’s hoping to expand quickly across the US and, to some extent, the world. (Waymo has said it’s launching in London this year and in Japan at some point in the future.) For years, autonomous-vehicle companies have argued, unsuccessfully, that Congress should pass federal regulations governing testing and operations nationwide.

Absent a national law, companies have worked in at least 22 statehouses to pass legislation allowing AVs to operate on public roads in various cities and localities. Now the national debate on driverless tech is again picking up steam. This week, the US Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on the future of self-driving tech, where lawmakers stressed the importance of road safety and the need to develop tech ahead of China. A DC service could put the tech front in mind for some of the country’s most influential people.

But local DC leaders have questions about autonomous vehicles: how they might function in the District and whether they’ll further trouble a local economy already roiled by mass firings across the federal government.

“Do I believe autonomous vehicles are going to be on the roads in DC? I do,” says Councilmember Charles Allen, who chairs the DC City Council’s Committee on Transportation and Environment. “It’s not an ‘if,’ it’s a ‘when.’”

Allen says he’s still wondering what dilemma the remedy will solve in the city, which he says does not have a problem with ride-hail drivers driving dangerously. “I don’t think cities are defining very well, ‘What’s the problem we’re trying to solve for?’ As a policymaker, what tends to happen in that situation is, you’re just trying to chase the shiny ball.” Allen says he worries about the long-term effects of AVs on ride-hail drivers, who are able to pick up shifts when they want.

Granted, Waymo took a risk when it announced in April 2024 that it would come to DC, because the city didn’t have regulations governing, or even allowing, fully driverless cars to operate there. This was a departure for the company, which started testing its tech in cities in California, Texas, and Florida that already had some autonomous-vehicle rules in place. The Washington, DC, city council passed a law allowing AV companies to test, with a human safety driver, in the District in 2020. Four companies, including Waymo and Amazon-owned Zoox, have said they’re testing there. But the issue hasn’t seen serious legislative movement since.

As a practical matter, Allen says the city council is waiting to pass legislation because it’s anticipating a now months-delayed report from the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) on the safety of autonomous vehicle tech and what rules would need to be changed in the city to allow deployments to go forward. The report was due last fall but has been delayed, the agency said, because of budget cuts. Allen says DDOT has now promised it in the spring. DDOT didn’t respond to WIRED’s questions.

The councilmember also says that DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, is choosing not to issue companies additional permits to test in the city. “The mayor does not seem to embrace autonomous vehicles,” he says. The mayor’s office did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. This year’s mayoral election will see a new leader take the helm of the city, after Bowser said in November that she would not run for a fourth term.

Allen describes a trip he took last year in a Waymo as “very pleasant,” though he noted that the vehicle got confused in a “difficult intersection,” leading to the legally mandated safety driver taking control of the car. He says a December incident, when a power outage in San Francisco led to several Waymos to freeze in traffic, raises more questions about how cities might oversee the tech and ensure safety.

(After the San Francisco outage, Waymo said, “We are now rolling out fleet-wide updates that give our vehicles even more context about regional outages, allowing them to navigate these intersections more decisively.”)

Waymo’s state-by-state autonomous vehicle effort continues. This week, the company said it would return to Boston, even though Massachusetts still doesn’t allow driverless tech on public roads without a human operator behind the wheel. Waymo started mapping the city last month—a crucial first step to testing—but left a month later, once data collection concluded. In the fall, Boston City Council pushed back against driverless operations, proposing an ordinance that would have prevented the vehicles from going driverless until lawmakers could study their effects on jobs, traffic, and safety.

Now, Waymo is asking Massachusetts’ state lawmakers for help. “Before offering fully autonomous rides to Bostonians, we’ll first need the state to legalize fully autonomous vehicles,” the company wrote in a press release. “We’re looking forward to engaging with officials to inform that path.”