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Driverless cab service Waymo coming to Pittsburgh

Jack Troy
| Wednesday, December 3, 2025 11:44 a.m.
Two Waymo driverless taxis cross paths in San Francisco in 2023. (AP)

Driverless cabs are coming to Pittsburgh.

Autonomous ride-hailing service Waymo is expanding into the Steel City along with Baltimore, St. Louis and Philadelphia, the California-based company announced in a blog post Wednesday.

Human-led test drives will start this week in Downtown Pittsburgh as Waymo confirms its technology works on the city’s roads.

The post described this phase as lasting a matter of months but didn’t give a firm date for when Pittsburghers can start calling robotaxis.

Waymo works much like other ride-hailing apps, allowing passengers to call a vehicle to their location in just a few taps. A June report from Obi, a rideshare price comparison service, found Waymo rides cost an average of 41% more than Lyft and 31% more than Uber.

Pittsburgh has a “special place in autonomous vehicle history,” Waymo noted in its post, crediting Carnegie Mellon University as an early leader in driverless technology.

This won’t be the first time Pittsburgh has received self-driving taxis. Uber rolled out a small fleet of autonomous Volvos in 2016, but city officials quickly soured, claiming the company reneged on promises to bring jobs to Hazelwood and support a federal transportation grant application.

Uber paused its driverless program in 2018 after one of its vehicles fatally struck a pedestrian in Arizona.

Two years later, the company sold the entire division to Aurora, a Pittsburgh-based competitor that has since become the industry leader in self-driving trucks.

Waymo started as a project of Google, which is owned by Alphabet, before becoming its own Alphabet subsidiary in 2016. Since then, it has provided more than 10 million paid rides.

The company is operating in five markets — Austin, Atlanta, San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles — and is testing or planning to launch services in 21 more, including a few abroad.


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