Waymo has been running robotaxis in American cities for years, but until now it has done so using a retrofitted consumer car, the Jaguar I-PACE, that was never built for the job. The Ojai changes that. It is a boxy electric minivan co-designed from the start with Geely's Zeekr, built specifically around the demands of autonomous ride-hailing rather than around a human driver. The base vehicle is manufactured in Ningbo, China, shipped to Mesa, Arizona, and finished with Waymo's sensors and software. Analysts peg the per-vehicle cost at roughly half what the I-PACE fleet required, even accounting for tariffs. That matters more now than ever: Waymo just closed a $16 billion funding round at a $126 billion valuation and needs its unit economics to justify the ambition.
The Ojai is rolling out to select riders in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix first, with San Diego, Las Vegas, and Denver to follow later this summer. It debuts alongside what Waymo calls its sixth-generation driver, a reworked hardware and software stack that cuts total sensor count by more than 40% compared to the previous system while improving performance. The key move was switching to 17-megapixel cameras, which see more with fewer units. The new system also integrates heaters, wipers, and sprayers directly into the sensor pods, a practical upgrade for wet-weather markets. Waymo currently operates around 4,000 vehicles completing 500,000 paid rides per week, a tenfold increase from a year ago. The target is more than one million weekly rides by the end of 2026, and the company expects Ojai numbers to reach the tens of thousands of vehicles within the same timeframe. A wave of Hyundai IONIQ 5s is also coming to bolster the fleet.
The cost reduction story is real, but the political dimension around Chinese manufacturing is not going away. Waymo pays tariffs on the imported Zeekr base vehicles, and the arrangement will remain a point of scrutiny regardless of what the economics show. On the operational side, the company has been finding and fixing issues at pace: a voluntary software recall covering nearly 3,800 vehicles addressed a flaw that allowed some cars to drive into standing water, and freeway service was temporarily paused to address behavior near construction zones. Waymo says it encounters around 10,000 construction zones per day across its network. These are real-world edge cases that no amount of simulation fully prepares for, and Waymo's willingness to pull service and patch rather than paper over the problems is one of the more credible safety signals in an industry prone to overpromising. The steering wheel on the Ojai is removable, and the company expects pedals and other driver-centric components to disappear from future vehicles as rider experience takes over from driver experience as the design brief.
Bottom line: The Ojai is a genuine inflection point for Waymo, not just a new model. Cutting vehicle cost in half while improving sensor performance is what turns a well-funded science project into a scalable business. Whether the Chinese supply chain becomes a political liability before the fleet reaches meaningful scale is the variable no analyst can model cleanly. Waymo has the technology lead, the data lead, and now the cost structure. The race now is whether it can execute the expansion faster than Tesla, Zoox, and Chinese rivals close the capability gap.