Waymo driverless vehicles wait at a traffic light in Santa Monica, California, on May 30, 2025.
Daniel Cole | Reuters
Residents of New York City will soon start seeing Waymo cars cruising the avenues. But at least for now, a human will be in the driver’s seat.
Alphabet‘s self-driving car unit announced on Wednesday that it plans to drive vehicles manually in New York, marking the first step toward potentially cracking the largest U.S. city. Waymo said it applied for a permit with the New York City Department of Transportation to operate autonomously with a trained specialist behind the wheel in Manhattan.
“While we won’t be in New York full-time yet, we have every intention of bringing our fully autonomous ride-hailing service to the city in the future,” the company said in an announcement. “We’re working towards that goal in a few key ways.”
If the permit is granted, it would be the city’s first testing deployment of autonomous vehicles. New York state law currently prohibits a service like Waymo to operate without a driver.
“We’re advocating for a change in state law that would allow for operating a vehicle with no human behind the wheel,” the company said.
Meanwhile, Waymo is aggressively expanding into new U.S. markets. Waymo One, its ride-hailing service, provides more than 250,000 paid trips each week across Phoenix; San Francisco; Los Angeles; and Austin, Texas, and is preparing to bring fully autonomous rides to Atlanta; Miami; and Washington, D.C., in 2026.
Waymo has made a prior appearance in New York.
The company brought its cars to parts of the city in 2021 for manual driving, data collection and testing. Ethan Teicher, a Waymo spokesperson, said “it was a planned trip with a start and an end.” The testing allowed Waymo to improve driving in icy and snowy conditions in a densely populated area, the company said.
