The Waymo Dallas robotaxi service went fully open on Tuesday 4 August 2026, when the Alphabet-owned company removed its waitlist and allowed anyone to hail a driverless car through the app. No invite, no queue, no patience required.
It is the same playbook Waymo has run in Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Turn up, prove the tech works well enough, open the doors. Dallas is simply the latest city to graduate from beta-adjacent to fully public.
What riders get, and what they don’t, yet
Anyone in Dallas can now download the Waymo app and ride immediately. The one notable gap is Dallas Love Field Airport, where Waymo says it is still testing and expects to begin serving riders ‘soon.’
The fleet runs on all-electric Jaguar I-Pace vehicles. Avis Budget Group handles the ground-level work under a multi-year strategic agreement: infrastructure, vehicle readiness, maintenance, and depot operations, including charging. Waymo retains responsibility for the autonomous driving software itself.
Avis CEO Brian Choi framed the deal as a strategic pivot for his company, calling it ‘a pivotal milestone in our evolution, from a rental car company to a leading provider of fleet management, infrastructure and operations to the broader mobility ecosystem.’ The Avis partnership also includes plans to expand to additional cities beyond Dallas in the near future, which suggests both companies are treating this as more than a local pilot.
Dallas City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert welcomed the arrangement when it was announced, saying the Waymo and Avis partnership would ‘offer an innovative, technology-based transportation option for our residents and visitors.’
The Waymo Dallas robotaxi service: a rougher road than the press release suggests
Waymo has been operating in Dallas since last year, when it began testing on public streets. The service opened to the public in February, though initially behind a waitlist. About 150,000 riders used the app during that restricted period.
The road to open access was not entirely smooth. In May, Waymo paused its Dallas service alongside operations in Houston, Austin, and San Antonio in Texas, and in Atlanta, after its robotaxis were caught driving into flooded roads. The snippet as originally reported omitted Austin from the list; TechCrunch’s reporting confirmed Austin was also included in the pause.
The flooding incidents were tied to a software recall Waymo had issued the prior week, specifically related to how the Waymo Driver handled flooded roads. That kind of detail tends to get buried beneath the triumphant waitlist-removal announcement, but it matters: autonomous systems navigating edge cases in real weather conditions is exactly where the hard engineering lives.
Services have since resumed across the affected cities. Waymo says it may adjust or temporarily pause operations in future based on severe weather, flood warnings, and real-time conditions. Riders can check current service status through the app.
Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana, speaking at the time of the Dallas city announcement, said the company looked forward to ‘bringing our fully autonomous ride-hailing service to the people of Dallas next year, offering a new era of safe and seamless transportation.’ That ‘next year’ is now, give or take a few months of waitlist friction.
Where Dallas fits in the wider picture
Waymo now lists its service footprint as spanning more than 30 cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle, Denver, Chicago, New York, Boston, Miami, Washington D.C., and others, plus Tokyo. Dallas joins that list as a fully open market rather than an invite-only experiment.
The scale ambition is clear enough. The Avis partnership’s explicit plans for additional cities signals that Waymo is betting on outsourcing fleet operations as a way to grow faster than it could manage everything in-house.
The Love Field Airport extension, whenever it arrives, will be the next test. Airports are operationally complex, high-traffic, and politically visible. If the Dallas waitlist removal is the easy win, the airport route is where Dallas will tell us something more useful about what this technology can actually do at scale.
