Waymo is facing a rough patch in Washington, DC

Waymo, Alphabet The subsidiary, which is developing autonomous vehicle technology, has picked up speed. The company now operates robotaxis in six cities, and has announced plans to launch them in a dozen more cities this year. It just raised $16 billion in a new round of funding and says it has provided more than 20 million rides since the company launched its services in 2020, 14 million of them in 2025 alone.

But Waymo’s mostly smooth operations have hit a rough patch in Washington, D.C., where the company first begins testing in 2024. Despite repeated sightings in the region of the now-familiar white and electric Jaguars, and despite spending tens of thousands of dollars on payments to at least four outside lobbying firms in the past year, according to filings, the company’s robots are stuck in a regulatory limbo. There’s no set date for its debut in the city, though DC still lists it on its website as launching in 2026. Waymo declined to comment.

The legal impasse is a stark test for a company — and industry — that hopes to expand rapidly across the United States and, to some extent, the world. (Waymo has said it will launch in London this year and in Japan at some point in the future.) For years, self-driving car companies have argued, unsuccessfully, that Congress should pass federal regulations governing nationwide testing and operations.

In the absence of a national law, the companies have worked in at least 22 state chambers to pass legislation allowing self-driving vehicles to operate on public roads in various cities and localities. Now the national debate about driverless technology is starting to gain momentum again. This week, the US Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on the future of self-driving technology, with lawmakers stressing the importance of road safety and the need to develop the technology ahead of China. The DC service could put the tech front in mind for some of the country’s most influential people.

But local leaders in D.C. have questions about self-driving vehicles: How they might work in the region and whether they will spell more trouble for a local economy already troubled by mass firings across the federal government.

“Do I think autonomous vehicles will be on D.C. roads? I think so,” says Councilman Charles Allen, who chairs the D.C. City Council’s Transportation and Environment Committee. “It’s not ‘if’, it’s ‘when’.”

Allen says he still wonders what dilemma this treatment will solve in the city, which he says doesn’t have a problem with taxi drivers driving dangerously. “I don’t think cities define well what problem are we trying to solve?” As a policy maker, what happens in this situation is that you are just trying to chase the shiny ball. Allen says he’s concerned about the long-term effects of autonomous vehicles on taxi drivers, who are able to change their shifts when they want.

Waymo certainly took a risk when it announced in April 2024 that it would be coming to D.C., because the city didn’t have regulations to govern, or even allow, fully self-driving cars to operate there. This was a breakthrough for the company, which began testing its technology in cities in California, Texas and Florida, which already had some rules for self-driving vehicles. The Washington, D.C., City Council passed a law allowing autonomous vehicle companies to conduct testing, with a human safety driver, in the area in 2020. Four companies, including Waymo and Amazon-owned Zoox, have said they are conducting tests there. But the issue has not seen serious legislative movement since then.

Practically speaking, Allen says the City Council is waiting to pass the legislation because it expects a months-delayed report from the District Department of Transportation (DDOT) on the safety of self-driving vehicle technology and what rules the city should change to allow deployments to move forward. The agency said the report was scheduled to be released last fall but was delayed due to budget cuts. Allen says DDOT has promised that now in the spring. DDOT did not respond to WIRED’s questions.