Robotaxis Went Viral in 2025. Here is The place You Can Trip Them in 2026.

Robotaxis make up a tiny fraction of the automobiles on US roads. However you’ve got seemingly heard about them.

Sabrina Carpenter, a Gen Z popstar, even sung about it: “I had a very nice time / I actually cherished the dialog / And that your automobile self drives.”

In 2025, autonomous automobiles took over a few of our roads and much more of our consideration.

Alphabet-backed Waymo had a banner yr, reaching full autonomy in a minimum of 10 cities, offering greater than 14 million journeys, and increasing public service to Austin and Atlanta. The corporate has additionally stacked up some cultural capital within the final yr.

Waymo’s Jaguar was featured in a number of music movies. Certainly one of them was in a music by Katseye, a pseudo-Okay-pop woman group, which additionally went viral earlier this yr for its GAP advert.

On-line, the phrase “robotaxi” peaked in late June with over 204,000 mentions, coinciding with the launch of Tesla Robotaxi that month, in accordance with information from Hootsuite, which tracks real-time model mentions throughout greater than 30 social networks and 150 million web sites, boards, and blogs.

As of Sunday, Tesla hasn’t offered a single absolutely autonomous journey to the general public. Solely this month did the corporate present an worker inside a Tesla driving and not using a monitor behind the wheel or within the entrance passenger seat.

Nonetheless, the conspicuous title of Tesla’s ride-hailing service is driving the dialog round driverless automobiles.

Viral by design

Robotaxis’ cultural pervasiveness are partially manufactured by the leaders of the tech themselves.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk continuously promotes “Robotaxi” on X, the social media platform he owns and has greater than 230 million followers on. The Tesla chief additionally is aware of the best way to seize headlines together with his bold timelines: 1,000 robotaxis in a number of months, 1,000,000 by the tip of 2026.

Waymo’s prominence in popular culture is essentially deliberate advert placements between the artist and the Alphabet-backed firm. The collaborations are a part of an effort to familiarize robotaxis with those that haven’t got entry to the service.

“Individuals are seeing our automobiles on the street, however not everybody will get to be uncovered to that as we’re fascinated by cities that we’re not in but,” Arturo Siguenza, Waymo’s model and artistic technique supervisor, informed Enterprise Insider. “And so our technique this yr is absolutely to uplift the Waymo story in locations the place we are able to have interaction and attain new audiences and present them the magic that individuals are experiencing with Waymo and the cities that we’re serving.”

However the novelty of robotaxis already makes the automobiles prime topics for our cellphone cameras and virality — particularly once they make errors.

The highest TikTok video that includes “Waymo” was revealed earlier this month, garnering over 3.4 million likes. The caption: “POV: You determine to take your first Waymo journey and instantly virtually die.”

The video seems to indicate a Waymo getting right into a close-call collision with a human-driven automobile. The passenger may very well be heard within the background saying this can be their final time in a Waymo.

A spokesperson for Waymo didn’t reply to a request for remark.

Information from Hootsuite, which additionally makes use of synthetic intelligence to trace model sentiment, revealed that Waymo had 2.1 million mentions prior to now 13 months. The height got here in June with about 157,000 mentions because of Waymo automobiles being set on hearth in the course of the anti-ICE protests, in accordance with Hootsuite. (Waymo needed to droop its service that day.) Information on sentiment confirmed 24.7% of the mentions have been “constructive,” whereas 32.1% have been “unfavourable.”

In different phrases, individuals are speaking about self-driving automobiles, however belief within the know-how continues to be a piece in progress.

The Electrical Automobile Intelligence Report revealed a survey this month, monitoring the attitudes of 8,000 US shoppers towards self-driving automobiles. About 40% of respondents mentioned they might “by no means think about using in a robotaxi.”

The belief hole

As 2025 wraps up, Waymo needed to droop its service another time.

On December 20, a few third of San Francisco skilled a blackout that took out the streets’ visitors lights. Movies of Waymos stalled in the midst of intersections and holding up visitors started to flow into on-line. The corporate paused service for the day.

In a weblog publish, Waymo mentioned that the magnitude of the blackout created a “concentrated spike” in requests from the corporate’s robotaxis, that are designed to deal with darkish visitors alerts as four-way stops however will “often” search affirmation from distant displays on the most secure method to deal with the driving scenario.

Musk used the second to advertise Tesla Robotaxi, saying the service wasn’t affected by the ability outage.

Movies additionally confirmed Tesla’s Full Self-Driving know-how rolling by means of downed visitors lights, though that acquired much less media consideration.

The yr 2025 noticed robotaxis turn out to be extra well-known, however removed from universally trusted. They’re going to want greater than pop stars to repair that.