Robotaxi in Los Angeles: where Waymo goes, from Silver Lake to Torrance.

“Is there a robotaxi near me” is a harder question in Los Angeles than almost anywhere else, because “LA” is not one place. Santa Monica, Culver City, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Inglewood and Torrance are all separate cities with their own city halls, wrapped around and inside the City of Los Angeles. A driverless car can serve Venice and Koreatown and still not pick anyone up in Pasadena.

This guide answers it street by street: where Waymo picks up today, which places it has never announced, what happens at LAX, and what the freeways, the politics and the size of the county mean for anyone who wants to own one of these cars rather than ride in one.

Is there a robotaxi in Los Angeles?

Yes, one. Waymo is the only company giving the public paid rides in Los Angeles with nobody in the driver’s seat. Everyone else is testing, waiting on permits, or not here.

• Waymo. It started carrying riders in a 63-square-mile zone stretching “from Santa Monica and Venice to downtown L.A.” in March 2024 (ABC7, Mar 14, 2024), took its first paid fares that April (NBC News, Apr 9, 2024), and dropped its waitlist on November 12, 2024, with rides available 24/7 (Waymo, Nov 12, 2024).
• Zoox (testing, no riders). Amazon’s robotaxi company began mapping LA with manually driven Toyota Highlanders in April 2025 (TechCrunch, Apr 8, 2025), and its deal with Uber includes plans to launch in Los Angeles in 2027 (TechCrunch, Mar 11, 2026). On the California DMV’s driverless testing list, current as of October 22, 2026, Zoox is approved only in Foster City and San Francisco (California DMV, checked Oct 27, 2026).
• Tesla (no service). Covered in the next section.

People also ask about Nuro, May Mobility, Avride and Motional. On that same DMV page, Nuro’s driverless and deployment permits cover San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties, not Los Angeles; May Mobility appears only on the list for testing with a driver; Avride and Motional are not listed at all. Mercedes-Benz holds a deployment permit that covers LA-area freeways in daytime, but that covers an automated driving feature in cars people buy, not a ride service.

Is Tesla’s robotaxi available in Los Angeles?

No. Four dated records line up on it:

• Tesla’s own market list. Its second-quarter update names one California market, the SF Bay Area, with the status “Safety Driver” (Tesla, Jul 22, 2026). Los Angeles is not on it.
• Tesla’s next cities. The first Robotaxi Safety Report, published October 21, 2026, lists Las Vegas, Jacksonville, Phoenix and San Antonio as “Coming Soon” (Tesla North, Oct 21, 2026). No California city is among them, and the Bay Area is left out of the report’s mileage table because a safety driver is required there (our breakdown of the report).
• The DMV. As of October 21, 2026, Tesla Robotaxi LLC appears only on the list of companies allowed to test with a safety driver, not on the driverless testing or deployment lists (California DMV, checked Oct 27, 2026).
• The CPUC. Pat Tsen, a deputy executive director at the California Public Utilities Commission, said in March that “Tesla is not operating an autonomous vehicle service” and that its Bay Area rides run on a charter-party carrier permit, the kind a limousine company gets (Electrek, Mar 25, 2026).

Public Cybercab rides exist only in Austin, and on its October 21 earnings call Tesla named Dallas as the next Cybercab city (our write-up of the call). For what Tesla’s absence means if you want to own a car here, see our Los Angeles page and the California page, which walks through the state’s permit ladder.

Where does Waymo operate in Los Angeles?

Waymo has grown its LA map in steps, and each step named places. Read in order, they are the best public record of where the cars go:

• March 2024: about 63 square miles, Santa Monica and Venice to downtown (ABC7, Mar 14, 2024).
• August 2024: added Marina del Rey, Mar Vista, Playa Vista, and more of Hollywood, Chinatown and Westwood, for 79 square miles (Waymo, Aug 2024).
• November 2024: open to everyone in an area Waymo described as “Santa Monica, Hollywood Boulevard, USC, and everything in between” (Waymo, Nov 12, 2024).
• June 2025: 35 more square miles, including Windsor Hills, Ladera Heights, Echo Park and Silver Lake (Waymo Help, Jun 18, 2025), plus Playa del Rey, all of Sunset Boulevard, and routes from Mid-City to Inglewood and Westchester, for “more than 120 square miles of LA County” (TechCrunch, Jun 17, 2025). CBS Los Angeles listed Brentwood and Inglewood among the additions and said the new area took in West Hollywood and Beverly Hills north of Santa Monica Boulevard (CBS Los Angeles, Jun 2025).
• October 27, 2026: “In LA we’re extending down the coast to the South Bay, adding Torrance,” rolling out over the following week (Waymo, Oct 27, 2026). Electrek, reading Waymo’s new map, says the service now runs “through Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach to Torrance” (Electrek, Oct 27, 2026).

How big is it now? Waymo didn’t say. The October 27 post puts “nearly 250 square miles” across five metros (Los Angeles, Nashville, Orlando, San Diego and the Bay Area) without splitting it by city, and Electrek notes Waymo also gave no count of cars added. The last LA-only figure is “more than 120 square miles,” which an October 6, 2026 report still used (The Driverless Digest, Oct 6, 2026). Treat LA as 120-plus and growing. Waymo has not published a current Los Angeles fleet count either.

Waymo Los Angeles map, neighborhood by neighborhood

Waymo publishes no downloadable boundary. The live map is in the Waymo app, and the edges move. This table is what the public record supports, with the source for each line, so you know how much weight to put on it. Tesla is left out because it gives no rides anywhere in the county.

Is there a robotaxi in Torrance, Manhattan Beach, Redondo Beach or El Segundo?

Starting this week, mostly yes. Waymo’s October 27 post names Torrance, and the map Electrek published includes the coast from Manhattan Beach through Redondo Beach. The rollout runs “over the next week,” so if the app does not take your South Bay address on day one, try again in a few days. El Segundo is the gap: it sits between Playa del Rey, which Waymo already serves, and Manhattan Beach, but neither Waymo nor the coverage we read names it. Whether a car will pick you up there is the app’s call.

Is there a robotaxi in Pasadena, South Pasadena, Altadena, Long Beach or Huntington Park?

Not that we can confirm. None of Waymo’s LA announcements, from the 2024 launch through October 27, 2026, names Pasadena, South Pasadena, Altadena, Long Beach or Huntington Park. On the east side the map’s named edge is Echo Park and Silver Lake. On the south side the new edge is Torrance, the closest named city to Long Beach, which makes Long Beach an obvious candidate on geography alone. That is our reading of a map, not a plan Waymo has announced.

What about Orange County, Burbank or the Valley?

The state has said yes; Waymo has not. On November 21, 2025 the California DMV approved Waymo to drive in “nearly all of Southern California up to the Mexican Border,” where before it was limited mainly to Los Angeles city limits, and Waymo announced no rollout plan or timeline for the new territory (CBS Los Angeles, Nov 21, 2025). That approval is permission to drive, not service. Orange County, Burbank and the San Fernando Valley are all inside it, and none of them has been announced.

How much does a robotaxi cost in Los Angeles?

Waymo publishes no Los Angeles rate card, and we will not make one up. The app shows a price before you confirm, and that is the number to trust.

The largest public price study we found is from San Francisco, not LA. A firm called Obi simulated more than 94,000 ride requests between November 27 and January 1 and found Waymo averaging $19.69 a ride, against $17.47 for Uber and $15.47 for Lyft (TechCrunch via Yahoo Finance, Jan 27, 2026). LA trips can be longer and route differently, so use that as a sense of the gap, not as an LA fare. The quick test is to price the same trip in the Waymo, Uber and Lyft apps at the same moment.

How do you ride a robotaxi in Los Angeles?

• Download the Waymo app. In LA there is no waitlist and no Uber step; you book Waymo directly, at any hour (Waymo, Nov 12, 2024).
• Both ends have to be inside the zone. Set the pickup and the drop-off, and the app tells you if either is outside it.
• You may get the new van. Since August 20, 2026, any LA rider can be matched with Waymo’s Ojai, the newer Zeekr-built vehicle; you cannot pick it yet, and Waymo says it will eventually let riders choose (Electrek, Aug 20, 2026).
• Freeway trips are opt-in and limited. Waymo’s help page says “Freeway access is currently limited, so not all riders can take freeway trips yet” (Waymo Help, checked Oct 27, 2026). More on that below.
• Tesla and Zoox: nothing to book in LA yet. Zoox’s planned 2027 LA service is meant to be bookable through Uber (TechCrunch, Mar 11, 2026).

Can a robotaxi take you to LAX, Burbank, Long Beach or SoFi Stadium?

LAX: no terminal pickups or drop-offs. Waymo’s airport page lists six airports, Las Vegas, Nashville, Phoenix, San Antonio, San Francisco and San Jose, and no airport in Southern California (Waymo Help, checked Oct 27, 2026). The holdup is the airport, not the car. A state charter-party license does not cover curbside airport service; the CPUC requires separate authorization from the airport, and Los Angeles World Airports says it first needs an autonomous vehicle licensing agreement approved by its Board of Airport Commissioners. In a February 18 report to the City Council it said it “had no timeline for permitting autonomous vehicle operations” (The Driverless Digest, Oct 6, 2026).

The workaround LA riders use: take a Waymo to the LAX/Metro Transit Center and ride the free airport shuttle from bus bays 1 and 2 to the terminals (The Driverless Digest, Oct 6, 2026). The airport’s own people mover, which would change that trip, is now projected to open in January 2027, per the same report.

Hollywood Burbank and Long Beach airports: no. Neither is on Waymo’s airport list, and neither city is in the announced service area.

SoFi Stadium: not reported. Inglewood has been in Waymo’s area since June 2025, but we found no Waymo statement about pickups at the stadium itself. The stadium sends rideshare drop-offs to the curb on Kareem Court and pickups to Kareem Court and Manchester Boulevard, and its page says nothing about robotaxis (SoFi Stadium, checked Oct 27, 2026). Expect the app, not the map, to decide how close you get.

What makes Los Angeles hard for a robotaxi

Freeways, on and off. LA runs on the 405, the 10 and the 101, and a robotaxi that sticks to surface streets loses the trips where it would save riders the most time. Waymo started offering some LA riders freeway trips on November 12, 2025, using them “when a freeway route is meaningfully faster” (Waymo, Nov 12, 2025; LAist, Nov 13, 2025). On May 21, 2026 it suspended freeway rides in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and Miami to work on construction zones (TechCrunch, May 21, 2026). On July 29 it began restoring them, Phoenix first, with LA and the Bay Area to follow “in the coming days” (TechCrunch, Jul 29, 2026). Today the help page still calls access limited.

Size. Even at 120-plus square miles, Waymo covers the dense middle of LA County, not the county. Trips from the Valley over the hill, from Pasadena to the Westside or from Long Beach to the airport mostly start or end outside it, and that last one ends at a terminal no robotaxi can reach. Every new edge, like this week’s South Bay, turns some of those trips into a booking.

Politics and neighbors. In June 2025 Waymo cars were burned during protests in Los Angeles, and Waymo temporarily limited service in parts of the city, including downtown (TechCrunch, Jun 17, 2025). In Santa Monica, the city has been fighting two Waymo charging lots on Broadway as a public nuisance; a judge barred overnight operations there in July 2026, and that order was stayed in August while Waymo appeals (Santa Monica Daily Press, Sep 15, 2026). The full depot record is on our Los Angeles page.

New state rules. Governor Newsom signed Senate Bill 1246, which lets robotaxi companies be fined when a car blocks first responders during an emergency for more than 30 minutes; the law takes effect in July 2028 (TechCrunch, Oct 1, 2026). That lands the same summer Los Angeles hosts the Olympics. We found no LA28 or LA Metro plan that gives robotaxis a defined role during the Games, so any claim that they will is a guess.

Where do LA’s robotaxis live between rides?

Every robotaxi carrying riders in Los Angeles belongs to Waymo, and Waymo keeps its own cars. Its LA fleet charges and gets cleaned at a mix of sites: a main depot in Sawtelle, a fleet charging site in Inglewood run by a charging company, and the two contested Santa Monica lots. We keep the sourced, site-by-site record on our Los Angeles page and in the US robotaxi depot database.

What is missing from that list is any place an individually owned robotaxi could go. That is the job DockDuty is built for: a stall where a privately owned car parks, charges, gets cleaned and inspected, and goes back out. The primer is what a robotaxi depot does. One planning note for any LA site: the Cybercab charges on DC only, through its NACS port, so a lot of ordinary wall chargers will not do, and the Santa Monica fight shows that in this region, the neighbors matter as much as the power.

What the South Bay expansion means for would-be owners

Waymo’s map shows LA can support a growing driverless network. It does not put anyone’s own car on it; Waymo’s cars are Waymo’s. A Cybercab would earn on Tesla’s network, and in California Tesla is still on the first rung of the permit ladder: testing with a safety driver. Before any privately owned car could carry LA riders with nobody at the wheel, Tesla would need driverless testing and deployment permits from the DMV and a passenger permit from the CPUC, and it has announced no timeline for any of them.

Nobody has fleet-scale Cybercab earnings history yet, including us, so any Los Angeles income figure is a projection. The earnings calculator lets you set your own assumptions, and Waymo vs. Tesla robotaxi explains why the two networks matter so differently to an owner.

Where DockDuty stands: Orlando is our lead market, with its depot targeted for Q4 2026. We are planning locations in several more metros at the same time, including depots in Miami and Tampa Bay. Los Angeles owner reservations are collected as demand, with no Los Angeles location committed. The founding book (50 stalls, network-wide) sold out on September 5, 2026, and capacity that opens next sells at Priority rates. You can reserve a stall from Los Angeles and elect Los Angeles, CA as your preferred market in the flow; the $450 deposit is fully refundable until your Cybercab is onboarded and credited in full against the $1,000 onboarding fee.

Robotaxi Los Angeles FAQ

Is there a robotaxi in Los Angeles?
Yes. Waymo has been open to anyone with its app in Los Angeles since November 12, 2024, and runs around the clock. Tesla gives no rides in LA, and Zoox is testing for a 2027 launch on Uber.

Where is the Waymo Los Angeles service area?
Waymo’s last LA-only figure is more than 120 square miles, from Santa Monica, Venice and Westwood through Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Hollywood, Koreatown and downtown to Echo Park and Silver Lake, and south through Culver City and Inglewood to Playa del Rey. From October 27, 2026 it is adding the South Bay through Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach to Torrance. The live boundary is in the app.

Does Waymo go to LAX?
Not to the terminals. As of October 27, 2026, LAX is not on Waymo’s airport list, and Los Angeles World Airports has given no timeline for allowing robotaxi pickups. Riders can take a Waymo to the LAX/Metro Transit Center and ride the free airport shuttle from there.

Is Tesla Robotaxi available in Los Angeles?
No. As of October 27, 2026 Tesla runs no Robotaxi or Cybercab rides in LA, holds only a California permit to test with a safety driver, and Los Angeles is not on its “Coming Soon” list.

Is there a Cybercab in Los Angeles?
Not for riders. Public Cybercab rides run only in Austin, and Tesla named Dallas as its next Cybercab city.

How much does a robotaxi cost in Los Angeles?
Waymo publishes no LA rate card; the app quotes the fare before you book. The largest public price study we found covered San Francisco, where Waymo averaged $19.69 a ride against $17.47 for Uber and $15.47 for Lyft.

Is there a robotaxi in Pasadena, Long Beach, Burbank or Orange County?
Not that we can confirm. No Waymo announcement through October 27, 2026 names any of them, and Waymo’s state approval to drive across most of Southern California is not the same as service there.

Does DockDuty have a depot in Los Angeles?
No. No DockDuty depot is operating anywhere yet. Orlando is our lead market, with its depot targeted for Q4 2026, and Los Angeles owner reservations are collected as demand, with no Los Angeles location committed.