On June 18, 2025, Waymo set its sights on New York City: the company applied to the city’s Department of Transportation for a permit to test autonomous vehicles in Manhattan with safety operators behind the wheel — the first application under the city’s new AV testing process. For a company already carrying passengers in several metros, the symbolic weight exceeded the fleet count: New York was the most demanding and most valuable autonomous market in the country.
What Waymo offered was a phased roadmap, not a launch date. While the application was pending, the company planned to start collecting mapping data in Manhattan in July using manually driven vehicles; a fully driverless service would have to wait for state law to change. Both TechCrunch and The Verge documented the roadmap and the regulatory reality behind it in detail that day. The filing itself was short; the strategy behind it rewarded unpacking.
Test first, ride later
Per the two outlets’ reporting, the test vehicles would be Jaguar I-Paces. The testing permit required a trained operator able to take over at any time and a $5 million insurance policy. While awaiting approval, Waymo expected to begin mapping Manhattan with manually driven vehicles in July, building the high-definition maps future autonomous operation would need. The mapping-first sequence had practical logic: street-level data in New York was the hardest to collect of any US market, and doing it with human drivers meant the slowest work could finish before the legal questions did.
The stated end goal was a fully autonomous ride-hailing service in New York, but everything hinged on regulation. The application was step one in a procedural sense: secure testing rights, build the data and the local relationships, then push the operating question onto the state legislature’s agenda. Applying publicly while lobbying openly also shaped the story — media and lawmakers could follow the process from day one instead of reacting to a finished launch.
The legal wall: one hand on the wheel
State law was the real gate. TechCrunch quoted the statute’s requirement that a test vehicle operator keep “at least one hand (or prosthetic) on the steering mechanism at all times,” ready to assume control — flatly incompatible with the driverless operation Waymo’s business depends on. Waymo was lobbying to change the law and described its conversations with lawmakers earlier in the year as positive.
Political resistance was real too. State Senator John Liu urged caution, arguing the technology “hasn’t even been completed in other parts of the country” and that NYC “does not have to be first” — driverless systems should prove themselves in less dense cities first. The Verge noted that the bill allowing driverless operation was still stuck in the state Senate’s transportation committee at the time.
New York’s previous challengers
Waymo was not the first AV company to court New York, but it arrived with more patience than its predecessors. Cruise came in 2017 and nothing came of it; Optimus Ride ran limited operations in Brooklyn; Mobileye’s attempts never got past demonstrations and pilots. Waymo itself sent Chrysler Pacificas to manually map Manhattan in 2021, two people per vehicle, and never drove them autonomously.
The difficulty was the environment. NYC’s street complexity was described, in TechCrunch’s telling, as a factor of ten beyond San Francisco’s: double-parked cars, bus lanes, dense bike traffic, and crowded sidewalks made the city the harshest proving ground — and the market most worth winning. The list of failed predecessors also pointed to one fact: before Waymo, no team had combined mature technology with operating scale strong enough to carry New York.
Scale and ambition
At the time, Waymo was operating across the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Austin, delivering more than 250,000 paid autonomous trips per week with a fleet of roughly 1,500 vehicles. Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, DC were queued for launch, with another 2,000 vehicles planned through 2026. New York was the conspicuous blank space on that map. The queued cities also showed New York was not the only front: Waymo scaled on multiple tracks at once, with New York pursued for its symbolic status and its certification against the hardest conditions.
From the outcome backward, the June 2025 application was exactly what it looked like: the start of a long run. State law did not change and driverless service did not arrive on any short timeline, but Waymo put “New York will have robotaxis” on the public agenda. For anyone tracking AV deployment, the story’s value was the pattern it exposed — the bottleneck was no longer the technology; it was permits and legislation.
Sources
- Waymo has set its robotaxi sights on NYC - TechCrunch
- Waymo takes its first formal step toward New York City - The Verge
AI-assisted summary compiled from the sources above, reviewed by a human before publishing.