Waymo's Texas fleet grew by half in a month — 113 cars in one day
Waymo tells a national story with 15 cities on its map. The state vehicle registry tells a narrower one: the fleet is concentrating, and Texas is where the cars are landing.
Waymo's Texas fleet hit 1,102 registered autonomous vehicles on September 24 — up from 736 on August 25, and 113 of them arrived in a single day. That last figure is the one that reframes the rollout. Texas publishes every AV registration into a public feed, and the daily snapshots show Waymo added 252 vehicles in early September and then 113 again this week, all of them built by Zeekr. The Texas fleet is now more than twice as large as Tesla's: 489 vehicles in the same registry, of which 420 are Model Ys and 69 are Cybercabs.
The composition is the second half of the story. Of the 1,102 Texas cars, 335 are the Zeekr-built RT that Waymo brands the Ojai, and 767 are the older Jaguar I-Pace. A month ago the Ojai share was 105 vehicles; it is now about a third of the Texas fleet, which matches what Waymo has said about the minivan being the vehicle that gets it to scale — cheaper to build, harder to wear out, and fitted with the sixth-generation Driver system plus an in-car Gemini assistant. Across the whole company, roughly 80% of its some 4,000 robotaxis sit in California and Texas.
The economics under that concentration are not as clean as the vehicle count suggests. The Ojai is a Zeekr RT built on Geely's platform, shipped from China without connected-car hardware, then finished at Waymo's Arizona facility. Vehicles built in China carry steep US import tariffs, so every unit Waymo adds in Texas costs more than the plan assumed — and it keeps adding them anyway. Research firm MoffettNathanson, tracking Ojai imports through shipping records, expects about 5,100 to reach the US by year end, which puts the Texas surge in context: this is the front end of a much larger intake.
Our read: this is what an operator looks like when the binding constraint has moved off the road and onto fleet operations. Waymo is averaging 500,000 paid rides a week and still says it wants a million a week by December, a doubling it can only get by putting cars where the permitting and the depot capacity already exist. Fifteen cities is a coverage map; two states is a logistics decision. If the second number keeps growing faster than the first, the "national rollout" framing is doing more work than the data supports.
What to watch: whether Waymo's California and Texas share starts falling as Las Vegas, Florida and the newer markets take Ojais — and whether the tariff bill on Chinese-built vehicles shows up in how fast the fleet grows in the first quarter.
Should a robotaxi company be required to publish per-state fleet counts the way Texas does? Tell us in the comments.
