Welcome to the Waymo World Cup

Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary offering robotaxi rides in 11 US metros right now, says it’s ready for the FIFA World Cup. Match attendees can catch driverless rides to six of the 16 North American venues: stadiums in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

The sprawling football event, expected to attract some 6.5 million visitors to the continent over more than a month, could prove an exciting close-up for Waymo. The company says it’s serving half-a-million paid rides a week—paltry stuff compared to the likes of ride-hail giants Uber and Lyft, but more impressive once you remember that the things don’t have drivers.

Waymo has plans to offer service in 20 more markets this year alone, with international expansions in London and Tokyo on the horizon. Meanwhile, the Waymo app is available in app stores in 13 countries, including Germany, Great Britain, India, and Japan, and in 15 different languages. For travelers who haven’t yet ridden robotaxis in China, this event likely marks their first opportunity to ride driverlessly.

The World Cup could also lead to some high-visibility stumbles. Between triumphant service expansions, Waymo has had something of an unfortunate spring so far. It was forced to shut down service in several markets as its cars struggled to deal with flooded streets (an issue that had already led to a nationwide software recall). In May, Waymo also suspended its highway rides, which since late last year had allowed riders to reach some destinations more quickly. The company says it’s concerned about how its vehicles react around construction zones. Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp says that the company is working with local authorities to prepare for the World Cup and surrounding events.

If it all goes to plan, well, the Waymo World Cup—the first autonomous vehicle World Cup—should look a lot like other World Cups. Self-driving cars promise to do lots of things: give people unable to get driver’s licenses new chances at mobility; reshape the economics of travel; put drivers out of work. But when it comes to special events, driverless cars struggle with the same limitations of drivered ones. Thousands and thousands of people want to get to and then leave a place at the same time. There is, after all, only so much road to go around.

“There’s never going to be a perfectly orderly process with no congestion,” says Adam Millard-Ball, a professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Luskin School of Public Affairs. “Geometrically, you’re not going to be able to have ‘front door’ pickups for everybody.” The future is many things, but traffic-free isn’t one of them.

That’s the same sort of problem that faces other sorts of cars. And it’s why pickups and drop-offs for Waymo’s closely related cousins, Uber and Lyft, look the way they do. Since the once-gray-market taxis began to spread across the US in the late 2000s, several cities and institutions—airports and stadiums among them—have found ways to “tame,” if not control, in-demand transportation. Once, your standard airport Uber picked up anyone curbside, right outside baggage claim. Now most airports direct ride-hail passengers to specialized parking lots.

Same with stadiums. In fact, several of these special ride-hail pickup zones now host Waymos. “The City of Santa Clara currently collaborates with rideshare services to create service-area locations around Levi’s Stadium during event days,” Lieutenant Eric Lagergren of the Santa Clara Police Department told WIRED in an email—event days here including the eight or so 49ers home games that happen every season. “The rideshare and public-transportation service area locations in Santa Clara will remain active for all FIFA World Cup 2026 matches being hosted in the City of Santa Clara,” he said. Same routine, different sporting event.