Robotaxi History and the ABB Robots Behind It

A robotaxi is a taxi with nobody in the driver's seat. You book it on an app, it pulls up, you get in, and software drives. For years that sounded like a demo. Then in September 2026 Waymo opened paid rides in Denver, San Diego and Tampa, Zoox started serving the Las Vegas airport and Tesla began charging riders in its Cybercab in Austin. This post covers how taxis worked before computers took the wheel, how the first self-driving cars came about, where the robotaxi business stands now, and where ABB robots fit in the factories that build these cars.

A Waymo Ojai robotaxi with no one at the wheel on Mission Street, San Francisco, 2026. Photo: Daniel Lu / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From hackney coaches to Stanley in the Mojave

Paying a stranger to drive you across town is an old idea. Records show a public hackney coach service for hire in London in 1605, and by 1636 there was a cab rank on the Strand outside the Maypole Inn. Parliament legalised hired carriages in 1635, and the first licences followed in 1662. In 1834 Joseph Hansom patented the light two-wheeled cab that took his name, with the driver perched high up behind the passengers. For most of the nineteenth century a city taxi meant a horse, a driver who knew the streets and a fare argued over at the end.

A horse-drawn hansom cab with its driver seated high at the back, the design Joseph Hansom patented in 1834. Photo: Andrew Dunn / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Motors came at the end of that century. Gottlieb Daimler's Victoria began running as a taxi in Stuttgart in June 1897. In London, Walter Bersey put battery-powered cabs on the streets on 19 August 1897, and the same year a New York company started running 12 electric hansom cabs. Petrol taxis followed in Paris in 1899, London in 1903 and New York in 1907, when Harry N. Allen imported some 600 French cars for his New York Taxicab Company. Every one of those cabs still had a human driver.

An 1897 Bersey electric cab on display at the Science Museum in London. Photo: The wub / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The first serious attempts to remove the driver happened in the desert. DARPA, the US defence research agency, ran its first Grand Challenge across the Mojave in 2004, and no vehicle finished the course. In 2005 Stanford's Stanley, a modified Volkswagen Touareg, won the second race, and in 2007 Carnegie Mellon's Boss won the Urban Challenge on mock city streets. Google hired people from those teams and started its self-driving car project in 2009. That project became Waymo in 2016 and opened its Waymo One ride service around Phoenix in 2018.

Stanley, Stanford's self-driving Volkswagen Touareg that won the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Robotaxi fleets in 2026 and the factories behind them

On 1 September 2026 Waymo opened public rides in Denver, San Diego and Tampa, which brought its commercial service to 14 US cities. TechCrunch reported a fleet of more than 4,000 vehicles, mostly Jaguar I-Pace SUVs plus about 300 Ojai minivans. Zeekr builds the Ojai, which carries Waymo's sixth-generation driving system and is the only vehicle on offer in Denver and San Diego. Waymo says it designed the Ojai to cost less to build, run and maintain. London and Munich are next on its list.

A Waymo Jaguar I-Pace robotaxi with its roof sensor dome in San Francisco, 2023. Photo: Dllu / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Zoox, owned by Amazon, builds a boxy vehicle with no steering wheel or pedals. It started charging fares in Las Vegas on 10 August and on 3 September became the first driverless service at Harry Reid International Airport. Tesla held an invite-only Cybercab event in Austin the same week and then opened paid rides in a limited part of the city. Within days the US road safety regulator NHTSA said it was evaluating the launch. In China, Baidu runs its Apollo Go service with the RT6, a car designed from the start for driverless ride-hailing.

A Zoox robotaxi, built without a steering wheel or pedals, photographed in August 2026. Photo: Tomás Del Coro / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Each of those cars comes out of a car factory, and that is where ABB robots fit. ABB does not make robotaxis or self-driving software. Its robots weld, seal and paint car bodies and fit parts in final assembly for carmakers around the world. A large arm such as the IRB 6700 carries heavy spot welding guns in the body shop, and the IRB 5500 paints bodies in explosion-protected booths. A robotaxi body needs the same thousands of welds and coats of paint as any other car. Robots can also plug the cars in, as our post on the EV charging robot explains.

ABB robots working on car bodies in a body shop. Photo: ABB

What comes next for driverless taxis

Purpose-built robotaxis like the Ojai, the Zoox vehicle and the Cybercab only pay off if they can be built in large numbers at a low cost per car. That takes robot body shops, robot paint lines and more automation in final assembly, where sensor pods, seats and glass go in. Engineers usually plan and test lines like that in simulation, in a tool like RobotStudio, before anyone bolts a robot to the floor. Whether a robotaxi maker would pick ABB for such a line is an open question. It is, though, the kind of work ABB robots already do for carmakers.

ABB paint robots working on a car body inside a paint booth. Photo: ABB

For riders, the change will arrive city by city. Waymo has said it is aiming for Tokyo in 2027 and paid rides in Singapore in 2028. For a family without a second car, or an older person who has stopped driving, a cab that turns up at any hour could make daily life easier. Right now, though, service areas are small, rides can be slow on busy streets, and most cities in the world have no driverless option at all.

A Baidu Apollo Go RT6 robotaxi in Hubei province, China, December 2025. Photo: S5A-0043 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

Safety is the biggest open problem. Crashes and odd behaviour, such as a Waymo stuck on a flooded Phoenix street, draw close attention, and each new city needs fresh permits and mapping. Remote staff still watch the fleets and step in when the software gets confused. Cost is the next problem, because the cars must get much cheaper to build. Then there are skills: the factories need engineers who can program and maintain the robots that build these cars, and many of those engineers still have to be trained.

ABB robots working on a car body in final assembly. Photo: ABB

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