Inside The Waymo Factory Building A Robotaxi Future

Forbes

05-05-2025

Step outside the main terminal at Phoenix's Sky Harbor airport to the rideshare zone on a hot spring day and you'll catch a glimpse of a fast-approaching future: driverless Waymo robotaxis queueing alongside human-driven Ubers and Lyfts to take waiting passengers to their next destination. The service just launched in Austin and continues to expand in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Silicon Valley, but Phoenix has been its home turf for years, kicking off paid public rides there in 2020. And now, the region that helped perfect the AI-enabled tech has quietly become Waymo's robotaxi production hub.
About 20 minutes east of Phoenix's airport in Mesa, Arizona, is a 239,000-square-foot factory that opened in October. Every day, it churns out several battery-powered, white Jaguar I-PACE electric SUVs loaded up with the company's custom-designed computer, cameras, radar and laser lidar sensors on a single production line. But the plan is to dramatically scale up the pace and automate output to keep up with growth plans, said Kent Liu, Waymo's head of vehicle manufacturing, who previously managed production operations for Apple and General Motors.
'This facility will certainly need to be capable of doing tens of thousands per year'
'We looked at our five-year projection and said, 'Okay, to meet that, this facility will certainly need to be capable of doing tens of thousands per year,'' Liu told Forbes. 'We have the capability, the capacity here to support that growth.'
The production scale is small compared to traditional auto plants that make hundreds of thousands of vehicles a year. But the 1,500 robotaxis Waymo has provide more than 250,000 paid rides a week or about 24 a day per vehicle, vastly more use than personal cars and trucks that are driven only a few times a day. And by the time the Mesa factory gets 10,000 Waymos on the road, perhaps in a year or so based on the current rate, the fleet could be booking 250,000 rides a day. That's well over 1.5 million a week. At that scale, Waymo's annual revenue could jump to $2 billion, up from a Forbes estimate of $100 million last year. The company declined to comment on those estimates.
The multimillion-dollar Mesa facility–Waymo won't say exactly how much it's investing–is vital to the Alphabet Inc. unit's growth goals. After years of testing and pilot programs stretching back to 2009, powered by three funding rounds that raised over $11 billion — not to mention the untold billions more Google poured into the program between 2009 and 2020 — Waymo finally became a real business last year.
Workers install Waymo's computing system, lidar, radar and cameras on electric Jaguar I-PACE SUVs at the Mesa, Arizona, factory.
In 2024, it expanded from its Phoenix operations to San Francisco and Los Angeles, followed by Austin in March. And as it keeps building up in those cities, adding more vehicles and covering ever larger service areas, it's preparing to launch this summer in Atlanta, and in Miami and Washington, D.C. next year. Meanwhile, Waymo is also testing in Nashville and Tokyo. If those cities are as viable as those it currently operates in, the company could soon be carrying millions of passengers weekly if not daily. After nearly 16 years, Alphabet's big bet may finally pay off.
'We've been laser-focused and will continue to be on building the world's best driver,' Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said on the company's April 24 results call. 'I think doing that well really gives you a variety of optionality and business models across geographies, etcetera.'
Those include the possibility of licensing the technology for use in personal vehicles, he said. Last week, Waymo took a step toward doing that by announcing a partnership with Toyota to design a next-generation vehicle platform for autonomous cars and trucks, as well as to study how to use Waymo's system in personal vehicles.
The factory is run with Magna, a leading auto engineering and manufacturing company that produced the Jaguar I-PACE Waymo uses at its Graz, Austria, plant. It replaces a smaller Detroit assembly facility Waymo opened in 2019, also with Magna, and closed at the end of 2024.
Inside the cavernous space, there are no conveyor belts or loud metal stamping you'd see at traditional assembly plants. The work pace is steady but not high volume. Raw cars roll into the building at one end, with plastic covers on the body panels over precut sections where sensors will be installed. They enter a manual assembly line where dozens of workers remove those covers, bumpers and other exterior components to begin the process of carefully installing an electrical wire harness, computers, sensors on each corner of the vehicle and Waymo's telltale 'top hat' unit–housing the main laser lidar for 3D vision, multiple cameras and audio sensors.
'Every vehicle comes in with those cutouts done in advance, and with a mounting plate on the top,' said Amanda York, the factory's program manager, who previously helped run assembly operations at Johnson Controls and Boeing. 'Those are elements that help us streamline and improve our process and the efficiency on the production line.'
Once that's complete, bumpers and other exterior pieces are reinstalled and Waymo badging and decals are added. The final step is a series of tests to calibrate the AI system and sensors, including short drive evaluations in a lot outside the facility.
A completed Waymo robotaxi drives out of the factory to go into service in the Phoenix area.
'That process takes anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, just to make sure everything is working correctly–that's it's seeing everything correctly,' Liu said. 'And then all this data, we upload it to a server in Mountain View to make sure that everything checks out.'
One day last month the target was to complete six vehicles during a single work shift. Waymo's Liu said that could soon double.
And there's no shortage of vehicles to prep. Hidden from public view, parked behind a high wall next to the factory is a secretive storage area where more than 2,000 I-PACEs, all white, sit under the bright Arizona sun waiting to be turned into robotaxis. Jaguar discontinued the luxury model last year, priced at about $72,000, but Waymo bought thousands of them and will keep using them for years to come.
Soon two additional models will join Waymo's fleet, including a small van from Zeekr, an EV brand recently created by China's Geely Group, which also owns Volvo and Polestar, that's already getting Waymo's gear. A version of Hyundai Motor's Ioniq 5 electric hatchback for Waymo is to start arriving by the end of the year, produced at the Korean auto giant's Ellabell, Georgia, 'Metaplant' that opened in March.
Both cars should be significantly cheaper than the Jaguar, though Trump's tariffs have created a snag with the Zeekr. Direct imports of the van were already a pricier option, as the U.S. boosted tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles to 100% under President Joe Biden. A possible workaround at that time would have been to import them in sections and do so-called kit assembly in Mesa — which appears to have been Waymo's plan. But with Trump jacking up tariffs on Chinese products to 145%, the Zeekrs will be very costly even if assembled in sections in Arizona.
Waymo won't discuss details of its Zeekr plans, beyond the fact that it will continue testing them in the U.S. and has completed crash-testing of the vehicles to allow their use on U.S. roads.
Waymo has begun testing Zeekr electric vans with its autonomous tech, but the Chinese model faces steep U.S. tariffs.
About a dozen Zeekrs, all periwinkle blue, were parked around the Mesa factory, before being trucked out for testing. They're an attractive option as a robotaxi with a roomy cabin that's easy to enter and exit, sliding side doors and a lower, flat floor. The car is slightly larger than rival Zoox's small electric van, which unlike Waymo's models, has no steering wheel, pedals or exterior mirrors.
All of Waymo's tech is designed in-house, including its lidar, radar, cameras and computing system, and manufactured by Alphabet's vast, global base of suppliers.
Would-be robotaxi rivals like Tesla think they'll have a big cost advantage over Waymo because vehicles like the future Cybercab shown off last fall have much lower production costs. But that's because Tesla is using far less sophisticated sensors and computing systems. Instead of the high-end lidar and radar used by Waymo, the company uses rudimentary 5-megapixel digital cameras. That might save thousands of dollars in additional costs, but Waymo believes its far more robust vision system better maximizes rider safety. And its cars are actually on the road.
All of Waymo's tech was designed in-house, including its lidar, radar, cameras and computing system, and is manufactured by Alphabet's vast, global base of suppliers. Along with the addition of new, lower-cost cars, Waymo has said its sixth-generation hardware that goes into use later this year will be dramatically cheaper than what it's currently using, without elaborating. That was before Trump's tariffs, though.
For now, the company is working to find the most efficient ways to install its tech in the Jaguars and truck them out to fleets in all the cities it's driving in. But not all of them are heading out via semi-truck. Those going to the Phoenix fleet drive themselves from the factory to start picking up riders, maybe from Sky Harbor airport, as soon as they're approved for service.
'It takes about 20 or 30 minutes to get into that service zone from the factory,' said Liu. 'And as soon as it gets into the service zone it's picking up customers already.'