This resolves to Vox Future Perfect's judgement of this question.

As of this writing, there are two US cities where average people can download an app from the Alphabet-owned firm Waymo and get a ride from a self-driving taxi that doesn’t even have a human driver in it as backup: San Francisco and Phoenix. Waymo, formerly the self-driving division of Google, has long been a leader in this space, and has shot forward after the General Motors-owned Cruise was banned from SF following an incident in which a pedestrian was trapped under one of its vehicles. Cruise then announced it was suspending all US operations to “earn public trust,” and its CEO quit in due course.

Cruise’s travails mean Waymo is now the uncontested king of self-driving in the US, at least for the moment. “If Waymo can perfect its technology, it could have time to establish market dominance,” my former Vox colleague Timothy Lee writes, who, along with the Verge’s Andrew Hawkins, is one of the people I trust most on self-driving cars.

Establishing market dominance requires expansion, and Waymo seems set to expand in 2024. It has established customer waitlists in Austin and Los Angeles, and offered a brief “tour” in the latter city this year where ordinary customers could try it. I’m predicting that at least one new city — probably Austin or Los Angeles, but anything’s possible I suppose — will reach the status of San Francisco and Phoenix in 2024, where ordinary people can download the Waymo One app and order a ride. Because of high demand, the company still rations out invite codes needed to use the app, but anecdotally those are pretty easy to get (you can DM Waymo on Twitter/X and usually get one). I assume they’ll do the same in new cities. But I’m guessing that several thousand more people are going to be using robotaxis routinely in 2024 than in 2023. —DM

Vox's prediction was "80 percent"