A Waymo Taxi Took Me for a Ride. I’m Ready to Try Tesla.

Waymo offers self-driving taxi rides in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Austin, Texas. Above, one of the company’s autonomous vehicles in San Francisco. (Jason Henry / AFP via Getty Images)

Cars that drive themselves—oftentimes better than humans—are here. And, so far, Alphabet Waymo and Tesla are battling for supremacy.

Waymo is extending its lead, but don’t count out Elon Musk’s electric-vehicle maker. The potential market is huge.

Tesla launched its robo-taxi service in Austin, Texas, on June 22. The rollout was limited to a selected group of riders, with a safety monitor in the front passenger seat. Still, the service is up-and-running.

Waymo, by contrast, completes more than 250,000 fully autonomous taxi rides a week in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin, and Atlanta. Service will start soon in Washington, D.C., and Miami.

And on Monday, the company announced testing plans for Philadelphia and New York.

“We’re on the move in the Big Apple!,” said the company in a post on X.

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Residents of those cities might scoff at the idea of driverless cabs in all that traffic. They might want to take a trip to San Francisco. Those streets aren’t easy to navigate, either.

I’ve taken a handful of rides in a San Francisco Waymo. The process is surprisingly easy, and a lot like Uber. A rider requests a taxi on the app. The estimated time is displayed as well as the pickup point, which is often a few steps from where the ride was requested. Then, the car arrives, seat belts are buckled and the rider is off.

My rides were a lot like any cab ride in a major city. There were motorcycles, cyclists, changing traffic lights, left turns, delivery vans, and, of course, other cars. Nothing much happened, beyond a slow, easy ride that ended at my destination.

I haven’t ridden in a Tesla robo-taxi yet. But I do have Tesla’s Full Self-Driving on a rear-wheel-drive Model Y. And though I have to pay attention all of the time, the feature does do most of the driving most of the time.

Tesla’s FSD also deals with pedestrians, traffic cones, cyclists, and all kinds of other situations without me doing much. (I have to admit here that sometimes I intervene because I’m not entirely comfortable—but not because the car was doing something wrong.)

For Waymo, Tesla, and any other company that gets into the robo-taxi race, New York presents a special challenge—at least right now. State law doesn’t allow for a fully autonomous ride-hailing service.

One of the benefits investors believed the Trump administration could provide for Tesla was a nationwide framework for introducing self-driving cars. That hasn’t happened yet.

Tesla and Waymo have to go state by state, getting a license to drive like any other 16-year-old. And like other licenses, autonomous driving ones can come with restrictions on where the cars can operate.

Eventually, though, regulations should come to pass—and self-driving cars will proliferate. Tesla’s Musk envisions a future where self-driving cabs are so plentiful and cheap that there’s no need to own a car—or maybe a second family car.

“Welcome to $1.2 trillion market potential,” wrote BofA Securities analyst Martyn Briggs in a report. “Autonomous vehicles are having their ChatGPT moment and are no longer a moonshot.”

The $1.2 trillion market is by 2040. Still, that’s big, roughly half the size of the annual global light vehicle sales.

Self-driving cars can help manage truck-driver shortages, open up urban space, and decrease road congestion, Briggs added. They could “bring ‘peak car’ as soon as 2035 with more AVs on demand, than owned.”

That’s the idea of a mostly utopian personal transportation future anyway. There is still a long road ahead for the technology. That $1.2 trillion number, however, or others like it, underpin Tesla’s roughly $1 trillion valuation.

For now, Tesla is running second to Waymo in the race to populate U.S. streets with autonomous vehicles. Second or first might not matter in the end if BofA’s math turns out to be right.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com