Robotaxis make up a tiny fraction of the cars on US roads. But you’ve likely heard about them.
Sabrina Carpenter, a Gen Z popstar, even sung about it: “I had a really great time / I really loved the conversation / And that your car self drives.”
In 2025, autonomous cars took over some of our roads and even more of our attention.
Alphabet-backed Waymo had a banner year, achieving full autonomy in at least 10 cities, providing more than 14 million trips, and expanding public service to Austin and Atlanta. The company has also stacked up some cultural capital in the last year.
Waymo’s Jaguar was featured in a few music videos. One of them was in a song by Katseye, a pseudo-K-pop girl group, which also went viral earlier this year for its GAP ad.
Online, the word “robotaxi” peaked in late June with over 204,000 mentions, coinciding with the launch of Tesla Robotaxi that month, according to data from Hootsuite, which tracks real-time brand mentions across more than 30 social networks and 150 million websites, forums, and blogs.
As of Sunday, Tesla hasn’t provided a single fully autonomous ride to the public. Only this month did the company show an employee inside a Tesla driving without a monitor behind the wheel or in the front passenger seat.
Still, the conspicuous name of Tesla’s ride-hailing service is driving the conversation around driverless cars.
Viral by design
Robotaxis’ cultural pervasiveness are in part manufactured by the leaders of the tech themselves.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk frequently promotes “Robotaxi” on X, the social media platform he owns and has more than 230 million followers on. The Tesla chief also knows how to grab headlines with his ambitious timelines: 1,000 robotaxis in a few months, a million by the end of 2026.
Waymo’s prominence in pop culture is largely planned ad placements between the artist and the Alphabet-backed company. The collaborations are part of an effort to familiarize robotaxis with those who don’t have access to the service.
“People are seeing our cars on the road, but not everyone gets to be exposed to that as we’re thinking about cities that we’re not in yet,” Arturo Siguenza, Waymo’s brand and creative strategy manager, told Business Insider. “And so our strategy this year is really to uplift the Waymo story in places where we can engage and reach new audiences and show them the magic that people are experiencing with Waymo and the cities that we’re serving.”
But the novelty of robotaxis already makes the cars prime subjects for our cellphone cameras and virality — especially when they make mistakes.
The top TikTok video featuring “Waymo” was published earlier this month, garnering over 3.4 million likes. The caption: “POV: You decide to take your first Waymo ride and immediately almost die.”
The video appears to show a Waymo getting into a close-call collision with a human-driven car. The passenger could be heard in the background saying this will be their last time in a Waymo.
A spokesperson for Waymo did not respond to a request for comment.
Data from Hootsuite, which also uses artificial intelligence to track brand sentiment, revealed that Waymo had 2.1 million mentions in the past 13 months. The peak came in June with about 157,000 mentions due to Waymo vehicles being set on fire during the anti-ICE protests, according to Hootsuite. (Waymo had to suspend its service that day.) Data on sentiment showed 24.7% of the mentions were “positive,” while 32.1% were “negative.”
In other words, people are talking about self-driving cars, but trust in the technology is still a work in progress.
The Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report published a survey this month, tracking the attitudes of 8,000 US consumers toward self-driving cars. About 40% of respondents said they would “never consider riding in a robotaxi.”
The trust gap
As 2025 wraps up, Waymo had to suspend its service one more time.
On December 20, about a third of San Francisco experienced a blackout that took out the streets’ traffic lights. Videos of Waymos stalled in the middle of intersections and holding up traffic began to circulate online. The company paused service for the day.
In a blog post, Waymo said that the magnitude of the blackout created a “concentrated spike” in requests from the company’s robotaxis, which are designed to handle dark traffic signals as four-way stops but will “occasionally” seek confirmation from remote monitors on the safest way to handle the driving situation.
Musk used the moment to promote Tesla Robotaxi, saying the service wasn’t affected by the power outage.
Videos also showed Tesla’s Full Self-Driving technology rolling through downed traffic lights, although that received less media attention.
The year 2025 saw robotaxis become more famous, but far from universally trusted. They’ll need more than pop stars to fix that.
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