By Marlo Anderson · The Tech Ranch · January 2026
You know me — I don’t just read the press releases. When something catches my attention at CES, I go find the people standing in front of it and I ask them what they think. So when I made my way over to the Waymo booth on the CES 2026 show floor, I didn’t just take notes on the hardware. I started talking to people.
What I heard surprised me — not because people were skeptical, but because they weren’t.
First, the Booth Itself
Before I get to the conversations, let me set the scene, because the Waymo exhibit deserved its own paragraph. Sprawling across 7,000 square feet, the Waymo exhibit at CES 2026 felt less like a booth and more like a bold, kinetic brand statement. The visual hook was undeniable: a 600-pound Waymo vehicle seemingly floating in midair, paired with a massive rotating logo. Animated exterior graphics traced a Waymo car through stylized cityscapes, telegraphing growth, momentum, and inevitability.
Inside, interactive touchpoints like the Waymo Map and The Waymo Driver translated complex AI and sensor technology into accessible, confidence-building narratives, while the immersive Watching Waymo Wall turned real-world driving scenarios into a theatrical, multi-sensory experience. Attendees could also swipe their badge, press a big button, and out dropped a Waymo pin — with cute sayings like “chill commute,” “backseat driver,” and “passenger princess.” There was even a special rare pin in the mix that got people hunting.
People were not walking past this booth. They were stopping, staying, and coming back.
“I Didn’t Expect to Actually Want One”
The first person I stopped to talk with was a woman from Chicago — a marketing director who had been attending CES for about six years. She was standing in front of the Ojai, Waymo’s newly named next-generation robotaxi, running her hand along the side of the vehicle.
I asked her what she thought.
“Honestly? I came in skeptical,” she said. “I’ve ridden in a Waymo in San Francisco and it was fine, but it felt like a novelty. Standing here looking at this thing and hearing where they’re going — Denver, Miami, Las Vegas — I don’t know. It’s starting to feel real.”
I asked if she’d use one regularly. She laughed. “If it shows up in Chicago? Yeah. Probably.”
That sentiment — it’s starting to feel real — came up more than once.
The Name Game
The Zeekr RT robotaxi has spent the past three years being refined and tested, and now before it joins Waymo’s official commercial fleet, it’s getting a new name: the Ojai, pronounced “oh-hi” — after the village in the Topatopa Mountains above Los Angeles known for its arts community and focus on wellness. Waymo’s official explanation is that the U.S. public simply isn’t familiar with the Zeekr brand.
I talked to a tech analyst from Dallas who had done his homework on this. He knew exactly what the Ojai used to be called.
“The rebrand is smart,” he told me. “Zeekr is a Chinese brand. In this political climate, that’s a headache Waymo doesn’t need when they’re trying to get everyday people to trust a car with no driver. ‘Ojai’ sounds like California. It sounds American. And apparently when you get in, it says ‘oh hi’ to you.” He grinned. “That’s not an accident.”
The economics behind the Ojai are striking too. Each completed Ojai robotaxi is estimated to cost roughly $50,000–$55,000, compared to roughly $150,000 for each Jaguar I-Pace fully equipped — meaning Waymo can deploy three times as many vehicles for the same capital.When I mentioned that number to the analyst, he nodded immediately. “That’s the story. That’s why this matters. It’s not about the name. It’s about what that cost structure does to their expansion speed.”
“The Watching Waymo Wall Got Me”
One of the most interesting people I spoke with was a retired traffic engineer from Phoenix — one of the cities where Waymo has been running longest. He had ridden in Waymos dozens of times and was at the booth with his adult son, who was visiting CES for the first time.
Inside the booth, attendees could step into Fan Domes to hear from real riders about their experiences, or watch the Waymo Driver navigate a variety of scenarios on the Watching Waymo Wall — including snow, fog, and unexpected obstacles.
The retired engineer pointed at the wall. “That’s what convinced me years ago,” he said. “Not the smooth rides. The edge cases. How does it handle the weird stuff?” He turned to his son. “Show him the footage of the kid running into the street.” His son pulled it up on his phone — a clip from Waymo’s fleet of the system detecting a child darting out between parked cars and stopping cleanly. “A human might have panicked,” the father said. “It didn’t.”
His son, meanwhile, was more focused on the expansion map. “They’re coming to Dallas this year,” he said. “I told my wife — she’s going to use this instead of Uber.”
The Hyundai Angle
Near the Ioniq 5 display, I got into a conversation with a woman who worked in automotive supply chain management. She had her eye on the Hyundai partnership, not the Ojai.
Hyundai is reportedly looking to supply Waymo with 50,000 IONIQ 5 units by 2028, in what would represent roughly a $2.5 billion deal — potentially the largest single vehicle supply agreement in autonomous driving history.
“The Ioniq 5 is the smarter long-term play,” she told me, unprompted. “It’s built in Georgia. Avoids the tariff issue. And the 800-volt charging means the fleet can stay operational. You can’t run a taxi company if your cars are sitting at a charger for two hours.” She paused. “I’m not even a Waymo customer. I just follow the supply chain. And what’s happening here is a massive industrial order starting to take shape.”
The World Tour Wall
Waymo’s booth leaned into a “world tour” vibe, with city nods including a UK license plate and a Japanese-style street sign, referencing international testing efforts in places like Tokyo. Waymo is also planning to offer rides in London sometime in 2026.
A young couple from the UK stopped near that section of the booth, noticing the British plate. I asked them what they made of it.
“We’ve heard about Waymo but you can’t get it in London yet,” the woman said. “Seeing that plate up there — it feels like a promise. Or a warning, depending on how you look at it.” She laughed. “I drive for Uber on weekends. So maybe a warning for me.”
Her partner was less philosophical. “I just want to know if it handles roundabouts.”
Fair point.
The Honest Conversation
Not everyone was converted. Near the exit, I spoke briefly with a software engineer who had spent time at the booth but seemed unmoved.
“The demos are impressive,” he said carefully. “But I remember when every autonomous vehicle company had impressive demos. The question is what happens when something genuinely weird occurs — not the scripted edge cases they show you on the wall.” He mentioned the San Francisco blackout incident, where a power outage shut down traffic lights and caused scores of the autonomous taxis to idle in the streets. “That was embarrassing. Not catastrophic, but embarrassing. They’re going to have a lot more of those moments as they scale.”
He wasn’t wrong. And to Waymo’s credit, they weren’t hiding from it. Judges praised the booth for its feature-plus-benefit approach that felt refreshingly effective — interactive teaching zones explained how the AI navigates, and large-scale data visualizations made complex systems easy to understand. They were showing you how it thinks, not just what it does.
What I Walked Away With
For the first time since the early 2020s, the industry’s center of gravity shifted away from electric vehicles and back toward autonomous driving at CES 2026. And standing at the Waymo booth, talking to a retired engineer, a supply chain analyst, a London Uber driver, and a skeptical software developer — I felt that shift in real time.
Waymo is currently delivering more than 400,000 autonomous paid rides per week, and the company plans to expand to over 20 new cities this year, including its first international markets in Tokyo and London.Those aren’t projections. That’s a company in motion.
The floating car above the booth was a spectacle. But the real show was the people underneath it — curious, opinionated, increasingly convinced — debating whether the driverless future is coming to their city next.
Spoiler: it probably is.
— Marlo Anderson, The Tech Ranch
