The Ghost Ride: Waymo Has Come Home to Miami

There is a specific kind of disorientation that comes from sitting in the passenger seat of a moving car with no one behind the wheel. Not fear, exactly. Something closer to the feeling of watching a magic trick and knowing, intellectually, that there is an explanation, but your body refusing to accept it.

About a year and a half ago, on a layover in San Francisco, I did something that felt, at the time, genuinely reckless. I downloaded the Waymo app, walked to a pickup spot, and got in. No driver. No one to make eye contact with in the rearview mirror. Just me, a machine, and the streets of a city that had already normalized something the rest of the country was still debating.

I talked to myself. I talked to the car. At one point I narrated what was happening out loud, the way you might describe a dream to someone before it fades. The Waymo moved through intersections, yielded to cyclists, merged onto a highway, and delivered me exactly where I asked to go. San Francisco, being San Francisco, treated this as completely unremarkable. A man on the sidewalk did not look up from his phone. A woman walking a dog did not flinch. The city had already moved on.

I flew home to Miami thinking: that was a tech-world thing. A Silicon Valley thing. Something that would take years to reach us, if it ever did.

Here we are.

Waymo is now open to everyone in Miami. No waitlist, no invite, no early-access form. You download the app, you request a ride, and a fully autonomous vehicle comes to get you. The company spent the last several months onboarding over 150,000 riders from an initial interest list across Miami and Orlando. As of April 15, 2026, that door is open to anyone.

The service covers real Miami geography. Coral Gables to Wynwood. Miami Beach. The corridors that matter. And Waymo is now beginning to introduce highway travel to the Miami service area, which means the Dolphin Expressway, 836, I-95 -- the roads that define how this city actually moves. If you want early access to highway routes, you can flag it directly in the app.

The numbers Waymo cites are not marketing language. Their driver has been involved in 92 percent fewer crashes that cause serious or fatal injuries than human drivers in the same conditions. That figure comes from real-world performance across Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, cities where the Waymo Driver has been logging miles for years. Miami is not a test market. It is the next chapter of something that has already been proven.

What strikes me now, thinking back to that San Francisco ride, is how quickly the surreal becomes ordinary. The ghost experience I described to friends when I landed home -- the moving car, the absent driver, the strange intimacy of talking to a machine -- is going to become, for Miami, just another way to get somewhere. The same way Uber once felt like science fiction and now feels like calling a cab.

Miami has always been a city that absorbs the future faster than it gets credit for. We built a skyline in a generation. We became a financial capital without anyone planning it. We turned a swamp into one of the most photographed coastlines on earth. The arrival of autonomous vehicles is not a disruption here. It is a continuation.

The sci-fi movie I used to watch has become the city I live in. And honestly, it is about time.