Waymo depots: where the cars charge, park and get fixed

To the depot, mostly. Waymo’s San Francisco depot sits in the Bayview industrial corridor and is widely described as the country’s largest operating robotaxi depot. Workers plug the cars in, clean the interiors, and do routine maintenance such as brakes and fluids, plus Waymo-specific work like replacing lidar and other sensors.¹

Not every car goes home at the same time. Fleets thin out overnight as demand drops, and the cars that stay out wait on lots closer to riders. That is where the trouble has come from. In August 2024, Waymo cars waiting on a lot at 2nd and Harrison Streets in San Francisco honked at each other while backing into spaces, with neighbors reporting a peak around 4 a.m. Waymo pushed a software fix on August 13, 2024, and the cars then honked in the cul-de-sac next door until a second fix.¹

The pattern is the point. A robotaxi has nowhere to be between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. except a depot or a lot, and whichever one it picks has neighbors.

At depots first. Waymo has said that as its operations in a city mature, it builds its own charging and prioritizes dedicated charging, and that until then it also uses public stations and tries to limit and stagger its use.¹ That is when drivers at public fast chargers start noticing the robotaxis in the queue.

The charging behind the depots is large:

• San Francisco. In 2022 Waymo’s depot there had 19 direct-current (DC) charging stations with more than 2 megawatts of total load, one of the largest charging sites in the city at the time.¹
• Dallas. The permanent depot Avis Budget Group is building has about 10 Alpitronic HYC-400 chargers with four handles each, roughly 40 fast-charging points.²
• Nashville. Flexdrive by Lyft says its 80,000-square-foot depot has dozens of chargers that can support hundreds of autonomous vehicles, and that Waymo vehicles would move in from October 12, 2026.¹

Land, power and neighbors. A depot needs acres, megawatts and a use the city will permit around the clock, and all three are cheapest in industrial areas near airports and rail lines. The cost is distance: every car that goes back to the depot drives there empty.

Santa Monica shows what happens when a charging site sits near homes. Waymo began charging at two lots near homes in 2024. Neighbors complained about noise and late-night work, and in November 2025 the City Council voted 6-0 to declare the lots a public nuisance and ordered overnight operations stopped. City staff measurements found the noise did not break the city’s noise ordinance, so the case rests on nuisance law instead. Waymo sued. In July 2026 a judge barred use of the lots between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., and an appeals court then stayed that order while the case continues.¹

Dallas shows the other constraint, power. While its permanent depot is built, Waymo charges its Dallas fleet on temporary fast chargers mounted on skids and powered by Aggreko generators, not a grid connection.² The fleet was already running driverless service around the clock, and it was waiting on the grid.

An empty drive to the depot is deadhead: miles with no rider and no fare. An infrastructure founder told The Road to Autonomy that under today’s depot model a car can be out of service for about two hours per servicing run, up to three times a day.⁴

Here is the arithmetic with the assumptions in the open. Take an 18-hour operating day and one paid trip per hour. Two depot runs of two hours each remove four trips, about a fifth of the day. Three runs remove six, a third. Waymo does not publish trips per vehicle or depot cycle times, so read this as a shape, not a measurement. The loss grows with distance to the depot and with how often the car has to go.

That is why the next layer is small sites inside the service zone: a lot or garage near riders where a car can top up during a lull instead of crossing town. We worked through the full model in Six Lost Hours a Day, and through where the grid has room for in-zone charging in Where can robotaxi depots actually get power?

We use your unused stalls, never fill them so a retail customer can’t charge, and never make you go over your monthly peak.

We built our count from public records, field reports and news coverage, rebuilt on November 6, 2026.¹ Of 28 Waymo records, 10 are confirmed operating and 10 are reported but unconfirmed. We publish none of their addresses: the map shows each by general area.

What no public source gives: how many cars each depot holds, how much power each one draws, and how far the average car drives empty to reach it. Charger counts leak out through permits and field visits. Electrical load and empty miles do not.

If you are looking for a job at a Waymo depot, go to Waymo’s careers page and the depot partners’ hiring pages; Flexdrive says it is hiring more than 70 people in Nashville.¹

If you want to lease land to Waymo for a full depot, read Can I Lease My Land to Waymo or Tesla for a Robotaxi Depot? first, because in most cities the partner, not Waymo, signs the lease.

If your site is a small lot next to homes, Santa Monica is the warning: overnight charging there drew a nuisance order even though the noise met the code. If it is a lot or garage inside a robotaxi zone with room for a few cars, list it free.