What Is a Robotaxi Depot? Size, Power and Who Runs Them

A robotaxi depot is the base where a driverless fleet charges, gets cleaned and repaired, and parks when it is not carrying riders.

A robotaxi has no driver to fill it up, wipe the seats or take it in for service. People do that work at the depot. Uber says its Houston depot will handle charging, maintenance, repairs, cleaning and other day-to-day fleet operations.¹ Hertz lists the same jobs, plus depot staffing, for the unit that will run Uber’s robotaxis in the Bay Area.²

What happens inside a robotaxi depot?

• Charging. Lyft’s Nashville depot for Waymo vehicles has dozens of fast chargers for hundreds of vehicles.³ A visit to Waymo’s Austin depot counted 36.⁴
• Cleaning. Uber and Hertz both list it as a core depot job.^{1 2}
• Maintenance and repairs. Nashville has maintenance bays for high-voltage repairs and secure parts storage.³ Austin has about a dozen loading bays.⁴
• Parking. When demand drops, the fleet comes back and waits.
• People. Nashville is hiring more than 70 full-time technicians, fleet operations staff and repair coordinators this year.³

How big is a robotaxi depot?

No operator publishes a standard. These are the depots on record:

• Zoox, Las Vegas: a 190,000-square-foot warehouse to house and maintain its fleet.⁵
• Waymo, Austin (run by Avomo): about 75,000 to 100,000 square feet by a visitor’s estimate, which they judged could support 500 to 1,000 vehicles at peak.⁴
• Waymo, Nashville (run by Flexdrive by Lyft): 80,000 square feet.³
• Uber, Houston: 50,000 square feet, plus a separate charging stop.¹
• Tesla, Austin: an 82,107-square-foot lot with 48 charging stalls in its first phase.⁶
• Fleetport (planned): hubs for 100 to 250 robotaxis each, near six airports, opening in 2027.⁷

Depot, staging lot or charging stop?

A depot does everything. A staging lot only holds vehicles near riders so they are close when trips come in. Waymo’s plan to lease 40 parking spaces at Caltrain stations is staging, not a depot.⁸ A charging stop only adds energy. Uber’s Houston plan pairs one depot with a separate charging stop.¹

The smaller formats are where most properties fit. We explain staging in What a Fleet Staging Lot Is.

Why depots sit at the edge of the city

Land, power and neighbors. A depot needs a lot of all three, and they are cheapest away from the center. The visitors to Waymo’s Austin depot asked whether energy, not land, limits how far that fleet can grow.⁴

Neighbors and cities can also stop a site late. San Francisco approved Tesla’s plan to put fleet chargers in a downtown garage, then the Teamsters appealed and Tesla dropped it.⁹ The cost of an edge location is the drive back and forth, which we worked through in Six Lost Hours a Day.

Who runs a robotaxi depot?

Often not the robotaxi brand. Waymo’s depots are run by fleet partners in several cities: Avomo in Austin and Flexdrive by Lyft in Nashville.^{3 4} Uber is bringing in Hertz.² Zoox and Tesla run their own.^{5 6} We list who signs where in Can I Lease My Land to Waymo or Tesla for a Robotaxi Depot?

What we do not know

• Space per vehicle. No operator publishes square feet per car, and the Austin capacity figure is a visitor’s estimate.⁴
• Power per depot. Charger counts are public; the electrical load behind them mostly is not.
• Whether operators keep building a few large depots or add many small sites near riders.

You do not need a depot-sized site to work with robotaxi fleets. List your property free and tell us its size, hours and power. We will tell you which format it fits.