Waymo's charger habit is a bill sent to everyone else

If a company sells you a driverless future, who pays for the plug? Right now, a worrying share of that answer is: whoever pulls up behind the robotaxi and waits.

The reports are consistent. As Golem reports, Waymo runs its own charging depots but also falls back on public stations, which irritates other electric car drivers. InsideEVs describes Waymo robotaxis crowding public fast chargers in San Diego, with regular drivers waiting for spots to open. A German outlet, ad-hoc-news, goes further and cites waits of 30 minutes to a full hour. That last figure comes from an undated page, so treat it as indicative, not measured.

Public chargers are a shared commons, and fleets are the heaviest users

A public fast charger is built for turnover: arrive, charge, leave. A commercial fleet vehicle has a different incentive. It exists to be topped up as fast as possible so it can go back to earning money. When it uses a public charger, it competes with a private driver who may have no alternative at all. And that driver is often precisely the person without a home charger, which is the situation an SPD group in Hamm's Rhynern district recently raised in an inquiry about residents of streets with only curbside parking or garage courts without suitable power.

That is the core of our argument: autonomy doesn't remove the cost of energy logistics, it relocates it. The fleet operator arguably saves on land and grid connections, and the cost shows up as a queue for someone else. Calling that "efficiency" is generous. We'd call it a subsidy, paid in other people's time.

Depots aren't a perfect fix, but they're the honest one

The obvious counter is that depots are hard too. They are. A Waymo depot in San Francisco, according to ladestationguru.de, means 2.4 megawatts of connection power, scarce land and neighbor protests. In Santa Monica, Golem notes, Waymo charged its cars at night in a residential area, to the dismay of residents, and a court has for now barred the practice.

So there is no free option. Charging hundreds of vehicles has to happen somewhere, and every location annoys somebody. But that is exactly why the burden should sit with the party that profits from the fleet. Businesses are already forming around it: Business Insider Germany reports that Voltera buys urban property to build charging sites for operators like Waymo, and elektroquatsch.de reports Uber putting $100 million into its own robotaxi charging network (we'd treat that figure as secondary reporting). The market looks able to build this. The question is whether it will do so when public chargers are cheaper to lean on.

What cities should actually require

Our recommendation is simple, and it is an opinion, not a finding. Cities that grant operating permits should attach charging conditions: fleets charge in depots by default, public fast chargers are a fallback only in genuine emergencies, and operators report how often they use public stalls. Where depots sit near housing, night-time charging needs clear rules, as Santa Monica shows.

Waymo's expansion makes this urgent. The company plans a Tokyo launch in 2027 with Toyota bZ4X vehicles, and the UK is reportedly next. Every new city will probably face the same question, ideally before the first queue forms rather than after.

None of this makes robotaxis the villain. It makes them a commercial service that should carry its own infrastructure costs. Verdict: if a fleet can't charge without borrowing the public's chargers, it isn't ready for the public's streets. We think cities have the most leverage before a service scales up, and they should use it.