Waymo opened teen accounts in Nashville on Tuesday, letting riders aged 13 to 17 hail its driverless cars across the city’s 50-square-mile service area without a parent on board. Each teen account must be linked to a parent or guardian, and a teen can bring up to three guests in the same age bracket. Nashville is only the second city to get the feature, after Phoenix last year, and a Waymo spokesperson told TechCrunch it will be the first of many teen launches in the coming months.
The product is built to reassure the parent rather than the passenger. Parents can follow trip status in real time and receive automatic ride receipts, and teens have access to specially trained rider support agents during the journey. Waymo gave a small group of Nashville families early access before the launch, and says further expansion will be limited to cities where its operations are mature and local regulations allow it.
For a driverless operator, teenagers are an unusually good fit. The usual parental worry about ride-hailing, a stranger behind the wheel, simply does not apply, and school runs, practices and weekend trips fill cars at hours when commuter demand falls away. Waymo’s ridership has grown from about 50,000 paid trips a week in May 2024 to more than 500,000 a week earlier this year.
What Waymo has not disclosed is how it verifies that the person in the car is the teen on the account, what happens when a ride is interrupted with no adult aboard, or whether teen trips are priced differently. A handful of early-access families is a pilot. Unaccompanied minors across a dozen cities is a safety record, and it will be judged on its first bad night.
