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Waymo opened its robotaxi service to the general public in San Antonio, San Diego and Tampa on Tuesday, expanding fully driverless, no-safety-driver rides into three metro areas for the first time, including pickups and drop-offs at local airports. The move, announced by the Alphabet subsidiary, extends a service that until recently was mostly confined to Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, and signals that the company is now willing to let strangers — not just waitlisted early adopters — summon an empty car with a spinning sensor dome on top to take them wherever they need to go.

The celebration lasted about as long as it takes to merge onto an interstate. In Tampa, one of Waymo's vehicles swerved into oncoming traffic on its very first day of public service, according to passengers who described bracing for a collision. "Thought we were done for a second," one rider told Yahoo Autos — not exactly the tagline Waymo had in mind for its Florida debut.

The juxtaposition is instructive. Waymo has spent years building a reputation as the autonomous-vehicle company that doesn't crash into things, leaning on a safety record it publishes with the zeal of a company that knows its entire business model depends on it. That record is part of why regulators in three new cities were willing to let the company loose on public roads without a human behind the wheel as backup. A single viral near-miss, captured from the backseat and shared widely within hours, does more reputational damage than any number of dry safety reports can repair.

That asymmetry is the central tension of the robotaxi business right now. The technology has improved enough, and the regulatory environment has loosened enough, for a company like Waymo to triple its city count in a single announcement. But public trust doesn't scale the way software does. It accumulates slowly, through thousands of uneventful rides, and it can evaporate in the time it takes to watch a fifteen-second clip of a car crossing a centerline.

For the robotics and autonomous-vehicle industry broadly, Waymo's expansion is a milestone worth noting: airport runs, in particular, are a notoriously complex use case, dense with construction zones, confused tourists and aggressive rideshare traffic, and a company confident enough to tackle them in three new cities at once is making a statement about where it believes the technology stands. For the people of San Antonio, San Diego and Tampa, it means a new transportation option — and, for at least a few of them this week, a story to tell about the time the computer driving them nearly didn't stop in time. Both things can be true, and Waymo's challenge, as it keeps expanding, is making sure the first fact keeps outrunning the second.