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This week Waymo's driverless taxis made their debut in two new American cities, and in both cases, the welcome was less a red carpet than a gauntlet. In Tampa, the Alphabet-owned company sent its robotaxis straight into the swollen traffic of a Buccaneers game, a baptism by gridlock captured on video by local station WFLA, showing the cars threading through crowds and oncoming cars with the placid indifference that has become their signature. In Denver, the welcome was more pointed: a passenger riding in a Waymo vehicle filmed a man hurling eggs at the car, footage that aired on KDVR and quickly made its way around the internet, a splattering reminder that not everyone has made peace with the idea of a car with nobody at the wheel.

Taken together, the two clips are a tidy snapshot of where Waymo finds itself as it pushes into new markets at a clip that would have seemed implausible even two years ago. The company, born out of Google's self-driving car project, has expanded steadily across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, and is now reaching into cities with their own particular textures of chaos — the tailgating frenzy of an NFL Sunday, the unpredictable sidewalks of a Denver neighborhood. The Tampa footage shows a company confident enough in its technology to send cars into the kind of dense, erratic traffic that was once considered the edge case too risky to attempt. The Denver footage shows that confidence colliding with a public that has not necessarily asked for any of this.

That friction matters beyond the novelty of a good local-news clip. Waymo's entire business model depends on a slow accumulation of trust — regulators, insurers, and ordinary pedestrians all have to be convinced, repeatedly, that a car without a driver is not a hazard but a convenience. Every viral video of an egg hitting a windshield chips at that case, regardless of whether the technology itself performed exactly as designed. For a company burning enormous sums to scale its fleet, public sentiment is not a side issue; it is close to the whole ballgame, since cities and state regulators can slow or halt expansion in response to backlash long before any software bug does.

There is also a broader economic subtext. Each new city Waymo enters is a test of whether autonomous ride-hailing can become infrastructure rather than spectacle — a service as unremarkable as hailing a cab, built into how people get to the airport or home from a game. The Tampa footage suggests the technology is inching toward that mundane reliability. The Denver footage is a reminder that the human reaction to sharing the road with a driverless car remains anything but settled, and that the hardest problem Waymo faces may not be engineering at all.