Before Waymo was Waymo, it was Google’s self-driving car project. Starting in 2009, the effort spent many years in test mode—with humans in the driver’s seats ready to take over, just in case—that its vision of vehicular autonomy often felt far from practical reality.

Since last year, however, Alphabet’s robotaxi service has begun to scale up quickly. It’s now fully open to the public in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area. And today the company is announcing that it’s testing fully autonomous trips, sans human driver, in Miami, and plans to do so in Orlando, Florida; Dallas; Houston; and San Antonio in the coming weeks.

For now, the only passengers will be Waymo employees. But the news is one of the final big milestones before the company offers rides t

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