Robotaxi Fleets & Charging Infrastructure: The Challenge for Cities

A Waymo depot in San Francisco shows what happens when hundreds of robotaxis need power at once: a 2.4-megawatt connection, scarce real estate, and angry neighbors. Here's what that means for charging infrastructure as robotaxi fleets expand into more cities.

Why robotaxi fleets force a rethink of charging

If you own an electric car today, you know the routine: charge overnight at home, top up occasionally at a public charger or on a road trip. A single vehicle sits parked most of the day and charges at leisure, usually while nobody needs it. Autonomous robotaxi fleets break that pattern completely. A vehicle that works around the clock never gets a "night to charge." It has to be topped up in short windows between rides, and not as a lone car, but as part of a fleet that can number in the hundreds, all potentially needing power at the same time.

That is why operators like Waymo build their own centralized charging depots instead of relying on the public charging network. For cities where robotaxi service is only starting to expand, this is exactly the question that matters: where is the power for these fleets supposed to come from, and what land, grid connections, and permits does that require? A recent video takes viewers inside a Waymo depot in San Francisco and shows, in concrete terms, what this infrastructure looks like in practice and where the friction points are.

Source: Kevin Chen: Behind the Scenes at Waymo Driverless Taxi Depot

Inside the Waymo depot: 2.4 megawatts for one fleet

The depot shown in the video, on Toland Street in San Francisco, is a central charging hub for a substantial part of Waymo's robotaxi fleet. It houses 38 DC fast chargers rated at roughly 60 kW each. Add that up and you get a total connected load of about 2.4 megawatts, in the same ballpark as a small light-industrial park, just to keep cars charged. For comparison, a single home or workplace charger typically draws somewhere between 7 and 22 kW. A robotaxi depot operates in an entirely different league than the private or semi-public charging infrastructure that most utilities are used to sizing for.

Not every parking spot can charge

One detail from the video stands out: only about a third of the parking spaces in the depot actually have a charging connector. The rest are used purely for parking and shuffling vehicles between trips. That shows a robotaxi depot isn't simply a big charging lot; it's a logistics system where charging, parking, and vehicle movement have to be tightly choreographed, closer to a warehouse with staged replenishment than a conventional parking structure. Cars get routed to an open charger the moment their battery drops below a threshold, while fully charged vehicles roll straight back into service.

Dedicated chargers instead of the public network

Waymo deliberately relies on its own DC fast chargers rather than public charging infrastructure. The reason is control. A fleet operator can't afford vehicles going offline because a public charger is occupied or charging too slowly. Availability and charge time need to be predictable so the fleet can keep enough vehicles on the road at all hours. A blocked public charger might be a minor annoyance for a private driver; for a fleet operator running a tight schedule, it can directly translate into cancelled rides and lost revenue.

Permitting as the bottleneck

Building a high-power hub like this is anything but simple. The video makes clear just how involved the process is:

• Finding suitable land with enough space and grid access
• Getting building permits approved by the city
• Requesting grid upgrades, including new transformers, from the utility
• Coordinating construction that can stretch over many months
• Aligning fleet planning with what the site can actually support

These timelines are a big reason robotaxi fleets tend to expand into new cities slowly, even once the vehicle technology and software are ready to go. A grid upgrade with the local utility can take anywhere from several months to well over a year, depending on the region and how much headroom the existing medium-voltage grid has, far longer than the construction of the depot itself.

Vulnerable to power outages

One particularly telling moment in the video: during a power outage, Waymo reportedly had to top up its robotaxis using mobile diesel generators. That points to a weak spot that barely registers for a single private vehicle but can be an existential risk for an entire fleet. Without grid power and no backup plan, the whole operation grinds to a halt. For a company promising thousands of rides a day, an outage lasting several hours isn't just a technical problem, it's a business risk.

Pushback from the neighborhood

Local opposition also comes up in the video. Residents complained about autonomous vehicles honking at night while maneuvering into the depot, and a request from Waymo to expand the site was turned down by the city. Conflicts like this are typical wherever commercial charging infrastructure lands in dense neighborhoods, where noise, traffic, and competing uses for land are already in short supply.

Scarce real estate, longer empty miles

Desirable, centrally located sites for charging depots are scarce and contested. That often pushes operators toward the edge of the city, which means longer empty runs, so-called deadhead miles, just to reach the nearest charging depot. That eats into time, energy, and fleet capacity that would otherwise go toward paying rides. The farther a depot sits from the actual service area, the bigger that loss becomes, which eventually shows up in how a fleet prices its rides.

Bandwidth as a second resource

Beyond power, the video notes that every depot also needs a high-capacity fiber connection of at least 10 Gbps. Depending on its sensor suite, each vehicle generates anywhere from hundreds of gigabytes to several terabytes of data per hour that needs to be uploaded on-site. A robotaxi depot ends up being as much a data-center site as an energy site, which adds its own requirements around cooling, power backup, and uptime for the IT infrastructure.

What this means for cities beyond San Francisco

Robotaxi fleets are still in an early phase in most of the world, but the planning questions are the same everywhere Waymo has already run into them. Cities that want to welcome autonomous fleets need to figure out early on where multi-megawatt depots can even be sited. Unlike a home charger, this isn't a simple utility hookup; it calls for medium-voltage connections of the kind usually reserved for industrial parks or large public fast-charging hubs. In dense downtown areas, where land is already tight and grid capacity is often close to its limit, that requirement quickly becomes a hard constraint on where a fleet can operate at all.

In Germany, robotaxi pilot programs are only just getting off the ground, but the underlying questions are identical. German cities looking to permit autonomous fleets will need to work out early where depots with several megawatts of connected load can fit, since neither downtown real estate nor existing grid capacity in most German city centers was built with this kind of load in mind. The permitting and grid-upgrade timelines that slow projects down in the US apply just as much on that side of the Atlantic, if not more so, given how methodical German utility and building-permit processes tend to be.

The San Francisco example also shows that land-use and grid planning can't be separated from transportation planning. When depots get pushed to the outskirts, the share of empty miles grows, which raises real questions about the environmental case for robotaxi fleets compared with private car ownership. The diesel-generator workaround mentioned in the video is also a warning sign. Any city or transit agency planning to shift toward autonomous, battery-electric fleets should be thinking about grid redundancy and storage, not just the number of charging bays.

Technical fixes on the horizon

Over the medium term, technologies like autonomous docking at chargers, wireless charging, or vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication between cars and city infrastructure could ease some of these pressures, for instance through smarter load balancing across the day. Bidirectional charging could also become attractive for fleet operators, letting parked vehicles provide grid services during downtime and helping offset the cost of an expensive depot. None of this is available at scale yet, but it shows the answer doesn't have to be simply "more connected load"; smarter use of existing capacity is part of the picture too.

Permitting speed as a competitive factor

For city governments everywhere, including in Germany, the speed of permitting and grid upgrades is turning into a genuine competitive factor. Cities that set aside land for high-power charging hubs and reserve grid capacity ahead of time gain an edge over cities that only react once an operator is already asking. That applies well beyond robotaxis, to anyone electrifying a commercial fleet, from delivery vans to electric trucking. A city or utility that starts talking to fleet operators about reserved capacity at suitable industrial sites today will move much faster when it's time to actually approve a depot.

One thing is clear: as robotaxi fleets scale up, charging infrastructure stops being a question about individual chargers and becomes a question of urban planning, grid capacity, and public acceptance all at once. Watching how this plays out in cities like San Francisco offers a realistic preview of the challenges other cities, including those in Germany, will face once robotaxi fleets move from pilot projects to everyday scale.

Additional Video

For a look at how a competing robotaxi operator is tackling the same charging bottleneck, this video breaks down Tesla's rapidly expanding dedicated Supercharger buildout for its robotaxi fleet.

Source: Brighter with Herbert – Tesla's Robotaxi Infrastructure Is Exploding