Martha Stewart spent decades teaching people how to fold napkins and dress a mantelpiece. Her latest project involves neither. In a minute-long clip Waymo posted on August 27, she walks through the cabin of the company’s newest vehicle the way she’d walk a magazine crew through a guest cottage, gesturing at the seats and the screens and talking up “what makes this cabin special.” It’s a home tour. For a taxi. That drives itself.
Before getting into why this is a more interesting story than a celebrity endorsement, it helps to know what she’s actually sitting in, because the vehicle underneath the marketing is doing more engineering work than the video lets on.
The car is called the Ojai, and despite what the name suggests, it isn’t a nod to the Southern California town so much as a design philosophy Waymo has pushed since 2021: build something closer to a lounge than a car. It’s the company’s first vehicle built from scratch specifically for autonomous ride-hailing, rather than adapted from something that already existed. Waymo’s fleet has run for years on modified Jaguar I-PACEs, and before that, Chrysler Pacifica minivans with sensor pods bolted to the roof. The Ojai skips the modification step entirely. There’s no B-pillar, so the doors open like an elevator rather than swinging out. The floor is completely flat, with no transmission tunnel or engine bay to route around, since the whole platform was built around a battery pack and electric motors from day one. Three large screens sit where a dashboard would normally live. Braille lettering and screen-reader compatibility are built into the cabin rather than added as an afterthought. According to Waymo’s own FAQ, riders can sit in any seat except the driver’s seat, which still exists, sitting empty, because the current Ojai hasn’t gone through the kind of federal review that would let Waymo remove it entirely. That’s a meaningfully different approach than Zoox, which recently won federal approval to charge fares in a vehicle engineered from the outset with no steering wheel or pedals at all.
None of the sheet metal, batteries, or seats come from Waymo, Google, or Detroit. They come from Zeekr, the electric vehicle brand owned by China’s Zhejiang Geely Holding Group. Waymo announced the partnership in December 2021, describing a vehicle designed at a Geely-affiliated studio in Sweden and engineered to prioritize passenger space over conventional car proportions. Waymo’s contribution is its sixth-generation sensor suite and self-driving software, layered onto a rolling platform Zeekr designs and builds. That division of labor is exactly what makes the Ojai cheaper to deploy at scale than a retrofitted luxury SUV, and it’s also what makes this rollout more legally complicated than a home-tour video would suggest.
Congress has spent 2026 advancing legislation aimed squarely at cars built this way. The Connected Vehicle Security Act of 2026 cleared the Senate Commerce Committee in July with unanimous, bipartisan support. Its ownership-based restrictions are strict enough to sweep up a legacy brand like Mercedes-Benz over a Chinese shareholder stake sitting just under 20 percent, but the bill’s language goes further than ownership math: it also targets connected vehicles physically manufactured inside China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea, with prohibitions tied to vehicles imported, manufactured, or sold after January 1, 2027. The Ojai isn’t a partial-ownership edge case sitting near a threshold. It’s a vehicle built entirely by a Chinese-owned manufacturer, running Google’s Gemini voice assistant, and already carrying real riders around Phoenix, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, with Denver, Las Vegas, and San Diego next in line. If that provision survives to a floor vote in its current form, Waymo would need either a federal exemption or a very different manufacturing plan for every Ojai built after the deadline, regardless of how clean its safety numbers look.
That’s the part a lifestyle video isn’t built to mention, and it’s the more useful story for anyone trying to understand where the robotaxi business actually stands right now. Waymo has spent years leaning on safety statistics to build public trust, and its self-reported crash data across hundreds of millions of autonomous miles is genuinely strong. But public trust and regulatory compliance are separate fights, and the second one has nothing to do with how smoothly the Waymo Driver merges onto a freeway. It has to do with a supply-chain decision made years before anyone in the Senate started drafting a bill about connected-vehicle hardware.
The celebrity placement fits a familiar pattern for products that need an image adjustment more than a spec sheet. Robotaxis have had a rough year in the court of public opinion. A UK parliamentary petition calling for an outright ban on driverless taxis picked up more than a thousand signatures within weeks, and Zoox’s own no-steering-wheel approval drew plenty of skepticism online about who actually asked for a car built that way. Recruiting a trusted lifestyle brand to make a self-driving vehicle feel like a cozy living room rather than a rolling sensor array is a smart move when the actual resistance is emotional rather than mechanical. Stewart doesn’t need to understand lidar to make a flat floor and three screens look inviting.
For anyone curious enough to want an actual ride, the Ojai isn’t available everywhere yet. Waymo began offering trips to select riders in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles this spring, with Denver, Las Vegas, and San Diego added to the expansion list ahead of a wider public rollout later this year. The newest addition inside the cabin, a voice assistant called Gemini in Waymo, handles climate and music requests and answers general questions, but according to Waymo, it has no access to driving controls beyond an emergency pullover request. It’s a nice touch, and entirely unrelated to whether the vehicle carrying it clears a Senate floor vote sometime in the next year.
Whether the Ojai becomes a genuine mainstream robotaxi or a cautionary tale about hardware sourcing probably depends less on how many screens it has than on where regulators draw the line on what counts as manufactured, in a bill that’s still one vote away from becoming law.
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