Waymo has secured its biggest California expansion yet, winning approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to charge for fully driverless rides across 18 counties from Sonoma down to San Diego. The clearance triples Waymo's footprint in the state and unlocks two brand-new metros in Sacramento and San Diego.
Statewide Sweep, Not Just Bay Area
The Advice Letter No. 4 approval covers 12 Northern California counties — Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano, Sonoma and Yolo — plus six in the south: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Ventura. It runs to every speed limit, freeway, city street and rural road, day or night, in rain, fog or hail, with only widespread snow or ice carved out. Waymo filed in January and sat through nearly seven months of regulatory review before the sign-off landed on Friday.
What Deploys Next
Approval is not deployment. Waymo said the rollout “will be gradual and guided by our safety framework,” but the company is already sitting on close to 1,000 sixth-generation Ojai robotaxis at its Arizona factory, with 684 finished and ready. Both the Jaguar I-Pace fleet and the Ojai vehicles built by Zeekr are covered. Waymo's operational area jumped from 5,843 square miles to 47,493 square miles overnight — roughly tenfold — and the company is targeting one million paid rides a week by year-end, up from around 500,000 today.
Winning The Boring Way
CPUC deputy executive director Pat Tsen said earlier this year that Tesla “is not operating an autonomous vehicle service” in California and holds only a charter-party carrier permit — the same license a limo company carries. That contrast now looks starker: one operator cleared to charge for fully driverless rides across most of the state, the other still running with safety drivers. Waymo has done more than 20 million cumulative trips on a fleet of roughly 3,000 vehicles, and its Dallas rollout dropped its waitlist earlier this week. The company also went driverless in Las Vegas ahead of the new California green light.
Reporting based on coverage from Electrek and the California Public Utilities Commission.