Waymo has won the biggest single expansion in its history: the California Public Utilities Commission has cleared the Alphabet unit to charge for fully driverless rides across 18 counties, including the entire Bay Area and Los Angeles basin, and to open two brand-new markets in Sacramento and San Diego.
What the CPUC actually approved
The August 14 decision runs through Waymo's Advice Letter No. 4, filed with the CPUC on January 28 and supplemented in May with details on unaccompanied minors and rider procedures during service disruptions. Regulators suspended the filing through September 25 for review before clearing it earlier than expected. The permit covers 12 counties in Northern California — Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Solano, Sonoma and Yolo — and six in the south: Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Ventura.
The operating conditions Waymo asked for are equally wide: all speed limits, freeways, highways, city streets, rural roads, parking lots, driveways and rail crossings, day and night, in rain, fog and hail. The only real carve-out is widespread snow or ice. Both the Jaguar I-Pace and the sixth-generation "Ojai" robotaxi are covered.
A gradual rollout, backed by a big fleet
Waymo said the expansion "will be gradual and guided by our safety framework." The company's paid service already spans more than 1,400 square miles across 11 U.S. cities on a fleet of roughly 3,000 vehicles that has completed over 20 million trips. Waymo is targeting one million rides per week by the end of 2026, up from around 500,000 today. The company has also stockpiled close to 1,000 new Ojai vehicles in Arizona that can be moved into California depots once charging, mapping and remote-support infrastructure is in place.
Regulatory contrast with Tesla
The Waymo approval sharpens a widening gap with Tesla's rival "Robotaxi" service, which still operates in California only with a human safety driver in the front seat under a charter-party carrier permit — the same type of authorization a limousine company holds. In March, CPUC deputy executive director Pat Tsen said flatly that Tesla is not operating an autonomous vehicle service in the state and therefore is not required to file AV safety data or quarterly reports. Waymo and Amazon-owned Zoox continue to file that data as licensed driverless carriers.
Why it matters
The letter covers roughly the areas where most Californians live and work, giving Waymo a runway to scale toward its stated one-million-rides-a-week goal without further permitting bottlenecks. Approval is not the same as deployment, but the state has now cleared away the biggest regulatory blocker to a coast-anchored, city-by-city rollout that would put Waymo firmly ahead of any other paid robotaxi service in the country.
See our related coverage of Pony.ai's expansion with Uber into Europe, Kodiak AI's California autonomous trucking permit and Nevada's 10-vehicle cap on Tesla's Vegas robotaxi fleet.
Reporting based on coverage from Electrek, Engadget, Fox Business and the CPUC decision docket.