Waymo cleared for paid rides across 18 California counties

California just handed Waymo the largest paid-robotaxi footprint in the country. The state's Public Utilities Commission approved Waymo's Advice Letter No. 4, Electrek reported, authorizing fares for driverless rides across twelve Northern California counties, including San Francisco, Sacramento and Santa Clara, and six in the south, including Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura. That is a regulatory footprint no US rival currently holds. Zoox only started charging for rides in Las Vegas on August 10, in a single city.

The permit is unusually permissive on the operational side. It covers all speed limits, from parking lots and driveways up to freeways and rail crossings, in rain, fog and hail, day or night. Only widespread snow or ice is carved out. For a category that has spent years constrained to a handful of daylight ZIP codes, a ruling that names freeways and hail is the more interesting sentence than the county list.

Waymo says it now runs about 3,000 vehicles across a mix of Jaguar I-Paces and a newer Ojai robotaxi carrying the sixth-generation Driver, has completed more than 20 million trips, and is aiming for one million rides per week by year-end. Against Uber's global scale that is still small, but paid rides in LA, San Diego and the Bay Area under one permit changes what small compounds into. The expansion also lands days after Waymo's sixth recent recall, which is the political backdrop the CPUC just approved into.

Several things the filing does not settle. Waymo says the rollout "will be gradual and guided by our safety framework" without naming per-county start dates or pricing, and the permit itself does not describe when freeway service actually goes live for passengers versus what regulators have simply allowed. The commission had also suspended review through September 25 for further examination before this clearance came through, so a follow-up look is not off the table. And in March, CPUC deputy executive director Pat Tsen publicly stated that "Tesla is not operating an autonomous vehicle service" in California, a gap the commission has now widened by giving Waymo something Tesla has not been granted.

The near-term winners are riders in California's two biggest metros and any city government looking for a template to license driverless fares. The near-term losers are rideshare drivers in those same metros, who now face a paid competitor with a statewide green light and freeway rights.