California Regulators Clear Waymo to Expand Robotaxis Into 18 Counties, Including Sacramento and San Diego

The California Public Utilities Commission signed off Friday, August 14, on Waymo's biggest service expansion yet, clearing the Alphabet-owned company to charge for fully driverless rides across 18 California counties, according to the CPUC filing cited by Electrek and confirmed in Waymo's own announcement.

The approval covers 12 counties in Northern California: 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. That's most of the state's population living inside Waymo's new potential service map.

Waymo announced the news on X: "Big news for the Golden State. We have received the CPUC's approval to expand our autonomous ride-hailing service across the SF Bay Area and LA, and bring our service to Sacramento and San Diego." The company added that "expansion will be gradual and guided by our safety framework."

What actually changes, and when

Don't expect robotaxis in Sacramento or San Diego streets tomorrow. Waymo spokesperson Sandy Karp told the LA Times the company's "immediate focus is preparing to launch rider-only service in San Diego later this summer and continuing to validate its technology in Sacramento." No exact launch date has been set, according to KCRA and CBS News.

Waymo had been manually testing and mapping Sacramento roads since announcing its planned entry there in February, according to KCRA. San Diego was announced as a target market back in November 2025.

The approval traces back to an Advice Letter Waymo filed with the CPUC on January 28, according to Electrek. Regulators initially suspended the letter through September 25 for further review, and Waymo filed a supplemental letter in May addressing rules for unaccompanied minors and rider procedures during service disruptions, including the kind of scenario created by the PG&E outage that hit San Francisco last December. That's nearly seven months of regulatory review for a single filing.

The operating conditions Waymo requested are broad: all speed limits, freeways, city streets, rural roads, parking lots, driveways and rail crossings, day or night, in rain, fog and hail. The one real carve-out is heavy snow or ice, according to Electrek. Both Waymo's existing Jaguar I-Pace fleet and its new Ojai robotaxi, a minivan built by Chinese automaker Zeekr, are covered under the approval.

Scale of the fleet

Waymo's service area passed 1,400 square miles across 11 cities as of May, larger than the state of Rhode Island, running roughly 3,000 vehicles that have completed more than 20 million trips, according to Electrek. The company is targeting 1 million rides a week by the end of this year. Waymo also cites data showing its vehicles have driven more than 220 million fully autonomous miles and are involved in an estimated 94% fewer serious-injury collisions compared to human drivers, a figure Karp repeated to both the LA Times and CBS News.

The Tesla contrast

Tesla runs a "Robotaxi" service in the same Bay Area, but with a human sitting in the driver's seat, and it operates under a charter-party carrier permit, the same category a limousine company holds, according to CPUC deputy executive director Pat Tsen, quoted by Electrek from March remarks: "Tesla is not operating an autonomous vehicle service." That permit doesn't require the AV safety reporting, data transparency, or quarterly filings Waymo and Amazon's Zoox must submit.

This is a legitimate regulatory distinction. A charter-party carrier permit is simply a different legal category than an autonomous vehicle permit, and it's Tesla's choice to operate that way in California for now while it continues testing full autonomy. Whether that reflects caution or unreadiness is a fair question, but it isn't evidence of wrongdoing.

Not a spotless record

Waymo's expansion isn't happening in a vacuum of goodwill. ABC7 San Francisco reported that during Fourth of July celebrations, multiple Waymo vehicles stalled in traffic and blocked city streets, and the company had to restrict service near Golden Gate Park during the Outside Lands festival to manage safety concerns. San Francisco officials have also discussed fining autonomous vehicle companies that impede emergency responders, according to ABC7. The LA Times and Edinburg Post both noted a Waymo vehicle struck and killed a neighborhood cat in San Francisco last year, an incident that drew public criticism at the time.

UC Berkeley civil engineering professor Scott Moura told ABC7 that a slow rollout makes sense given the unknowns. "It will be interesting to see how they perform on highways, going across bridges, in rural areas where maybe you don't have connectivity," Moura said, adding that "there might be growing pains." He also urged public scrutiny: "Everyone should ask questions about this. Be skeptical. Be curious."

What's still unresolved

Waymo has not released a firm launch date for San Diego or Sacramento service, nor a timeline for when the broader 18-county authorization will translate into actual rides on the ground in places like Riverside, Orange or Ventura counties. The company says expansion will be "gradual," which leaves local officials and residents in each new county waiting to see how fast, and how far, that gradual rollout actually goes.