Waymo wins approval to offer driverless rides across 18 California counties

California regulators have approved Waymo’s expansion across 18 counties, including 12 in Northern California and six in the south. The decision allows the company to charge for fully driverless rides throughout the Bay Area and Los Angeles, while adding Sacramento and San Diego as new markets.

The authorization covers all speed limits and a wide range of locations, from freeways and city streets to rural roads, parking lots, driveways and rail crossings. Service can operate day and night in rain, fog and hail; widespread snow or ice is the main exclusion. Both the Jaguar I-Pace and the newer Ojai robotaxi using Waymo’s sixth-generation Driver are covered.

Waymo’s current scale gives the approval a concrete baseline: its service area reached 1,400 square miles across 11 cities in May, supported by roughly 3,000 vehicles that have completed more than 20 million trips. The company says the rollout will be gradual. The regulatory clearance does not itself mean that every approved area is already operating; depots, charging, mapping, remote support and vehicles must still be made available.

So what does this change concretely? Residents and visitors in the approved markets may gain access to paid, fully driverless rides as Waymo builds out service, rather than only rides with a safety driver. The immediate effect is permission to expand, not a stated launch date or guaranteed coverage in every county.

The decision also sets Waymo’s regulatory position apart from Tesla’s current Bay Area service. A California Public Utilities Commission executive said Tesla was not operating an autonomous vehicle service, while its permit does not include the autonomous-vehicle safety reporting, data transparency or quarterly filings required of Waymo and Zoox. The sources differ on Waymo’s end-of-year target: one says 1 million rides a week, while another says more than one MILLION paid rides by year-end.