Waymo can now charge for driverless rides across 18 California counties
California regulators tripled Waymo's service area to Sacramento, San Diego and most of the Bay Area and LA, just as its safety claims face independent scrutiny.
What happened: California regulators approved Waymo's biggest expansion yet: driverless rides you can pay for across 18 counties, from Sonoma to San Diego. The California Public Utilities Commission signed off on a filing Waymo submitted in January, after nearly seven months of review, suspensions, and a supplemental filing covering things like unaccompanied minors and service during power outages. The approval covers 12 Northern California counties, including the whole Bay Area and Sacramento, and six Southern California counties, including Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, and San Diego. Waymo is now cleared for freeways, rural roads, parking lots, and rail crossings, day or night, in rain, fog, and hail — everything except heavy snow. Both its older Jaguar I-Pace and newer Ojai vehicles are covered.
Why it matters: Waymo has now given more than 20 million paid rides and logged over 220 million fully driverless miles across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta. That scale matters: small safety samples can hide risky edge cases, but at this size, pedestrians darting out, cyclists cutting through intersections, and red-light runners are being tested for real. Waymo says its cars caused far fewer injury crashes than human drivers over the same distance. Meanwhile, Tesla's Bay Area 'robotaxi' still requires a human safety driver and operates under a limo-style permit with none of Waymo's safety-reporting requirements, and Amazon's Zoox just launched its first driverless rides in Las Vegas.
The safety numbers, plainly: Waymo reports 94% fewer crashes causing serious or fatal injury, 93% fewer causing pedestrian injury, and 84% fewer involving cyclists, compared with human drivers. But that comparison uses an 'adjusted human benchmark' built from Waymo's own cities and conditions, not all driving everywhere. An independent 2026 IIHS analysis of the same data found a smaller, still substantial, 81% drop in injury crashes overall. Waymo doesn't operate in heavy snow, flooding, or most highway and rural driving, so its favorable numbers may not hold once it expands into those conditions. Federal regulators also have two open investigations into school-zone incidents, including a low-speed crash where a Waymo hit a child in Santa Monica.
The rollout: Waymo says the California rollout will be 'gradual,' with San Diego rider-only service planned for later this summer and Sacramento still being validated. Depots, chargers, mapping, and remote-support staff all need to be built out before cars start carrying paying passengers in new counties. The company is separately chasing a goal of 1 million paid rides per week by the end of 2026, up from roughly 500,000 now, which would require nearly doubling its current fleet of about 3,700 vehicles. At its present pace of adding 265 to 300 vehicles a month, Waymo looks likely to fall short of that target — a manufacturing and logistics gap rather than a driving-technology problem.