Waymo just won approval to run robotaxis across 18 California counties

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Waymo receives permission to offer rides in Sacramento and San Diego - Engadgetwww.engadget.com

Waymo has received approval from California regulators to expand its driverless robotaxi service across eighteen counties throughout the state, a significant regulatory win that extends both the Jaguar I-Pace vehicles already in its fleet and its newer Ojai robotaxi model running Waymo's sixth generation self driving system. The expansion builds on a service area that had already grown past 1,400 square miles across eleven cities as of this past May, a footprint that reportedly now exceeds the entire land area of Rhode Island.

The scale of Waymo's existing operation in California is genuinely substantial by this point. The company's fleet of roughly 3,000 vehicles across the state has completed more than 20 million total trips so far, and Waymo has publicly stated a goal of reaching a million rides per week nationally by the end of this year. That kind of accumulated operational history and total mileage matters enormously in this specific industry, since real world driving data at genuine scale is what actually improves autonomous driving systems over time, far more than any amount of closed course testing or simulation work ever could on its own.

The regulatory contrast with Tesla's competing robotaxi service operating in that exact same Bay Area market is worth examining directly and specifically here. According to a March statement from California Public Utilities Commission deputy executive director Pat Tsen, Tesla is not actually operating a genuine autonomous vehicle service under state regulatory definitions, since what the company technically holds there is a charter party carrier permit, functionally the same category of permit a standard limousine service would use. That specific permit classification notably does not require the same autonomous vehicle safety reporting or quarterly data transparency filings that both Waymo and rival Zoox are required to submit under their proper autonomous vehicle regulatory classification.

This approval also arrives against the backdrop of Waymo having faced its own real safety scrutiny along the way, including a documented recall issued after reported incidents of its vehicles illegally passing stopped school buses, a genuinely serious safety issue that any autonomous vehicle company operating at real public scale is going to encounter and has to properly address as the technology continues maturing under close regulatory and public attention. Regulatory approval at this scale is clearly not the same thing as a perfect flawless safety record, but it does at least reflect regulators having reviewed the required years of accumulated performance and incident data that Waymo's more stringent permit classification actually obligates the company to report and disclose transparently.

Expanding into eighteen counties simultaneously represents a meaningfully different kind of regulatory bet than the more typical city by city rollout approach most robotaxi companies have generally favored up to this point. Whether Waymo can actually operationally scale its service quickly and safely across that much newly approved geography at once, rather than just holding the formal legal permission to eventually do so on paper, is the practical question that will genuinely determine how meaningful this particular regulatory milestone actually turns out to be over the coming months