Robotaxis are now allowed in many new places

“California regulators have approved a major expansion of Waymo’s driverless taxi service. The company is now authorized to offer paid robotaxi rides across parts of 18 counties, including new areas around Sacramento, San Diego, Orange County, Napa, and the East Bay of San Francisco,” reports The Doomslayer.

Fox8 reports:

“California has given autonomous ride-hailing one of its biggest regulatory green lights yet, and the immediate winner may be consumers rather than the companies building the cars.

On August 14, the California Public Utilities Commission approved Waymo’s updated passenger safety plan, clearing the company to expand paid driverless service across a much larger area in Northern and Southern California. The footprint reaches 18 counties, including new markets around Sacramento and San Diego, while expanding territory around San Francisco and Los Angeles.

That does not mean a Waymo will appear on every approved street tomorrow. The company says expansion will be gradual. But the decision moves robotaxis from city-sized experiments toward a regional transportation network.”

This February, Waymo provided 400,000 robotaxi rides per week, up from 200,000 a year earlier.

Self-driving cars are generally safer than human-driven cars. Self-driving cars could reduce automobile fatalities by over 90%.

This year, the National Highway Traffic Safety ‌Administration “approved a Robotaxi design without human controls such as a steering wheel or pedals. The newly approved vehicle, developed by Zoox, Amazon’s robotaxi subsidiary, uses the space normally occupied by a driver to create a roomy carriage-like cabin for passengers,” reported The Doomslayer.

Robotaxi use more than doubled in California in 2025, rising from 3.8 million kilometers per month at the end of 2024 to 9.4 million in December 2025.

In 2024, Waymo opened “up its robotaxi service to anyone who” wanted “to ride in San Francisco. Previously, customers interested in taking a ride in one of the company’s driverless cars needed to sign up for a waitlist, which could take weeks or months to open up,” reported The Verge:

Waymo began its commercial test service in the city in August 2021 with a rollout to “trusted testers” — preapproved riders, some of whom were asked to sign nondisclosure agreements. In March 2022, Waymo began offering driverless rides for its staff. Since then its been giving rides to regular people who sign up for its waitlist, which the company says approximately 300,000 people have done since it first launched.

Now, Waymo’s driverless ridehail service will be available to anyone who downloads the app and requests a ride. This is similar to how Waymo operates its robotaxi service in Phoenix, which has been open to the public without a waitlist since 2020.….Opening up the service to more people who want to pay money to ride in its driverless vehicles is a crucial step toward the normalization of autonomous vehicles.