California Just Legalized Waymo in Some of the Nation’s Most Populous Areas

On Friday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles published a document outlining a list of newly approved areas of coverage for Alphabet, Inc.’s robotaxi service Waymo, and the implications could be massive.

The areas where “testing and deployment” of Waymo driverless taxis will now be legally tolerated by the state include two massive, apparently continuous swaths of geography full of interconnected urban population centers, suburbs, exurbs, and the rural land in between them. This includes chunks of (in alphabetical order) Alameda, Contra Costa, Los Angeles, Marin, Napa, Orange, Riverside, Sacramento, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, Sonoma, Ventura, and Yolo Counties.

The new map includes much of California wine country, and fills in the remainder of the Bay Area. It also adds a great deal of coverage to densely populated parts of southern California. Most of Orange and San Diego Counties are now state-approved Waymo zones, for instance, and each of those accounts for millions of residents. If Waymo follows this approval with a rollout of its service in all these areas, it means commuters can travel for hours in Waymo vehicles, sightseers can take long day trips. Exurban residents can take Waymo rides to Los Angeles International Airport.

Famous expanses of California highways—and freeways—could potentially open up to driverless taxi traffic. You could take the scenic route up Pacific Coast Highway from San Diego to Malibu, or driverlessly reenact the first episode of The O.C. by hailing a ride from Chino to Newport Beach.

Of course, the price of doing any of these things could be breathtaking. At the average of $11.22 per kilometer cited by one Waymo price analysis from June, it would cost, by my count, $2,636 to travel from San Diego to Malibu in a Waymo if the current pricing pattern holds—though a new pricing pattern would probably emerge for longer rides. A similar ride would cost about $200 in a human-piloted Lyft or Uber, according to the fare estimator site Rideguru.

Waymo says it has no specific plan for rolling out its service in most of these newly permitted areas, though it does have its eyes on one of these areas. “We appreciate the DMV’s approval of our expanded fully autonomous operations,” a Waymo representative told CBS News, who claimed the company’s next expansion “will be San Diego, where we’ll welcome our first riders in mid-2026.”