Quick Take
Waymo, a company operating self-driving cars, recently expanded its operations into more of the Bay Area, including an area of Lexington Hills that lies mostly in Santa Clara County but very slightly reaches into Santa Cruz County. However, don’t expect to see Waymos on local roads in the near future.
Last week, the California Department of Motor Vehicles website showed that a small part of Santa Cruz County had been approved for driverless testing of Waymo vehicles, the self-driving cars operated by the Mountain View-based company.
Waymo has been offering driverless taxi rides to the public since 2020, and already operates autonomous vehicles in the Los Angeles area, San Francisco and other parts of the Bay Area into San Jose.
With the expansion, the approved areas in Northern California reach north past Santa Rosa and east to the Sacramento area. In Southern California, the approved areas reach Santa Clarita and Thousand Oaks as well as all the way past San Diego to the Mexico border. The approved part of Santa Cruz County is tiny, with just a sliver of land in the Lexington Hills area bordering Santa Clara County included in the company’s operational expansion.
DMV spokesperson Jonathan Groveman told Lookout on Wednesday that Waymo – owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company – has indicated that it does not plan to begin commercial operations in the new area before May 1, 2026, and added that the company also needs additional approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to implement commercial passenger service in the new areas.
So, does that mean that Santa Cruzans could be seeing driverless cars pulling up next to them at stoplights on local roads in the near future? Not quite yet. Waymo spokesperson Ethan Teicher told Lookout via email that Santa Cruz will not be getting the self-driving taxis with this expansion.
“We’re working to serve more Californians in the future. To serve Santa Cruz, we would need to apply for permits from both the DMV and CPUC,” he wrote.
California state law also requires autonomous vehicle manufacturers to provide local authorities with a written notification that includes the list of all public roads in the jurisdiction included for operations, the date that testing will begin and the days and times that testing will be conducted on public roads, the number of vehicles and point of contact for the manufacturer.
Santa Cruz County Community Development and Infrastructure spokesperson Tiffany Martinez said the department has not received any official notice about operations coming to the county. California Highway Patrol spokesperson Israel Murillo said he hadn’t, either.
“Since we do have regulatory powers over the roadways, we would have to be notified,” said Martinez. “But it sounds like we don’t have local regulatory jurisdiction over something like that, and it really goes through the state.”
Should Waymo’s self-driving vehicles eventually find their way onto Santa Cruz County roads, the DMV would be the body approving the use and rolling out the service. Martinez added that, given how novel the company and its service is, local governments are learning the process one step at a time.
“It will be interesting to me to figure out what the process was for [other jurisdictions], and whether or not they felt any noticeable impacts from them,” she said.
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