Waymo said it will begin gradually ramping up fully autonomous operations in San Diego in the coming weeks, starting with rides for its own employees before opening the service to the public later this year. The move turns months of testing into a real rollout, even as the company still waits for permission to charge fares.
The first trips will be limited to Waymo employees, the company said, and San Diego would become the 11th city where people can open an app and hail a fully autonomous Waymo vehicle at any hour of the day once the service officially launches. Waymo said it had about a dozen vehicles when it entered San Diego and is still building out its fleet as it collects information from Pacific Beach, Normal Heights, Point Loma, Southcrest and neighborhoods in between.
That matters now because the launch is no longer an abstract promise. San Diegans have already been seeing white or light blue vehicles with large cameras and sensors on city streets, often with an employee behind the wheel during testing. The company says those vehicles are authorized for fully autonomous rides in San Diego, and it wants to move from gathering data to taking passengers in a city that has become part of a wider contest over who gets to control the pace of robotaxi expansion.
For Mikaiil Hussein, who said the United Taxi Workers of San Diego represents hundreds of drivers, the concern is immediate and personal. He said drivers will struggle and lose a lot of jobs, and argued that a machine that does not get tired cannot be fair competition. Sean Elo-Rivera pushed a resolution on autonomous vehicles in January that passed and called for more local say over where testing happens, saying San Diego is not a testing lab and San Diegans are not lab rats.
The unresolved piece is the one that will decide whether this becomes a free ride demo or a commercial service: the California Public Utilities Commission still has to approve Waymo's request to charge fares. Waymo says that step would allow it to extend its commercial service and bring what it calls safety and mobility benefits to San Diegans, but until that decision arrives, the city is headed for a rollout that is real, limited and watched closely by drivers who fear the next phase is already moving faster than they can respond.
