AINEWS
California's Public Utilities Commission has yet to sign off on Waymo's new Chinese made robotaxi, called the Ojai, so every California ride in one is free while the older fleet still charges.
A rider in Los Angeles taps the Waymo app. A pale blue car Waymo calls the Ojai pulls up. The fare reads $0.00.
That missing fare is the visible footprint of a structural feature, not a Waymo promotion. The Ojai began carrying California riders in June, per Ars Technica, but a state regulatory gate is still holding up paid service for the vehicle. Every trip is free for now, and Ars Technica projects the gratis window could run "until the end of September and perhaps beyond."
California requires two agencies to sign off on a driverless taxi before it can charge a passenger. The Department of Motor Vehicles approves the vehicle and the territory it can drive in; the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approves the right to operate as a passenger carrier. Waymo, Alphabet's driverless taxi unit, has the DMV half. It does not yet have the CPUC half for the Ojai.
The Ojai is a pale blue vehicle that Ars Technica describes as Chinese-manufactured, an electric car Waymo added to its fleet this spring. It is a different platform from the Jaguar I-Pace cars Waymo has run in California for years, and those older vehicles still have CPUC authority to charge fares. Only the new vehicle is stuck in the gratis window.
Waymo asked for that authority on January 28, 2026, when it filed CPUC Advice Letter 0004. The filing is bigger than the Ojai alone. It also asks the CPUC to let Waymo expand its Northern California footprint from Sea Ranch and Sacramento south through Berkeley, Oakland, and San Jose, and to push its Southern California territory past Los Angeles into Thousand Oaks and Santa Clarita, then down to the Tijuana border past San Diego.
The CPUC's Consumer Protection and Enforcement Division received protests and asked Waymo for a response. Waymo replied on February 24, defending the filing. As of the CPUC's most recent update on May 29, 2026, Advice Letter 0004 was still listed as open on the agency's advice-letter status page.
That delay is what makes the free rides possible. The dual-approval structure is a deliberate California choice, and the advice-letter process is a public comment window built into it. Ars Technica calls the resulting dynamic a "regulatory quirk": a consumer windfall as a side effect of a state decision to require two separate sign-offs before a robotaxi can charge for a ride, rather than a Waymo discount.
The system has costs. Lighter-touch states let driverless taxi companies launch with one approval rather than two, and California's pace is part of why some deployments move faster elsewhere. The free-ride window makes that tradeoff unusually visible, because the delay now has a consumer benefit stapled to it.
For now, the open question is what the CPUC does next. The September window is Ars Technica's projection, not a CPUC-set deadline. If the agency approves Advice Letter 0004 first, the free window closes and Waymo could start collecting fares in the new territory. If the review extends, so does the free window, and a wider swath of California keeps getting a no-cost introduction to the new vehicle and the expanded service area Waymo has been asking for since January.
The CPUC's advice-letter status page will be the next public tell. The filing has been open since late January; the next update will say whether the free rides are days from ending or still weeks away.