Waymo submitted an application to test autonomous cars without safety drivers in California; source says tests will start near its Mountain View headquarters
Carolyn Said / San Francisco Chronicle :
Context & Ripple Effects
This application is the formal opening move in Waymo's California campaign: six months earlier, sources reported it was preparing a commercial ride-sharing service with no safety drivers, and the state had no driverless-testing category on its books yet. By filing to test without safety drivers near its Mountain View headquarters, Waymo forced California's DMV to define one.
The payoff came within the year, when the DMV issued Waymo the first permit for driverless testing on public roads — the start of a staged ladder that later produced a non-commercial passenger pilot in 2019, fully driverless rides in San Francisco by 2022, and approved freeway testing by 2024.
First-order effects
- If granted, Waymo can run its Silicon Valley test fleet with empty driver seats for the first time in California, converting Mountain View-area roads into its primary validation ground outside Arizona.
- California's DMV becomes the decisive gatekeeper: its response determines whether Waymo's commercial ambitions, already reported for late 2017, have a home-state regulatory path.
Second-order effects
- The permit structure that follows forces other AV operators to sequence their own applications through the same testing-to-driverless-to-passenger ladder rather than negotiating bespoke deals.
- Removing the in-car safety driver shifts Waymo's cost and staffing burden to remote operations — a dependency visible years later in paid door-closing and towing crews summoned via the Honk app.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, 'driverless' becomes a permitted operational tier rather than a binary claim, with regulators expanding scope incrementally — surface streets, passengers, then freeways — while humans remain in the loop as remote supervisors.
- The state-by-state permitting model entrenches early movers like Waymo, since each accumulated permit tier doubles as a moat competitors must climb themselves.
The trend: Autonomous vehicle deployment is advancing through incremental state permits — testing, driverless, passenger service, freeways — with California's DMV setting the cadence for the industry's staged removal of the human driver.