California Regulators Rubber Stamped Waymo Expansion While Robotaxi Crashes Tripled Across Los Angeles

Waymo robotaxi crashes in Los Angeles County jumped from 69 to 219 in a single year.

That tripling happened exactly as California regulators cleared Waymo to expand into even more neighborhoods.

The agencies that approved this expansion had the crash numbers sitting in front of them the whole time.

The Numbers Regulators Had Sitting On Their Desks

The Los Angeles Times reviewed California's Autonomous Vehicle Crash Dashboard and found Waymo crashes in LA County climbed from 69 in 2024 to 219 in 2025, more than tripling in a single year.

The count for 2026 already sits at 186 crashes, with months still left on the calendar.

Those 2026 crashes break down into 149 involving passenger vehicles, 11 involving heavy trucks, and two involving first responder vehicles.

Eighty two of those crashes happened while the Waymo vehicle was stopped. Sixty five happened while it was simply traveling straight ahead, not even turning.

Statewide, Waymo's reported crashes jumped from 304 in 2024 to more than 590 in 2025.

Regulators Signed Off Anyway

None of that tripling trend stopped the regulator Governor Gavin Newsom appointed from clearing the way for Waymo to keep expanding its service territory across Los Angeles and beyond.

John Reynolds, the Newsom appointee who runs the California Public Utilities Commission, spent nearly three years as managing counsel at Cruise, General Motors' self-driving car subsidiary, before Newsom put him in charge of regulating the very industry he used to represent.

Reynolds voted to approve expanded autonomous vehicle permits in August 2023, citing the vehicles' "potential to increase safety." Five months later, after a Cruise robotaxi dragged a pedestrian through a San Francisco street, Teamsters official Lindsay Dougherty said the incident was "what happens when you let big business regulate itself."

Kris Kusano, who runs Waymo's safety data research, says the company reviews every crash and close call, and insists its vehicles are already safer than the typical human driver in the cities where they operate.

That is the company vouching for itself, and Reynolds has let that vouching stand without demanding independent verification before approving expansion after expansion.

Even the Researchers Backing Driverless Cars Admit the Catch

Matthew Raifman, who studies autonomous vehicles at UC Berkeley's SafeTREC center, says AVs are "likely quite safer than human drivers for most driving conditions."

Raifman adds a condition regulators keep glossing over: that safety record only holds in the places and conditions where these vehicles are currently permitted to drive.

NHTSA itself warns that its tally doesn't account for how many vehicles are actually on the road or how many miles they log, which means some of this tripling simply reflects Waymo parking more cars on more streets.

Waymo's published safety comparisons are also built almost entirely on data from mild weather cities with no real snow or ice, conditions regulators have never required the company to prove itself in before clearing further expansion.

Waymo is not the only experiment running on California streets, either. Zoox, a separate robotaxi operator testing vehicles in Los Angeles and San Francisco, has already logged 18 crashes with NHTSA this year, a smaller count than Waymo's but proof that regulators are clearing multiple unproven fleets onto the same roads at the same time.

What Los Angeles Drivers Are Being Used to Test

Every Angeleno sharing the road with a Waymo is part of an experiment that Gavin Newsom's regulator cleared faster than the safety data justified.

The crash dashboard was public. The tripling was public. The expansion approvals came anyway.

Commuters in Los Angeles did not get a vote on whether their freeway became a proving ground, and the man who approved it used to collect a paycheck from the industry he now regulates.

The next crash report out of Los Angeles County will answer one question Sacramento has yet to ask out loud: whether a regulator with a résumé built inside the self-driving car industry was ever going to say no.

Sources:

• Autobody News staff, "Waymo Crashes in Los Angeles County Tripled in 2025 as Robotaxi Fleet Grew," Autobody News, October 2026.
• California Public Utilities Commission, "Autonomous Vehicle Crash Dashboard," California Public Utilities Commission, 2026.
• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "Standing General Order Crash Reporting," National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 2026.
• BizPacReview staff, "Newsom Crony's Power Play: Big Tech Insider Grabs CA Utility Throne Amid Bill Hikes," BizPacReview, February 20, 2026.