Tesla has been granted a permit to operate a taxi service in California, a spokesperson for the California Public Utilities Commission, a state regulator, said Tuesday. It marks the first step towards Tesla's and CEO Elon Musk's vision of operating a driverless taxi service in the state. One day, Musk has said, Tesla owners should be able to rent out their cars as sort of self-driving Ubers while they're not using them. He has said current owners should be able to operate their Models 3 and Y autonomously in the state later this year--a plan that faces both technological and regulatory hurdles. But despite the permit, Tesla's driverless taxi future still seems far off in California, which has the perfect climate for self-driving cars but some of the strictest regulatory requirements in the US for testing and operating them.

Waymo is launching its driverless taxi service in Los Angeles tomorrow after a stream of crashes. Angelenos will be able to sign up for Waymo's waitlist to be the first to ride in the fully autonomous vehicles after years of testing. 'Once an unimaginable future, autonomous driving is now a real-world way of getting around for tens of thousands of people each week,' said Waymo co-CEO, Tekedra Mawakana. 'After achieving key milestones in each city, we're so excited to bring the safety, comfort and delight of our Waymo One service to more people in Los Angeles and Austin this year.' Although Waymo is rolling out its taxi service in LA, it is still conducting fully autonomous testing in Austin, Texas and is expected to become available to public riders later this year.

Los Angeles commuters: Don't be alarmed, but driverless taxis may soon become a more common site on local streets. On March 1, state regulators gave Waymo, the self-driving taxi company owned by Google's parent, Alphabet, the green light to expand its robotaxi service to Los Angeles County, clearing the way for the company's expansion into one of the biggest markets in the country. While local transportation agencies deal with day-to-day traffic operations in their respective jurisdictions, the California Public Utilities Commission oversees the regulation of driverless vehicles across the state, superseding local governments. Waymo has not disclosed a timeline for when its service will become widely available, but a handful of Waymo vehicles are already roaming about the county, including around the USC campus, as part of its ongoing testing and promotion program. Under its new approval agreement, Waymo's driverless fleet can operate in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Inglewood, East Los Angeles, Compton and many more locales.

Cruise, the self-driving arm of General Motors, said late today it had halted its robotaxi service across the US and would no longer operate its vehicles without safety drivers behind the wheel. That decision to hit the brakes comes two days after California regulators suspended the driverless car company's permit in San Francisco, alleging Cruise had failed to disclose details of an early October collision that sent a woman to the hospital with serious injuries. Cruise's decision shuts down its driverless taxi services offered in Austin and Phoenix, which had continued to operate even after the California suspension. Its fleets in Dallas, Houston, and Miami, where Cruise has been preparing for a commercial launches, will no longer hit the road without humans in the drivers' seats. The company says its orange-and-white Chevrolet Bolts will still be steered by software, but safety drivers will always be behind the wheel to take over if the technology goes wrong.

GM's autonomous driving division, Cruise, has begun its paid driverless taxi service in San Francisco and officially took its first fares last night. Cruise has been operating a free driverless taxi service in the area since earlier this year (and got pulled over once), but last night it began charging for this service. Both Cruise and its rival Waymo, a division of Google's parent company Alphabet, have been hoping for some time to start charging for autonomous taxi rides in California. Waymo got permission in February but has not yet started charging fares. Cruise's program is still quite limited, only covering about a third of San Francisco with 30 cars.

GM's Cruise has started charging passengers for fully driverless rides in San Francisco. The company secured a driverless deployment permit from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) earlier this month, making it the first in the industry to do so. That allows Cruise to charge for rides with no safety driver behind the wheel, though its vehicles are limited to select streets in the city. In addition, the company's paid passenger service can only operate from 10PM to 6AM, and its cars can only drive at a max speed of 30 mph. Another limitation is that its driverless vehicles aren't allowed on highways and can't operate during times of heavy fog and rain.

California regulators on Thursday gave a robotic taxi service the green light to begin charging passengers for driverless rides in San Francisco, a first in a state where dozens of companies have been trying to train vehicles to steer themselves on increasingly congested roads. The California Public Utilities Commission unanimously granted Cruise, a company controlled by automaker General Motors, approval to launch its driverless ride-hailing service. The regulators issued the permit despite safety concerns arising from Cruise's inability to pick up and drop off passengers at the curb in its autonomous taxis, requiring the vehicles to double park in traffic lanes. The ride-hailing service initially will consist of just 30 electric vehicles confined to transporting passengers in less congested parts of San Francisco from 10pm to 6am. Those restrictions are designed to minimize chances of the robotic taxis causing property damage, injuries or death if something goes awry.

Two years after the Alphabet-owned Waymo launched a limited self-driving taxi service in the Metro Phoenix, Arizona, area (and two years after people started attacking the autonomous cars), the company has kicked off a fully driverless car service in and around Phoenix. Whereas in 2018 passengers would be assuaged by the site of a human in the driver seat, ready to take over in case of an emergency, the newly retooled robot taxi service lacks those human attendants. As Ars Technica notes, this is two years behind schedule for the autonomous mobility company, who initially promised a driverless taxi experience at the end of 2018. Efficacy of self-driving car claims aside, that was the same year that Uber had to suspend its own self-driving car testing in Arizona after one of their test cars (with attendant at the wheel) hit and killed a pedestrian. What did launch in 2018 was the aforementioned Waymo One service, which was only available to research testers previously enrolled with Waymo. So the technology wasn't there yet, but it appears Waymo is more confident this time around.

While of course no one has a foolproof crystal ball, there's a lot of hype and excitement/optimism for big-idea tech like autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence, and augmented and virtual reality to make big strides this year. We may even begin to see these technologies substantially affect our daily lives. The beginning of 2018 rode in on a wave of hype for autonomous vehicles, with Alphabet's Waymo well on its way to launching a driverless taxi service in Phoenix, AZ, and Uber busily logging millions of test miles with its own fleet of self-driving vehicles. But as the year played out with several autonomous vehicle accidents and fatalities making the news, many of the big players in driverless car development pressed pause for a bit while they took time to evaluate their algorithms, systems and hardware. While this has led to some delays in vehicle or service launches, 2019 nevertheless looks poised to see a great deal of development in driverless technology, as well as some on-the-road achievements.

Waymo just became the first company allowed to test fully self-driving cars--the kind with no carbon-based beings behind the wheel--in the state of California. The outfit that started life as Google's self-driving car project has been running driver-free cars in Arizona for almost a year, where the state testing rules are far more lax than in California, and where it plans to launch a commercial robo-taxi service by the end of the year. But securing the right to do the same in its home state is still a milestone, and evidence it can win over even comparatively wary regulators to the way of the robot. To begin, the truly driverless cars will test only at up to 65 mph in the southern Bay Area, in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, and Palo Alto. The company said it will inform local governments before expanding its tests any further.