CPUC's AV Quarterly Reporting Framework: Waymo Emerges as Sole Deployment Operator as Cruise Exits, While Pilot Cohort Consolidates Around Five Firms

Headline Finding

The CPUC’s AV quarterly reporting registry — spanning December 2018 through mid-2026 — reveals a decisive structural shift in California’s commercial AV landscape: Waymo is now the only carrier operating under a Deployment permit (the highest-tier commercial authorisation), while Cruise has disappeared from the deployment rolls entirely after appearing in every reporting period from December 2022 through May 2024. In the Pilot tier, the active cohort has consolidated to five firms — Aurora, Tensor (formerly AutoX), Waymo, WeRide Corp, and Zoox — down from a peak of eight in mid-2023. This pattern of consolidation is itself a governance signal: the regulatory framework is functioning as a de facto market-structure instrument, with permit tiers sorting operators by demonstrated capability and survival.

Detail

The CPUC’s Autonomous Vehicle Programs quarterly reporting page documents every carrier that has submitted data under the Commission’s AV Passenger Service Pilot and Deployment programmes, from the first Pilot reports in February 2019 through the most recent Deployment and Pilot periods ending June 30, 2026.

In the Deployment programme — the tier requiring full commercial authorisation under Decisions 20-11-046 and 21-05-017 — the first permits were issued in February 2022. Both Waymo and Cruise reported in every Deployment period from March 2022 through May 2024. Cruise then ceased to appear: it is absent from all Deployment reporting periods from June 2024 onward, leaving Waymo as the sole Deployment carrier across all four quarters of 2025 and both quarters of 2026 reported to date (January–March 2026 and April–June 2026). Waymo has claimed confidentiality for certain portions of its reports in every single Deployment period; those claims are described as currently under review in each instance.

In the Pilot programme, the carrier population peaked at eight firms in the period June–August 2023 (Aurora, AutoX, Cruise, Deeproute, Ghost, Motional, Waymo, Zoox). By the period December 2023–February 2024, Ghost and Motional remained but Deeproute had dropped out. By June–August 2024, Cruise and Ghost had both exited, and by September–November 2024 the cohort had settled at five: Aurora, AutoX (subsequently rebranded Tensor), Waymo, WeRide Corp, and Zoox. That five-firm cohort has persisted through the most recent Pilot period (April–June 2026), with Nuro appearing in that final period in place of Aurora.

Decision 24-11-002, effective January 1, 2025, materially upgraded the reporting obligations. Pilot participants exceeding 300 passenger service trips in a quarter must now submit the expanded data reports previously required only of Deployment operators. Those reporting fewer than 300 trips continue under the lighter Pilot template, and those reporting zero trips need only submit an attestation. Critically, both Deployment and Pilot participants exceeding 300 quarterly trips must now report incident-level and fleet-level data on stoppage events — situations where AVs have stopped and are not moving when they should be. The reporting calendar was also rationalised: from January 1, 2025, reports follow calendar quarters with submission deadlines of May 1, August 1, November 1, and February 1, replacing the prior offset schedule.

Several data-quality corrections are on the record. Waymo’s Deployment reports for June–August 2022 and March–May 2022 were updated in January 2023 to correct undercounting of CPUC-jurisdictional trips. Waymo’s Pilot reports for three periods in 2021 were corrected in July 2022 for mileage figures that had inadvertently included employee-hailable and testing vehicles. Waymo’s incident reports for two 2023 Deployment periods were corrected in 2024 for overcounting in citation and collision categories. Zoox’s Driverless Pilot reports for two 2025 periods were corrected in February 2026 for errors in passenger count, trip fulfillment, and passenger-miles methodology.

Governance Implication

1. The legitimacy lever is under sustained pressure: Waymo’s blanket confidentiality claims — filed in every single Deployment reporting period from 2022 through 2026 and described as ‘currently under review’ throughout — mean that the public accountability function of the reporting regime is structurally compromised. A framework designed to generate transparent operational data is producing redacted outputs for the only commercial-scale operator, raising the question of whether the CPUC’s confidentiality review process is functioning as a genuine check or a standing accommodation.

2. Cruise’s exit from the Deployment programme is the most consequential market-structure event in the registry: the two-operator commercial tier has collapsed to one, concentrating spatial-allocation and fiscal leverage entirely in Waymo’s hands. Cities and the CPUC now negotiate curb access, per-trip fees, and service-area conditions with a single counterparty — a structural imbalance that weakens the regulator’s bargaining position on every value lever.

3. Decision 24-11-002’s trip-threshold mechanism (300 trips per quarter triggers Deployment-equivalent reporting, including stoppage-event data) is a meaningful instrument innovation — it creates a performance-based escalator that ties reporting burden to operational scale rather than permit tier alone. This is a model for adaptive accountability architecture that other state regulators could adopt.

4. The pattern of repeated data corrections — across Waymo (mileage, incidents, trip counts) and Zoox (passenger counts, trip fulfillment, passenger-miles) — signals that the underlying data collection and reporting methodology is not yet mature. For a regime whose legitimacy depends on verified operational data, recurring post-hoc corrections erode the evidentiary value of the reports and complicate any fiscal or safety-based regulatory action that relies on them.

5. The technology/deployment clock has moved well ahead of the governance clock: the Pilot cohort has been operating continuously since 2019, the Deployment tier since 2022, and the reporting framework is still resolving confidentiality claims and correcting historical data through 2026. The governance apparatus — designed to generate the evidence base for regulatory decisions — is running in catch-up mode relative to the operational reality it is meant to oversee.

Sources

https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/regulatory-services/licensing/transportation-licensing-and-analysis-branch/autonomous-vehicle-programs/quarterly-reporting https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M557/K171/557171609.PDF https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cpuc-website/divisions/consumer-protection-and-enforcement-division/documents/transportation/av/d2411002.pdf