Waymo's sixth-generation Ojai van began carrying Los Angeles riders on Sunday, Aug. 23, offering a roomier robotaxi with Google's Gemini AI built in.

Los Angeles is among the first cities to receive the new vehicle, alongside San Francisco and Phoenix, LAmag reported Thursday, Aug. 27. The Ojai features automatic sliding doors, three large in-car screens, accessibility upgrades and 13 high-fidelity cameras powered by a custom chip delivering more than 1,000 TOPS (trillions of operations per second), according to TechCrunch.

Riders can talk to Gemini to adjust the air conditioning, change songs, control cabin lights or ask questions about the city they're passing through, Waymo said on X on Aug. 21.

The company says the Ojai is cheaper to build, operate and maintain than its predecessor. Its self-driving system draws on data from 20 million autonomous trips across 11 cities.

Martha Stewart fronted the launch promotion, calling the van her "home away from home."

Expansion meets pushback

The debut arrives two weeks after the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved Waymo to operate in 18 additional counties, including Orange, Riverside and Napa. That decision more than triples the company's service area around Los Angeles and San Francisco, according to LAmag.

Waymo covers about 120 square miles in LA, stretching from Santa Monica to Echo Park, according to a USC survey published Aug. 19 in the Daily Trojan. That same survey of 2,000 LA County residents found fewer than 5% had ridden a Waymo, compared with nearly 28% who had used Uber or Lyft.

Coverage is uneven.

"I live in Culver City, where I see them all the time," Kyla Thomas, a research scientist at USC's Center for Economic and Social Research, told the Daily Trojan on Aug. 19. "Then there are other parts of L.A. County where people can't even get a Waymo to come to their neighborhood yet."

Santa Monica charging fight continues

Not everyone is cheering the growth. Residents near Waymo's Broadway charging lots in Santa Monica have complained for more than a year about overnight noise and bright lights. A lower-court injunction issued July 27 barred overnight charging between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.

A state appeals court temporarily blocked that injunction on Friday, Aug. 14, restoring Waymo's 24-hour access while it considers the company's appeal, the Santa Monica Daily Press reported.

The City of Santa Monica said in an Aug. 14 statement that the order does not reverse the trial court's findings and that residents have waited more than a year for quiet nights. The court ordered Santa Monica to file its opposition by Monday, Aug. 24. A final ruling on the appeal has not been announced.

San Diego, Las Vegas and Denver are next in line for the Ojai rollout, though Waymo has not disclosed a timeline.