Waymo gets California DMV approval to begin testing without humans behind the wheel

The company will begin going completely driverless around its Silicon Valley headquarters.

Waymo has announced plans to begin testing without human safety drivers.

The company is the first to get a California Department of Motor Vehicles permit for completely driverless operation on public roads.

"Fully driverless testing is the latest step in the path Waymo has been on since 2009, when we first began working on self-driving technology at Google," the company wrote in a blog post. "Since then we've driven over ten million autonomous miles on public roads across 25 cities."

Waymo's fully driverless test cars will initially operate in a relatively small zone around the company's Mountain View headquarters in Silicon Valley. The program will eventually expand to include other territories.

The permit allows day and night testing on city streets, rural roads and highways with posted speed limits of up to 65 mph. Cars will be allowed to operate in light rain and fog, both conditions that Waymo says it can handle.

Notably, if the driverless taxis do run into trouble they are programmed to come to a safe stop and wait until a remote Waymo fleet manager can help resolve the issue.

The company is already giving rides to the public in Arizona but the driverless California pilot will only host its own employees as passengers at first.