Denver Cab Companies Say Waymo Found A Loophole In Colorado's Taxi Law

Waymo obtained a Colorado luxury limousine permit, bypassing taxi regulations by fitting itself into an existing regulatory category never designed for autonomous fleets. The loophole exposes gaps in state law: no separate autonomous-vehicle statute, crash-reporting requirements that don't trigger until commercial service begins, and regulatory reliance on traffic-law compliance despite Waymo's documented incidents of traffic-rule violations. If you're building autonomous mobility anywhere else, Colorado just showed you the playbook: pick the regulatory category that fits your operations model, not your technology, and the permitting door opens. But watch what comes next—once Waymo starts collecting crash data under commercial service, the gaps regulators didn't know they had become evidence for the next state's tighter rules.