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Waymo is taking its driverless cars to Tokyo, and it’s bringing local partners along for the ride. The Alphabet subsidiary announced a partnership with Japanese ride-hailing platform GO Inc. and major taxi operator Nihon Kotsu to launch the country’s first fully autonomous commercial robotaxi service, targeting initial trips in 2027.
The plan calls for a small initial fleet of Jaguar I-PACE electric vehicles running Waymo’s fifth-generation Driver technology, scaling up to roughly 100 vehicles across key Tokyo neighborhoods. No safety drivers. No human behind the wheel. Just passengers and algorithms navigating one of the world’s most complex urban driving environments.
How the partnership works
Each partner brings a distinct piece to the puzzle. Waymo contributes its autonomous driving stack, the same technology already ferrying passengers around parts of San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles. GO handles app integration and dispatch, giving Waymo instant access to an established user base in Japan’s ride-hailing market. Nihon Kotsu, one of Tokyo’s largest and oldest taxi companies, manages operational logistics on the ground.
Riders will be able to hail a driverless Jaguar through either the GO app or Waymo’s own mobile application. The vehicles will operate at Level 4 autonomy, meaning they can handle all driving tasks within defined geographic and environmental conditions without any human intervention.
The partnership didn’t materialize overnight. Waymo and its Japanese collaborators signed a cooperation agreement back in 2024, which led to testing across seven Tokyo wards starting in 2025. Those tests apparently went well enough to greenlight the commercial rollout, pending final regulatory approvals from Japan’s transport authorities.
Why Tokyo, and why now
Japan has a demographic problem that makes autonomous vehicles less of a novelty and more of a necessity. The country’s population is aging rapidly, and the transportation sector is feeling the squeeze. There simply aren’t enough taxi and bus drivers to meet demand, particularly in urban centers where an aging population increasingly relies on ride services.
The Japanese government has leaned into autonomous vehicles as part of the solution. The country has set a target of deploying 10,000 autonomous vehicles by fiscal 2030, a policy goal designed to address both the labor shortage and road safety concerns.
For Waymo, the expansion also represents something strategically important: proof that its technology can travel. The Tokyo project marks Waymo’s first international commercial endeavor, with additional international testing or launches planned for cities such as London and Munich. Demonstrating that the same core system can adapt to left-hand traffic, Japanese road signs, and entirely different driving norms is a fundamentally harder challenge, and a far more compelling pitch to future international partners.
Market reaction and competitive landscape
Investors noticed. Shares of GO rose as much as 9.7% following the announcement, a signal that the market sees real commercial potential in the venture rather than treating it as another autonomous vehicle press release destined to age poorly.
Waymo’s approach of partnering with established local operators rather than trying to build its own fleet and dispatch infrastructure from scratch is worth noting. By teaming with Nihon Kotsu, a company that has been running taxis in Tokyo since 1928, Waymo essentially gets a local guide through the regulatory maze.
The roughly 100-vehicle fleet planned for the initial rollout is modest by the standards of Waymo’s US operations, where the company has registered tens of millions of fully autonomous trips across more than 15 cities and claims a safety record more than 15 times better than that of human drivers.
The 2027 timeline is contingent on regulatory sign-off, which is never a formality in Japan. But given the government’s stated goals and the two years of testing already completed in Tokyo, the path to approval looks more straightforward than it might in countries where autonomous vehicle policy is still being debated from scratch.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
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