Waymo has finally put a year on its first commercial market outside the United States — and it belongs to a taxi company founded almost a century before the Waymo Driver existed.
On September 15, Waymo, Tokyo taxi operator Nihon Kotsu and the ride-hailing platform GO announced they had agreed to prepare for the commercial launch of a fully driverless ride-hailing service in Tokyo in 2027. It would be Japan's first commercial robotaxi service, and Waymo's first commercial move into Asia. The fleet will start small and grow to roughly 100 Jaguar I-Pace vehicles across key Tokyo neighborhoods, bookable through both the GO app and Waymo's own.
What makes the announcement notable is not the date. It is the structure. In San Francisco, Phoenix and Los Angeles, Waymo owns the stack end to end. In Tokyo, it is renting a seat inside someone else's business.
Who does what
Japanese transport law requires a licensed taxi operator to carry paying passengers, and the partnership is shaped around that constraint. Waymo supplies the autonomous driving system, the vehicles, the operating platform and fleet management software. Nihon Kotsu — Tokyo's largest taxi company, with a history stretching back nearly 100 years — handles depot operations and on-site operations management, and would carry legal responsibility for an accident during driverless operation. GO runs the dispatch app, the overall service design, and coordination with the rest of Tokyo's taxi industry, according to reporting from Automotive World and Japanese trade outlet TRAICY.
That last piece matters more than it sounds. Tokyo's taxi sector is politically organized and protective, and GO is the incumbent platform inside it. Waymo is not arriving as a disruptor; it is arriving as a supplier to one.
"Users will be able to hail both conventional taxis and autonomous trips with Waymo directly through the 'GO' taxi app," said Hiroshi Nakajima, president of GO, in the companies' joint announcement. "To deliver this new mobility experience, we are launching as a full commercial service." It is the first time Waymo has committed to distributing rides through a partner's app outside the US — a notable reversal given that its domestic tie-up with Uber is currently winding down in favor of going it alone.
The groundwork is nearly two years deep. Waymo announced the Tokyo road trip in December 2024, calling it its first international one, and its first all-electric Jaguar I-PACEs landed in early 2025. Nihon Kotsu drivers manually mapped seven central wards — Minato, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Chiyoda, Chūō, Shinagawa and Kōtō — before the program graduated to supervised autonomous testing, which has continued through the past year. Throughout, the Waymo Driver has been adapting to what Waymo's own 2024 post called "left-hand traffic and new driving nuances associated with operating in one of the world's most densely populated urban environments."
"Over the past year, our professionally trained drivers have spared no effort in helping the 'Waymo Driver' adapt to Tokyo's roads," said Yasuharu Wakabayashi, president of Nihon Kotsu. He framed the project as a hedge against demographics: a way to address future driver shortages "while coexisting with human-driven taxis."
Why this matters
The Tokyo deal is the clearest evidence yet that autonomy has an export problem — and that Waymo now knows it.
Waymo's US position is genuinely dominant. Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana noted that the company delivers "over half a million trips each week while demonstrated to be over 15 times safer than human drivers," across 15 cities. None of that transfers automatically. A driving model trained on right-hand-drive American arterials has to relearn left-side traffic, unmarked residential lanes barely wider than a car, and pedestrian density that has no US analogue. Then it has to clear a separate legal system: Japan lifted its ban on Level 4 driving in an April 2023 amendment to the Road Traffic Act, but the resulting permit regime requires sign-off from the relevant local public safety commission, plus licensing under the Road Transportation Act. The companies have been explicit that the launch date is contingent on that approval and that they are still working with government ministries to secure permits and licenses.
Compare the playbooks. In Munich, targeted for late 2027, Waymo is building through its own local subsidiary. In London, it has yet to secure a fully driverless permit and will launch with safety drivers aboard. In Tokyo, it embedded itself in a century-old operator instead. The implicit judgment is that in Japan, regulatory and cultural trust — not perception or planning — is the binding constraint, and that trust is cheaper to borrow than to build.
The competitive clock makes the caution costly. While Waymo spent two years mapping seven wards, Chinese operators went abroad fast and asset-light: Baidu's Apollo Go moved toward fully unmanned service in Dubai with Uber and is targeting 1,000 vehicles there by 2028; WeRide has been scaling Middle East deployments into the hundreds. Tokyo itself is no longer uncontested either — Nissan ran a Yokohama pilot with five Serena vans aiming at its own 2027 launch, Nuro began Tokyo testing in 2026, and Uber has already named a Tokyo robotaxi operator of its own. A 100-vehicle fleet in 2027 is a beachhead, not a market position.
What to watch
Three things. First, the permit: the public safety commission filing is the real gating event, and neither Waymo nor its partners have committed to a month, only a year. Second, whether supervised testing graduates to genuinely empty vehicles on Tokyo streets before the commercial launch — Waymo has never disclosed when supervised autonomous driving began there, and rider-free operation is the milestone that makes 2027 credible. Third, whether the Nihon Kotsu model becomes the template. If Tokyo works, expect Waymo to stop trying to be a foreign operator in every market and start being a supplier in most of them. That would be a smaller business per city — and a much faster map.
“Users will be able to hail both conventional taxis and autonomous trips with Waymo directly through the "GO" taxi app. To deliver this new mobility experience, we are launching as a full commercial service.”— Hiroshi Nakajima, President, GO