Waymo to launch fully autonomous ride-hailing in Tokyo in 2027 with Nihon Kotsu and GO
SuzKP · x · 2026-09-15
Waymo has signed agreements with Nihon Kotsu and GO to prepare a commercial launch of fully driverless ride-hailing in Tokyo in 2027.
- Scale: Waymo now serves 500k+ weekly fully autonomous trips across 15 US cities, demonstrated to be over 15x safer than human drivers.
- Tokyo prep: Vehicles have been testing since 2025 under Nihon Kotsu supervision, navigating narrow streets and dense crowds; the service pairs Waymo's tech with GO's mobility platform and Nihon Kotsu's century of taxi operations, running 24/7.
- Why Japan: aging population and looming labor shortages make autonomous taxis a complement to Tokyo's transit network.
Related event: Waymo to Launch Robotaxis in Tokyo by 2027(2 posts)→
More from Embodied
- New probe tests 10 vision foundation models on persistent spatial state across 4 levels — liuziwei7 · 2026-11-02
- Wearing Whoop and Apple Watch on a single dual-slot band — tinyfool · 2026-11-02
- REA: async brain-cerebellum runtime for robots where policies never wait on the LLM — Pengfei Zhou · 2026-11-02
- Robot Combat Sports Coming to Japan with a Permanent Arena in Tokyo — cixliv · 2026-11-02
- REK robot fighting in the cage: humanoid bot in boxing gloves draws a crowd — broodsugar · 2026-11-02
- iPhone Duo: a folding iPhone mod impresses, but its hinge raises crackgate concerns — rudrank · 2026-11-02