Waymo Is Coming for Tokyo: Fully Driverless Taxis to Hit Japan's Capital in 2027

Tokyo's taxi drivers just got a timeline. On Tuesday, Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana stood before Japanese reporters and made the promise the country's transportation industry has been bracing for: unmanned, fully autonomous taxis on Tokyo's public streets — available to any rider with a phone — starting in 2027.

The announcement, made at a joint press conference in Tokyo, pairs Alphabet's self-driving unit with two heavyweights of Japanese mobility: GO, the country's leading taxi-hailing app, and Nihon Kotsu, Tokyo's largest taxi operator. If the plan survives regulators and the final rounds of testing, Japan's capital will host the country's first fully driverless commercial taxi service — and Waymo's first paying customers outside the United States.

A Waymo Jaguar I-PACE robotaxi in San Francisco — the same vehicle type Waymo used during its Tokyo testing phase. (Photo: 9yz / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

The deal, in one paragraph

Waymo, GO, and Nihon Kotsu said Tuesday they aim to launch Japan's first fully autonomous commercial taxi service in Tokyo in 2027. The rollout would start with a small fleet and expand to roughly 100 vehicles across key Tokyo neighborhoods, according to the joint announcement reported by Reuters. Rides would be bookable through both the GO and Waymo apps. The launch is explicitly conditional: regulatory approvals have to land, and the companies are still validating Waymo's technology and their joint operating model on Tokyo streets.

That conditional language matters, and it showed up everywhere in Tuesday's statements. But the headline commitment was unmistakable, and Mawakana delivered it herself to reporters.

"From day one, this will be an unmanned service"

"From day one, this will be an unmanned service for the public. We'll grow our fleet responsibly over time, steadily operating until anyone in Tokyo can download an app and take a ride." — Tekedra Mawakana, Waymo co-CEO, at the joint Tokyo press conference, September 15, 2026

This is the detail that separates the announcement from a conventional pilot. Robotaxi programs typically creep into new cities in stages: safety drivers, then empty cars with remote backup, then a trickle of public riders. Waymo is saying Tokyo skips the creep. When the service launches, the cars carry paying riders with nobody behind the wheel — full commercial operation, not a technology demo.

The confidence is earned, at least by Waymo's track record. In a statement accompanying the announcement, Mawakana said the company now delivers "over half a million trips each week" and claims its vehicles have been demonstrated to be "over 15 times safer than human drivers." Waymo describes its U.S. foundation as "tens of millions of commercial fully autonomous trips across 15 major U.S. cities." Independent reporting puts the current scale at roughly 500,000 paid rides per week across 14 American cities, with a company goal of one million weekly trips by the end of 2026.

The view from inside a driverless Waymo Jaguar I-PACE in San Francisco — no one behind the wheel. (Photo: 9yz / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Tokyo has been a year in the making

Tuesday's announcement was the payoff of groundwork that started well before this week. Waymo began collecting data on Tokyo roads in 2025 using human-driven Jaguar I-PACE vehicles — its first public-road operations anywhere outside the United States, according to Reuters.

The partnership itself predates even that. GO's president, Hiroshi Nakajima, said the companies first announced their collaboration in December 2024 and have been working toward commercial service ever since. According to Waymo's account, the past year involved its vehicles driving Tokyo streets autonomously while supervised by trained Nihon Kotsu crew members — navigating narrow neighborhood roads, maneuvering through dense crowds, and adapting to left-hand traffic, which flips the assumptions baked into an American-trained driving system.

"Over the past year, our professionally trained drivers have spared no effort in helping the 'Waymo Driver' adapt to Tokyo's roads." — Yasuharu Wakabayashi, President, Nihon Kotsu

Wakabayashi's statement is worth reading twice. Nihon Kotsu is nearly a century old — a legacy taxi company with the operating knowledge Waymo lacks. Its framing is that the robotaxi service will coexist with human-driven taxis and, in its words, help "pass on a safer, higher-quality transportation infrastructure to the next generation." Whether rank-and-file drivers share that optimism is another question entirely.

The real gatekeeper: Japan's regulators

The single largest uncertainty in Tuesday's announcement isn't the technology. It's paperwork. Waymo said the partnership is "actively expanding local operations and working closely with government ministries to secure the necessary permits and licenses," and that the 2027 timeline is contingent on approval from national and local authorities plus completion of ongoing validation.

Japan has been moving, deliberately, toward accommodating autonomous vehicles. The country has permitted limited Level 4 driverless operations on public roads in designated areas since 2023 — small pilot zones, carefully geofenced. A full commercial taxi service across Tokyo neighborhoods would be a different order of magnitude: dozens of vehicles in general traffic, carrying strangers, for money, with no human aboard. No foreign company has yet secured that kind of permission in Japan.

This is where the local partners earn their keep. Nihon Kotsu operates within Japan's licensing and labor frameworks; GO already integrates with the country's taxi dispatch infrastructure. Waymo's own framing — pairing "proven technology with the highest standards of local hospitality and operations" — reads as a direct appeal to regulators and a risk-averse public.

Why Tokyo — and why Japan wants this

The companies aren't selling this as a novelty. They're selling it as a solution to a demographic emergency. Japan's population is shrinking and aging; its supply of professional drivers is thinning with it. The joint announcement explicitly positions the service as a way to address the driver shortage and the broader population decline.

Nakajima put the commercial intent plainly: users will be able to hail both conventional taxis and autonomous Waymo trips directly through the GO app. "To deliver this new mobility experience, we are launching as a full commercial service," he said — not a trial, not a beta, a service.

The competitive field is already forming. Nissan is separately working with British startup Wayve and Uber on robotaxis, Reuters noted — a reminder that Waymo isn't the only one reading Japan's demographics as a market signal. But none of those efforts has announced a commercial timeline as aggressive as 2027.

The view from Austin: the race Waymo is really running

For American readers, the Tokyo announcement lands in the middle of a genuinely hot contest. Waymo closed a $16 billion funding round in February 2026 that valued the company at $126 billion — the largest investment ever in an autonomous-vehicle company — and has been adding U.S. cities at a near-monthly pace. The fleet, roughly 2,500 vehicles, is scaling toward the numbers needed for a million weekly rides.

Meanwhile, Tesla began carrying paying passengers in Austin earlier this month with its steering-wheel-free Cybercab, a launch that immediately drew a federal audit from NHTSA over how the vehicle was self-certified for public roads. Tesla's fleet remains tiny compared to Waymo's, and its autonomous driving relies on a camera-only approach while Waymo stacks lidar, radar, and cameras. The two companies are now racing on two fronts: American cities and, as of Tuesday, the rest of the world.

Waymo has confirmed London comes first internationally, then Tokyo. That ordering matters for the U.S. story too — it shows Alphabet's flagship AV unit treating overseas expansion as a growth lever, not a side project, at exactly the moment Tesla is betting its future on robotaxis at home.

What could still go wrong

Three risks deserve honest weight. First, regulatory approval is a genuine unknown, not a formality — Japan's transport authorities have never cleared a foreign operator for unmanned commercial service at this scale. Second, validation is ongoing, and Tokyo's streets — narrow residential lanes, dense pedestrian flows, some of the world's busiest intersections — are a meaningfully harder test than the sun-baked grids of Phoenix. Third, trust: Japanese consumers are demanding riders, and one serious incident in a foreign company's empty car would travel faster than any press release.

But the direction of travel is hard to dispute. A year of supervised testing, a December 2024 partnership now bearing commercial fruit, the country's largest taxi operator as a partner, and a CEO willing to say "unmanned from day one" on the record. Tokyo in 2027 is a target, not a guarantee. It's also, as of Tuesday, the most concrete driverless-taxi commitment any major market has seen.

Sources

Reporting for this article drew on Reuters (Tokyo, September 15, 2026 — reporting by Daniel Leussink); Waymo's official announcement, "Opening our doors to Tokyo riders in 2027 with Nihon Kotsu and GO" (waymo.com, September 2026); and independent coverage of Waymo's U.S. operations from Electrek, TechCrunch, and the Associated Press via TechXplore. Quotes from Tekedra Mawakana, Hiroshi Nakajima, and Yasuharu Wakabayashi are drawn from the joint announcement and Waymo's published statement.