Waymo, GO and Nihon Kotsu aim to run Tokyo's first driverless taxis in 2027

Alphabet's Waymo, taxi-app operator GO and Tokyo fleet company Nihon Kotsu said on 15 September they intend to launch Japan's first fully driverless commercial taxi service in Tokyo in 2027. The plan starts with a small fleet and grows toward about 100 vehicles in central wards if regulators approve the operating model and if the companies finish validating Waymo's system on Tokyo streets.

Tekedra Mawakana, Waymo co-CEO, told a joint press conference that the service will be unmanned for the public from day one. Rides will be booked on both the GO app, Japan's largest taxi-hailing platform, and the Waymo app. GO shares rose as much as 9.7 percent on the announcement. The stock is up more than 40 percent since its June listing.

What has already been tested

The three companies agreed to work together in 2024. Public-road tests began in 2025 in seven Tokyo wards, first with human-driven Jaguar I-PACE cars collecting data, then with Nihon Kotsu drivers riding along while the fifth-generation Waymo Driver ran the vehicle. Those escorted tests are still running. Tuesday's statement is the decision to treat that work as the base for a commercial, no-driver service rather than as an open-ended trial.

Japan already has automated buses and other vehicles on fixed routes under limited conditions. An app-hailed taxi that can take an arbitrary urban trip without a safety driver is a different legal and operational object. Level 4, in the Japanese and SAE sense used in the joint release, means the system handles the driving task inside a defined domain and does not rely on a human to take over.

The first cars will be battery-electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles fitted with the current Waymo Driver. Employees will take test rides before the public launch. Mawakana said Waymo already provides more than 500,000 rides a week in its U.S. cities and cites a safety record more than 15 times better than human drivers on the miles it has published. Those figures are Waymo's. Japanese regulators will apply their own test protocols to Tokyo traffic, rain, night deliveries and the mix of bikes, kei cars and pedestrians that do not appear in Phoenix or San Francisco in the same density.

Who does what in the partnership

GO will handle the interface with local taxi firms and the design of how an autonomous car sits inside Japan's existing taxi industry. Nihon Kotsu, one of Tokyo's largest operators, will run operations and fleet management. Waymo supplies the driving stack. Taiji Wakabayashi, Nihon Kotsu's president, said the company's duty to run safe, reliable, comfortable trips does not change when the driver leaves the cabin. He also pointed to the industry's coming driver shortage and to Japan's ageing population as the reason to add robotaxis to a city that already has dense rail.

Nissan and Uber have a separate Tokyo robotaxi trial planned for the second half of 2026, still with a different technical path. Waymo's project is the first to put a public date of 2027 on a fully unmanned commercial taxi in the capital.

The approval gate

Nothing in the release removes the need for Japanese transport and police approval. The companies will have to show how a remote operations centre handles a stalled car in a narrow ward street, how liability sits among Waymo, GO, Nihon Kotsu and the insurer, and how a passenger who does not speak Japanese summons help. Those are the items that usually stretch a robotaxi calendar.

If the 2027 start holds, Tokyo becomes Waymo's first public-road commercial market outside the United States, ahead of a planned London service. The useful test is not the press conference. It is whether the first 20 cars can complete ordinary GO bookings in rain on a weekday without a driver in the seat, and whether the city's taxi unions and ward offices treat that as a supplement to the rail network or as a threat to existing plates.