Waymo Picks Toronto for First Canadian Expansion, Targets Riders by 2028

Waymo said Friday it will begin testing self-driving vehicles on the streets of Toronto within days, marking the company's first expansion into Canada and setting a target of 2028 for carrying its first paying passengers in the city. The announcement, made in a post on Waymo's company blog, makes Toronto the Alphabet subsidiary's fourth market outside the United States, after London, Tokyo and Singapore, and its first in a cold-weather climate.

The rollout will follow the phased approach Waymo has used in every other city it has entered. Specialists will first drive vehicles manually through Toronto to build high-definition maps of the street network. Autonomous software will then be tested with a trained safety specialist behind the wheel, and only after a validation period will the company remove human drivers and, eventually, open the service to riders.

What Waymo announced

Waymo said it has been cleared to take part in a provincial program that governs the testing of automated vehicles on Ontario roads, and that vehicles will appear on Toronto streets "in the coming days." The company did not specify a commercial operating permit, and its blog post framed the move as the start of a multiyear process rather than an imminent robotaxi launch. Co-chief executive Tekedra Mawakana called Toronto "one of the world's great cities" and described the expansion as an important milestone in Waymo's global journey, language echoed across the company's announcement and in coverage by Global News and TechCrunch.

To run the local operation, Waymo is working with Element Fleet Management, a Toronto-headquartered company that already manages a portion of Waymo's U.S. fleet under a multiyear partnership the two companies signed in June covering vehicle maintenance, charging and fleet readiness. Waymo said the Toronto work, alongside its partners, is expected to create "hundreds of roles" over time in fleet maintenance, validation driving, customer service and operations, though it gave no specific hiring figure or timeline for those jobs.

The numbers

Waymo's blog post cites more than 400 million fully autonomous kilometers driven and a company-reported figure of roughly 95% fewer crashes involving serious injury or worse than human drivers across the cities where it operates — a claim the company has not had independently verified for that specific figure. A separate, independent analysis released in July by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that Waymo's driverless vehicles were involved in 68% fewer crashes per mile than human drivers across San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Austin, based on roughly 50 million autonomous miles compared against 222 billion human-driven miles in the same cities. The IIHS researchers also cautioned that the comparison is imperfect because the federal crash-reporting system was not built for this kind of monitoring, and because autonomous-vehicle companies are not required to disclose the miles they log.

Beyond Toronto, Waymo now runs commercial robotaxi service in roughly a dozen U.S. metro areas and is testing in London, Tokyo and Singapore. The company has said it provides several hundred thousand paid rides a week in the United States, a figure it has said it wants to push past one million by the end of 2026.

How Toronto became the target

The expansion caps roughly a year of groundwork. Waymo's co-CEO and two other employees registered as lobbyists in Toronto in November 2025 to discuss autonomous-vehicle rules with city officials, and the company spent months meeting with provincial regulators before Friday's announcement. Ontario has permitted on-road testing of automated vehicles since 2016 under a provincial pilot framework, and the province separately approved a driverless delivery pilot for the automotive supplier Magna International in 2025 — a company that is also Waymo's manufacturing partner for the Jaguar and Zeekr vehicles built for its fleet. Waymo's other Canadian ties include the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, which participated in two of the company's funding rounds in 2020 and 2021.

Notably absent from Friday's announcement was any detail on what regulatory framework would govern a commercial, driverless service once testing concludes. Ontario's existing automated-vehicle pilot regulation was set up to cover testing rather than paid ride-hailing, and reporting by Electrek noted that the current testing rules are due to lapse in October 2027 — months before Waymo's targeted 2028 launch — with the province yet to say what, if anything, will replace them.

Who is affected

The move puts Waymo on a collision course with an already crowded Toronto ride-hailing market, where Uber and Lyft hold a dominant share and have their own autonomous-vehicle ambitions. It also revives a political fight that has simmered since Waymo's interest in Toronto first became public. Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow's office said earlier this year that she would not support Waymo's entry if it cost jobs or depressed wages for existing drivers, and Ontario Premier Doug Ford has separately voiced concern about the effect of autonomous vehicles on driving jobs. Waymo's announcement did not address those concerns directly beyond its pledge to create local roles through Element Fleet Management.

Accessibility groups were given a more prominent role in Friday's rollout than in some of Waymo's earlier city launches. The company said it has been consulting with organizations including BALANCE for Blind Adults, CNIB, Community Living Toronto, Connected Canadians and Epilepsy Ontario as it prepares the service.

"Toronto is one of the world's great cities, and we're proud to bring the Waymo Driver to Canada's largest city," Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in the company's announcement.

What happens next

For now, the practical change in Toronto will be limited: specialist-driven Waymo vehicles mapping city streets, with no passengers and no fixed date for removing human drivers from the vehicles. The bigger test will be whether the Waymo Driver, which has proven itself mainly in warm-weather U.S. cities plus a recent push into snowier markets such as Denver, can handle a Toronto winter of slush, road salt and freezing rain. Equally uncertain is whether Ontario moves to write a permanent commercial framework for driverless ride-hailing before its current testing rules expire in 2027, a question that will shape whether Waymo's 2028 target for Toronto riders is realistic or aspirational. Coverage by The Globe and Mail and the CBC both noted that the announcement contains no permit for commercial service, leaving the political and regulatory fight over Toronto's driving jobs unresolved even as the mapping vehicles hit the road.