Waymo to bring driverless robotaxis to Singapore by 2028

Waymo, the autonomous-driving subsidiary of Alphabet, said it will launch a fully driverless, all-electric ride-hailing service in Singapore by 2028, marking the company's entry into Southeast Asia and its fourth announced market outside the United States. The company confirmed the plan in a blog post published Thursday, timed to a joint announcement with Singapore's Ministry of Transport and Land Transport Authority.

Singapore's Land Transport Authority said in its own release that Waymo will become the city-state's newest licensed autonomous vehicle operator, joining incumbent transport groups ComfortDelGro and Grab as companies authorized to run AV services on public roads. The regulator said it will work with Waymo to ensure deployments "meet safety and regulatory requirements and build public trust in autonomous vehicles."

The numbers

Waymo's rollout will unfold in three phases. An initial fleet of all-electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles, the same model Waymo uses in its U.S. markets, will arrive in Singapore over the coming months. Throughout 2027, trained specialists will manually drive the vehicles across the island to map local roads and calibrate the company's self-driving system, known as the Waymo Driver, for Singapore's road geometry and monsoon weather patterns. A commercial, fully autonomous ride-hailing service is scheduled to open to the public through the Waymo app in 2028.

The company says it has completed more than 20 million fully autonomous rides worldwide. Its most recent published safety impact data puts accumulated rider-only mileage at 220.6 million miles through March 2026, with the company reporting 94 percent fewer crashes causing serious or fatal injury and 82 percent fewer injury-causing crashes overall compared with human drivers over equivalent distances in its operating cities. Singapore's own private-hire and taxi sector employs roughly 70,000 drivers, a workforce the government has already begun preparing for AV competition. Around 20 autonomous vehicles are currently operating in the country under existing trial programs, a fraction of the taxi fleet but a number regulators expect to grow quickly as more operators receive approval.

How Singapore became a testing ground

Singapore has spent more than a decade building the regulatory scaffolding for this moment. The country began public-road AV trials in the one-north business district in 2015, and the Land Transport Authority formalized oversight two years later with the Road Traffic (Autonomous Motor Vehicles) Rules of 2017, which require any company testing or deploying autonomous vehicles on public roads to obtain government authorization first, according to the agency's own account of the framework. Every vehicle must pass safety assessments at CETRAN, a dedicated test facility at Nanyang Technological University built to replicate Singapore's road layouts and traffic rules, and must carry a data recorder that logs speed, timing and whether autonomous mode was engaged, in case of an investigation.

That framework is already supporting live services. Grab and ComfortDelGro began running autonomous shuttles along separate routes in the Punggol residential district, and the Land Transport Authority opened the service to public rides on April 1, 2026, after the Grab-operated routes had logged more than 25,000 kilometers of testing with roughly 99 percent positive feedback from 740 early community riders. Fares were free during the initial rollout, with the regulator saying a flat $4 fare would begin once the routes moved to revenue service around the middle of 2026. Separately, Chinese autonomous-driving firm Pony.ai received approval in April 2026 to run an invite-only robotaxi service in partnership with ComfortDelGro, also centered on Punggol, putting two Chinese-backed operators, WeRide and Pony.ai, into direct competition with each other well before Waymo's vehicles arrive.

Waymo has been methodical about which cities it enters next, with plans to begin commercial service in London by the end of 2026, followed by Tokyo in 2027 and Munich in late 2027. Singapore becomes the first Southeast Asian addition to that list, and the company has said it will begin testing in the western part of the island, around the Labrador and Harbourfront area, targeting commuting, weekend travel and industrial zones with limited existing transport options.

Who is affected

The most immediate stakeholders are Singapore's licensed taxi and private-hire drivers, whose ranks the government has been preparing for AV disruption since well before Waymo's arrival. Senior Minister of State for Transport Sun Xueling announced a driver transition package in Parliament on July 7, 2026, built around three components, according to the Ministry of Transport's announcement. A Career Conversion Programme launching in the third quarter of 2026 will retrain drivers as AV safety operators, remote operators or fleet managers, or route them toward public-bus captain roles, with employers eligible for salary support of up to 90 percent during the reskilling period. A separate training-incentive scheme, piloting from January 2027 over three years, will pay drivers $20 an hour for approved short courses, capped at $1,600 per driver across roughly 2,000 eligible programs. The package was developed jointly with the Ministry of Manpower, the National Trades Union Congress, Grab Singapore and ComfortDelGro, and includes dedicated career fairs and a government resource site for affected drivers.

Commuters in the initial test corridor stand to gain a new transport option layered onto Singapore's already extensive public transit system, which Waymo executives have described as a complement to trains and buses rather than a replacement. Existing AV operators Grab, ComfortDelGro and Pony.ai's local partners will now compete directly with a well-capitalized entrant backed by Alphabet, adding pressure to a market that regulators have deliberately kept open to multiple players rather than granting exclusivity to any single operator.

Reaction

Waymo co-chief executive Tekedra Mawakana framed the expansion as a fit between the company's technology and Singapore's transport ambitions.

"Singapore has built one of the safest, most efficient and most forward-thinking transportation ecosystems in the world."

Singapore's Minister for Transport, Jeffrey Siow, said the deployment aligns with the government's broader push to attract advanced technology operators. "Waymo brings world-class technology and operational expertise to Singapore, and will move us towards our vision of creating new transport options for Singaporeans," Siow said, a statement also carried in local coverage from AsiaOne.

What happens next

The next visible milestone will be the arrival of Waymo's Jaguar I-PACE fleet on Singapore's streets in the coming months, initially with human specialists behind the wheel rather than passengers in the back seat. That mapping and calibration phase is expected to run through 2027, with the Land Transport Authority overseeing safety validation before any fully driverless rides are opened to the public in 2028. How quickly Waymo scales beyond its initial western Singapore test zone, and how directly it ends up competing with WeRide and Pony.ai's already-operating services in Punggol, will likely shape whether Singapore becomes a genuine multi-operator robotaxi market or consolidates around a smaller number of dominant players.