Waymo Picks Toronto for Its First Driverless Rides in Canada

Waymo is coming to Canada. The Alphabet-owned self-driving company announced on Friday that it will bring Driverless Rides in Canada to Toronto first, with its first public riders expected in the city in 2028, according to Reuters. The plan makes Toronto the company's first Canadian market and its fourth announced expansion beyond the United States, after London, Tokyo and Singapore.

The rollout starts quietly. Waymo's cars will begin driving Toronto streets in the coming days with specialists behind the wheel, building high-definition maps and testing the software on local roads before anything operates without a human driver, Electrek reported. That groundwork phase is how the company enters every new city, and only after it does the driverless system take over.

Why Toronto, and why now

Toronto checks a lot of boxes for Waymo. It is Canada's largest city, it has harsh winters that would test the system in snow and ice, and it already has a Canadian supply chain behind the service. Element Fleet Management, which is headquartered in Toronto, will run end-to-end fleet operations. The company also pointed to two Canadian heavyweights already in its corner: the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board as a long-term investor and Magna International as its manufacturing partner.

The announcement landed on Waymo's own blog on Friday morning. Co-chief executive Tekedra Mawakana called Canada "an important milestone in Waymo's global journey." The company already operates commercial robotaxi services in five American cities, so a Toronto launch would make the Driverless Rides in Canada push the centerpiece of its next phase.

Jobs first, or no welcome

Waymo is leading with jobs. The company says it and its partners will create hundreds of roles over time in fleet maintenance, validation driving, customer service and operations. That promise is aimed directly at Toronto's politicians: in April, Mayor Olivia Chow's office told the Toronto Star it would not support the service if it eliminated driving jobs, and that the company "must demonstrate this will not happen."

The jobs pledge looks designed to clear that bar. Fleet maintenance and validation driving are exactly the hands-on roles that keep people employed around a driverless service, and partnering with a Toronto-headquartered fleet operator keeps that spending local. Still, the promise will be judged on delivery, not announcements.

There is also a regulatory catch. Ontario does not yet have rules for a commercial driverless ride service, Electrek noted, so the 2028 target depends on the province writing them. Waymo said it will begin engaging with local authorities now, which means the timeline has a political dimension as well as a technical one.

What it means for your ride options

For Torontonians, the news puts a date on something that has felt like a science project: driverless rides on local streets within about two years. If the service launches on schedule, riders would get a driverless alternative to Uber, Lyft and the TTC for trips across the city, with pricing and coverage still to be announced.

Toronto would also join a global robotaxi race that is speeding up. Uber, Verne and Pony.ai have begun rides in Zagreb, while a separate Bolt and Lucid deal targets tens of thousands of driverless cars for Europe, as covered in our breakdown of the Lucid-Bolt fleet deal. In the United States, Tesla has been expanding its Cybercab fleet in Austin, which we tracked in detail earlier this month. Waymo's bet is that starting with mapping and local partners now gives it a steadier path than its rivals.

The road to 2028

The timeline from here is straightforward. Manually driven Waymo cars start mapping Toronto streets within days. The company then works with the city and the province on the regulatory framework while it validates its software through a Toronto winter or two. If that goes to plan, the first public riders climb in sometime in 2028.

The bigger signal is that Canada is no longer watching the driverless era from the sidelines. A first Canadian deployment, backed by Canadian investors and a Canadian manufacturer, turns Toronto into a proving ground for whether robotaxis can survive snow, tight streets and streetcar tracks. For everyone else, the wait for Driverless Rides in Canada just got a lot shorter.

According to Reuters, Waymo described the expansion as part of its move beyond the United States, with London and Tokyo also in the pipeline. For more on how the robotaxi industry is scaling, see our coverage linked above.