Waymo will bring its autonomous taxis to Singapore in 2028 after starting mapping the city in 2027

Waymo has officially announced that it is expanding its international operations with its arrival in Singapore. This will be its second market in Asia, after Tokyo, in Japan, where it is expected to arrive definitively in 2027.

The autonomous vehicle subsidiary of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) will begin receiving the first units of the electric Jaguar I-PACE, which is the one usually used by the brand in the United States. These vehicles will arrive over the next few months to prepare the infrastructure.

The plan calls for starting manual mapping in 2027 before opening the commercial service to users in 2028 through its own mobile application. The deployment in the Asian city pursues a different operating model than that applied in the large metropolitan areas of the United States.

In this case, the company seeks to articulate its fleet as a shuttle service for the first and last leg of the journey, connecting Remote residential areas with metro stations and trunk bus stops. In this way, the idea is that driverless cars complement the transportation network instead of competing directly against the system.

Calibration against tropical storms and background in Tokyo and London

Throughout 2027, specialized drivers from the firm will manually travel the streets to search the city streets. In addition, they want to adapt the driving algorithms to the weather, an essential point for robotaxis to be safe.

As the company recalls, the entire platform, which integrates LiDAR sensors, cameras and radars with a perimeter range of 300 meters in 360 degrees, must learn to manage the region’s intense monsoon rains. With this testing phase, the system will adapt its decisions in real time to the particularities of local traffic and the regulatory requirements of the Singaporean government.

This move expands the foreign strategy started in Tokyo, where the manufacturer began testing in 2025 and plans to activate its commercial service in 2027, integrating into the local GO Taxi application. Together with the preliminary tests carried out in London, a city in which Uber has already begun to operate, the project has accumulated more than 300 million kilometers on public roads and 500,000 weekly trips in 15 American cities. According to data provided by the company, its autonomous vehicles reduce collisions with injuries by 94% compared to the records of human drivers in urban environments.

When will it arrive in Spain?

The short answer is that we don’t know. However, although Waymo has not yet set an official calendar for our country, there is one detail that sheds some light on the issue. And it is that Waymo Iberia has already formally registered the companyan administrative maneuver replicated in other European territories, such as France.