Waymo starts mapping Toronto, targets robotaxi riders in 2028

The first cars are not yet driving on their own. In the coming days, Waymo vehicles will appear on Toronto's streets with trained specialists behind the wheel, mapping the road network in high definition and checking that the Waymo Driver, the company's self-driving software, adapts to the city. Waymo says its first public riders are expected in 2028. Toronto would be its fourth announced market outside the United States, after London, Tokyo and Singapore.

The mechanism is deliberately slow. Before a car drives without a person, its software has to learn the streets and prove itself on them, and Toronto offers conditions that its US cities did not. Waymo has just put its first snow city, Denver, into service; Toronto's winters, with slush, road salt and freezing rain coating sensors for months, are what the manual phase is meant to test. Waymo describes its system as "all-weather". Toronto will be where that claim gets checked.

The rules are the backdrop, not the story. Ontario's current testing framework expires in October 2027. Toronto's mayor, Olivia Chow, has also said her office will not back the service if it costs jobs, and that the company "must demonstrate this will not happen". Waymo says it and its partners will create "hundreds of roles" over time in fleet maintenance, validation driving, customer service and operations, with Element Fleet Management, a Toronto-headquartered firm, running the fleet end to end.

For Torontonians, the first gain is jobs, including validation driving, which comes long before any paid ride. Riders would come later, and only if Ontario writes the rules a commercial service needs. The 2028 date therefore depends on the province as much as on Waymo. If the framework is in place by then, Toronto could be among the first Canadian cities to test a driverless service in winter; if it is not, the timeline slips with it.

The 95% figure is Waymo's own, drawn from its driving record in the United States. Waymo itself says the claim is about cities where it already operates. Whether the record holds on Toronto's salted roads in winter will be known only after the winters of the manual phase have passed.