Waymo picks Singapore for its next robotaxi city
Cars arrive in coming months, human-driven mapping runs through 2027, and public rides are aimed at 2028.
Waymo says Singapore will be its next international robotaxi market, with a commercial launch targeted for 2028.
The Alphabet-owned company said on Friday that vehicles will begin arriving in Singapore in the coming months. Through 2027, trained specialists will manually drive Jaguar I-Pace cars to map roads and adapt the system to local layouts and monsoon conditions. Waymo says it is working toward fully autonomous ride-hailing for the public through its app by 2028, subject to approval from Singapore's Land Transport Authority.
Singapore requires autonomous vehicles to pass safety assessments at the Centre of Excellence for Testing and Research before public-road deployment. Waymo already has a corporate entity in the city-state and sits on Singapore's Steering Committee on Autonomous Vehicles.
Overseas, Waymo has also talked up London by the end of 2026, Tokyo in 2027, and Munich in late 2027. Domestically it runs about 4,000 vehicles across roughly 15 US cities, while remaining blocked from New York, Chicago and Washington, DC.
Singapore is a small, tightly regulated market, which is exactly why robotaxi firms treat it as a credibility test for Asia.
If Waymo can clear LTA and CETRAN rules, it gets a Southeast Asian reference city and a story to take to other dense capitals. India is not on this announcement, but the same questions travel: who is liable when a driverless car fails, how monsoon rain and chaotic traffic are handled, and whether regulators want pilots or commercial fleets.
Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana called Singapore one of the world's safest and most efficient transport systems. That praise also underlines the gap with messier megacities where Waymo has stayed away.
The next concrete steps are vehicle arrival, 2027 mapping with safety drivers, and the LTA approval path. Watch whether public rides actually open in 2028, and how Waymo's London and Tokyo timelines compare. For Indian readers, the useful signal is regulatory, not tourism: which Asian city proves the tech first under hard rules.