Toyota Motor Corporation will build Waymo's self-driving taxis on its own assembly line, the two companies announced on Thursday, converting an exploratory agreement signed in April 2025 into a concrete manufacturing partnership. Toyota will produce autonomous bZ4X electric SUVs at its Takaoka plant in Aichi Prefecture, fitting Waymo's self-driving hardware onto the vehicles as they come off the line, rather than retrofitting them separately. Testing and validation will begin in Japan in 2027, with Britain and other markets where Waymo already operates to follow in subsequent years.
The shift matters because last year's agreement committed the companies to little more than exploring how they might work together. This one specifies a vehicle, a factory and a first market. Toyota has not disclosed how many vehicles will be built or where in Japan the pilot will run, but the choice of Japan and Britain is deliberate: both drive on the left, and Waymo's technology has so far been validated almost entirely on right-hand-drive American roads.
Waymo currently runs paid driverless rides in more than a dozen US cities, using fleets built on Jaguar's I-PACE electric SUV. The bZ4X deal gives it a second vehicle platform and, crucially, a manufacturing partner that can scale production without the company having to build its own factory. Toyota, in turn, gains a path to deploying its Level 4 autonomous technology commercially at a pace it could not easily manage alone — important for a company that has talked for years about eliminating traffic fatalities but has lagged rivals in bringing self-driving systems to market.
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Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo's co-chief executive, said the partnership reflected the company's respect for Toyota's reliability and manufacturing scale, adding that Waymo's vehicles have shown accident rates far below those of human drivers in the cities where it operates — a claim based on the company's own data from more than 270 million driverless miles. Hiroki Nakajima, Toyota's executive vice-president and a board member, said safety technology delivers the greatest benefit when it reaches the largest number of people, and that no single company could achieve zero road accidents alone.
