Toyota and Waymo, Google’s self-driving car subsidiary, are in the early stages of a new partnership that’ll prioritize building and deploying autonomous driving tech. This will include a new autonomous-car platform, the companies announced on Tuesday. With the goal of improving the future of personal vehicle ownership, the collaboration will draw on Toyota’s car-building expertise and Waymo’s robotaxi know-how.
Not much more is known about the partnership, seeing as it’s so early. But since Toyota is the world’s top-selling automaker, we can reasonably infer the aim for this tech tie-up is volume.
In the past, Waymo has collaborated with Hyundai, Daimler, Fiat Chrysler, and Jaguar Land Rover, the latter of which contributes its Jaguar I-Pace EV crossover as the current platform for the tech company’s fifth-generation robotaxis. (The Waymo One was the winner of the 2025 MotorTrend Best Tech Award in the robotaxi category.) Past generations have utilized Chrysler Pacifica minivans as Waymo technology’s vehicular host.
At the recent inaugural Ride AI conference earlier this month, the Toyota Research Institute said it views self-driving technologies as an assistant or teacher in the near-term, rather than a full-on replacement. This could be a clue as to what the new Toyota and Waymo collab will roll out first.
Waymo has expanded its robotaxi service to the Los Angeles, Austin, Phoenix, and the San Francisco Bay Area markets, and provides more than 250,000 trips per week. With safety as a top priority, the company claims its cars are involved in 81 percent fewer injury-causing collisions when compared against a human benchmark.