Overview
- Waymo announced Friday that it has provincial approval to join Ontario’s automated-vehicle pilot and will start high-definition street mapping and supervised test drives in Toronto in the coming days.
- The company says the first phase will use trained safety specialists behind the wheel to build maps and collect data so its Waymo Driver can be validated for Toronto’s traffic, streetcars and winter weather.
- Waymo has partnered with Toronto-based Element Fleet Management to run local fleet operations and says the expansion will create hundreds of jobs in maintenance, validation driving, customer service and operations.
- A full transition to paid, driverless service depends on Ontario replacing O. Reg. 306/15 before it is revoked on October 13, 2027, because current rules limit autonomous vehicles to provincial pilot projects.
- Waymo points to a large operational record—hundreds of millions of autonomous kilometres and hundreds of thousands of paid trips weekly—to support its safety claims, but Toronto leaders and drivers have raised safety and job-impact concerns that will shape approval and deployment.