Waymo is heading north. The Alphabet-owned autonomous driving unit confirmed on 16 October that its vehicles will start appearing on the streets of Toronto in the coming days — but not as robotaxis. The first cars will be driven manually, sweeping the city to build high-definition maps of its road network, as the company works toward carrying its first passengers in 2028.
It is Waymo’s first market outside the United States, London and Tokyo, and comfortably the coldest climate it has attempted. The two-year runway reveals as much about the engineering problem as it does about permits.
- Humans first: Toronto starts as a mapping exercise, with trained specialists at the wheel long before anyone hails a driverless ride.
- 2028 is the target: Waymo says it wants paying passengers by 2028 — a deliberately cautious date for a city with punishing winters.
- The paperwork is provincial: Toronto’s mayor wants the highest safety bar, but authority over autonomous testing sits with Ontario, not city hall.
A phased entry that begins with a human behind the wheel
The rollout is deliberately incremental. Manual mapping comes first, followed by testing with autonomous driving specialists at the wheel, then the removal of that person, and only then the opening of the service to the public.
Waymo has been approved to take part in Ontario’s automated vehicle testing programme, according to Canadian media reporting that cites the company — although the official blog post announcing Toronto makes no mention of it. That framework has existed since 2016 and, since 2019, has allowed driverless trials under certain conditions, with collisions required to be reported to the ministry within ten days.
On the operational side, Waymo is leaning on Element Fleet Management, a Toronto-headquartered company it already works with in San Diego. Laura Dottori-Attanasio, its chief executive, framed the move as a natural extension of that relationship.
“As a Canadian company, we are proud to expand our collaboration with Waymo.”
Waymo speaks of “hundreds of jobs over time” in fleet maintenance, validation driving and customer support, and is quick to point out its existing Canadian ties: a Canadian pension fund is an investor and Magna International is a manufacturing partner.
Winter is the real engineering problem
Snow, ice and road salt are the reason for the long timeline. Toronto is the most northerly — and probably the most wintry — city Waymo has ever tried to operate in, and the company’s sensors have never had to cope with a Canadian February at scale.
Sidney Givigi, a robotics professor at Queen’s University, put the difficulty bluntly to Canadian broadcasters.
“All the sensors can end up obstructed by snow, something they don’t have in California.”
That single constraint explains why the industry spent a decade clustering in Phoenix, Austin and Los Angeles. Cracking a Canadian winter would unlock a large slice of northern Europe and much of the northern United States; failing would leave the robotaxi map a map of temperate climates.
City hall, labour and the wider Waymo map
Reception in Toronto is warm at best. Mayor Olivia Chow has raised safety concerns and is calling for the highest possible standards, even though the permits are issued provincially. After meeting Waymo earlier in the year, her office warned that any move toward autonomous vehicles “must not leave people without jobs or undermine workers’ livelihoods.”
Uber Canada, which runs a driver-based operation in the city, is positioning itself between the two camps. Laura Miller, its head of policy, argued for a mixed model and urged the province to prepare for the employment fallout. The automotive components industry, by contrast, sees an industrial opportunity: its president, Flavio Volpe, noted that General Motors already employs a thousand engineers on autonomous driving in Oshawa and said he would like to see five thousand more jobs in the region. The advocacy group Technologists for Democracy wants the deployment paused altogether, citing data sovereignty, privacy, employment and congestion, while other organisations have lined up in support.
The wider context is expansion. Waymo runs robotaxis in 15 US cities and is testing in London and Tokyo, having opened San Antonio, San Diego and Tampa to any rider just days ago. Two years ago it had three commercial markets and did not drive on highways. It claims more than 400 million kilometres driven autonomously and, on its own figures, 95% fewer crashes involving serious injury or worse than human drivers in the cities where it operates — company data, not a regulator’s. Thousands of its vehicles have also been recalled after entering construction zones.
Toronto has no direct robotaxi rival, though the city is not empty of autonomy: Gatik runs trucks for a supermarket chain, Magna tests autonomous delivery and local startup Waabi partners with Uber. The contrast elsewhere is sharper, with US regulators weighing whether to investigate Tesla over robotaxis alleged to have sped through school zones.
“Expanding to Canada marks an important milestone in Waymo’s global journey.” — Tekedra Mawakana, co-chief executive of Waymo.
The calendar is the story here. Spending two years to open a single city, while opening several a month at home, shows Waymo is not replicating a proven playbook but solving a genuinely new problem — and saying 2028 out loud rather than promising next year is an admission that winter is a hard technical barrier, not a marketing line. What the announcement never resolves is the labour question, and that, more than any sensor stack, will decide how Toronto greets the service when it finally arrives.