Waymo has chosen Toronto as its first Canadian city and says its first public riders could arrive in 2028. Cars start driving Toronto streets in the coming days, initially with specialists at the wheel building high-definition maps. Toronto becomes Waymo’s fourth announced market outside the United States, after London, Tokyo and Singapore. The announcement came on Oct. 16, and Waymo is not yet offering rides to anyone in Canada.
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Mapping first, riders in 2028
Waymo says its vehicles will be driven manually at the outset while trained specialists build high-definition maps of local streets and adapt the Waymo Driver to Toronto conditions. Only after that mapping and software validation does the company plan unsupervised operation, with the first riders targeted for 2028. Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana called Canada “an important milestone in Waymo’s global journey.”
The announcement on Oct. 16 presents the all-weather Waymo Driver as a complement to Toronto’s transit and bike lanes, a claim Electrek says the city’s winters will test. Waymo cites more than 400 million fully autonomous kilometers, about 250 million miles, and says its vehicles were involved in 95% fewer crashes with serious injury or worse than human drivers in the cities where it operates. Those are the company’s own figures. The data it released in September, covered by Electrek’s report, ran through June 2026 and counted 271 million driverless miles, with an estimated 841 injury-causing crashes avoided, a modeled number rather than an observed one.
The September release is the fuller evidence for the safety pitch. Waymo reported an 82% reduction in crashes that caused injury compared with human drivers, 86% fewer cyclist injury crashes and 93% fewer pedestrian injury crashes. Of the 841 avoided injury crashes it estimated, 175 would have involved pedestrians, cyclists or motorcyclists and 55 would have caused serious injuries or worse. Waymo added about 50 million driverless miles in the three months after its end-of-March update. Electrek pointed out that the figures are Waymo’s own, that crashes are rare, and that independent IIHS data show similar but smaller reductions, which matters for a city where the company has no operating record yet.
Element Fleet, Magna and CPP Investments
Toronto-headquartered Element Fleet Management will provide end-to-end fleet management, and its chief executive, Laura Dottori-Attanasio, said Element is proud to expand its partnership with Waymo to bring autonomous ride-hailing to Toronto. The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board is described as a long-term investor in Waymo, and Magna International is its manufacturing partner. Waymo also named accessibility and mobility advocates among its backers: BALANCE for Blind Adults, CNIB, Community Living Toronto, Connected Canadians and Epilepsy Ontario. BALANCE chief executive Michelle McQuigge said innovation that removes barriers to independence is at the heart of her organization’s work.
Jobs, City Hall and the political test
Waymo says it and Element plan to create hundreds of roles over time in fleet maintenance, validation driving, customer service and operations. Mayor Olivia Chow’s office, speaking to the Toronto Star, said it would not support Waymo if the service cost jobs and that the company “must demonstrate this will not happen.” The statement leaves the city’s position conditional, and it arrives before a single rider has been carried.
The regulatory side is also unsettled. Transport Canada told Canadian Affairs that self-driving vehicles on public roads are limited to “temporary pilot projects” run by provinces, and Ontario’s automated vehicle pilot program is a testing framework rather than a ride-hailing licence.
Three tests will decide whether the 2028 date holds: how the Waymo Driver performs through a Toronto winter after a mapping period that starts with human drivers, whether the city’s conditions on jobs can be met by the hundreds of roles Waymo and Element describe, and what provincial rules exist by then. Each depends on a different decision-maker, from Waymo’s engineers to City Hall to the Ontario government, and none has a public deadline before the company’s own 2028 target.
Waymo’s U.S. scale and the Tesla comparison
Waymo says it provides more than 500,000 paid rides per week across more than a dozen U.S. metros. Driverless service started in Las Vegas this summer, as Electrek covered in July, with Denver, San Diego and Tampa to follow. That footprint is the base on which the company is now taking its first step outside North America’s largest market for robotaxis, in the form of a Canadian city whose weather and rules differ sharply from Phoenix or San Francisco. Element and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board are Canadian institutions, and Magna is named as the manufacturing partner, so the Toronto plan is built around local partners from the start.
Tesla’s Robotaxi service, by comparison, runs in seven U.S. cities, but Tesla does not disclose how many cars operate without a safety monitor and has not dated a Canadian launch, according to Electrek’s robotaxi crash-record analysis. Waymo’s 2028 date for Toronto is a target, not a commitment, and the company’s post mentions no permits or approvals.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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