Waymo enters Canada with Toronto mapping, targets first riders in 2028

Waymo's vehicles will start appearing on Toronto streets driving manually "in the coming days", the company said on Oct 16, the first phase of a plan to build a fully autonomous robotaxi service in Canada with a goal of welcoming its first riders in 2028.

Waymo is entering Canada, and the work begins as a mapping job in Toronto. It starts with high-definition mapping of local street networks and supervised driving by trained specialists. The 2028 rider date depends on approvals Ontario has not yet granted, and the technical question raised in Toronto is winter: a Queen's University roboticist says snow can block the sensors, something Waymo does not deal with in California.

Ontario's permit covers manual driving; paid driverless rides need more approvals

Waymo has been approved under Ontario's Automated Vehicle Pilot Program for manual driving and testing, which allows HD mapping and data collection on local driving conditions, CityNews reported. The program began 10 years ago with a driver required in the seat, and Ontario allowed driverless vehicles under certain conditions from 2019. According to Uber, paying passengers in Ontario will not get driverless rides before 2028 at the earliest and would still need additional approvals.

If riders arrive in early 2028, mapping and supervised testing will have run more than a year. Waymo says it is investing in local facilities and jobs, and named Toronto-headquartered Element Fleet Management as its fleet-management partner, with "hundreds of roles over time" planned in fleet maintenance, validation driving and customer service.

Waymo says it operates in more than 15 cities and provides more than 500,000 paid trips each week, with about 4,000 fully autonomous vehicles. Data from more than 400 million fully autonomous kilometres, it says, show the Waymo Driver was involved in 95% fewer crashes involving serious injury or worse than human drivers in the cities where it operates.

Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow said her biggest concern is safety and that autonomous vehicles should be held to the highest standards, and that the legislation permitting them is provincial and does not involve the city. Beck Taxi, Toronto's largest independent family-owned taxi operator, said "there are too many cars on our roads" and noted that New York and Boston have decided not to allow Waymo to operate in their cities. Uber Canada's head of policy Laura Miller said "the future of mobility will be hybrid, with human drivers and autonomous vehicles operating side by side"; Uber partners with more than 30 autonomous vehicle companies, including Toronto's Waabi.

Sidney Givigi, a robotics and machine learning professor at Queen's University, said harsh weather remains a real concern. "All the sensors can get occluded by snow, which is something that they don't have in California," he said. "What if there is ice on the road, or you have a very strong blizzard and then you try to stop your car on a hill and it does not stop?"