Waymo has announced plans to bring its self-driving taxis to Tokyo in early 2025, beating Japanese automakers to the draw and stealing a march on Tesla’s robotaxi in the largest urban market for autonomous driving outside China.
This past week the Alphabet (Google) subsidiary revealed a partnership with Nihon Kotsu, the top taxi and limousine service company in Tokyo, and GO, Japan’s most popular taxi app. Nihon Kotsu will be in charge of managing and servicing of Waymo vehicles. GO provides easy-to-understand directions in English.
First, Nihon Kotsu drivers will operate Waymo’s cars manually to map the central areas of the city – the heavily traveled and frequently visited districts of Shinjuku-ku, Shibuya-ku, Minato-ku, Chiyoda-ku, Shinagawa-ku and Koto-ku.
Then the all-electric Jaguar I-PACE autonomous vehicles will go on their first road trip outside the US.
Waymo boasts. The company goes on to explains: “The Waymo driver is our autonomous driving technology that never gets drunk, tired or distracted,” Waymo boasts. “Each time we test the Waymo Driver in regions far from where we typically operate, we prioritize safety and are mindful of our footprint.” The company explains its procedure as follows:
First, we bring a small fleet of vehicles equipped with the Waymo Driver to a new city. Testing fleets are limited and closed to the public. Once the Waymo Driver understands the lay of the land, the vehicles can begin driving autonomously. During these trips, human specialists provide feedback to our engineering teams on the driving experience and flag unique nuances that might come with operating in new areas.
Simultaneously, our engineering team can evaluate the Waymo Driver’s performance in a virtual replica of the new location to measure how it generalizes. Our teams use the new learnings and insights gathered during this time to continue refining the Waymo Driver’s capabilities and service experience.
Driving in dozens of different cities over the years has helped inform the design and capabilities of our sensing technology, improve the Waymo Driver’s performance in the cities we already operate,and safely bring our technology to new places.
Watch a video showing a Waymo vehicle in traffic here.
Tokyo’s street map is very complex and, like the British, the Japanese drive on the left-hand side of the road. This will take some getting used to. But Waymo would be able to apply its experience in Tokyo to London and other big cities where they drive on the left – in Mumbai and Delhi, for example.
Safety is essential to winning the trust of the public and Waymo has a relatively low accident rate: about one crash resulting in injury per million miles of driving, as reported by computer scientist Timothy Lee.
In Waymo’s estimation, compared with the average human driver over 25 million miles of driving in Phoenix and San Francisco, the Waymo Driver had 81% fewer airbag deployment crashes, 72% fewer injury causing crashes and 57% fewer police-reported crashes. So far, no fatalities have been reported.
But Waymo Driver does make mistakes. Last June, while on the way to pick up a passenger in Phoenix, a Waymo self-driving taxi crashed into a telephone pole. No one was hurt, but the company recalled all 672 autonomous vehicles it was operating at the time for a software update. There was also a 444-vehicle crash-related recall earlier this year and 2 vehicles were recalled in December 2023, again for software updates.
In the six months to 2024, Waymo vehicles were involved in 17 crashes and five other incidents involving potential violations of traffic safety laws. There were no injuries reported.
According to an analysis of US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data made by Craft Law Firm, a total of 3,979 accidents involving autonomous vehicles were reported between 2019 and June 17, 2024. After more than doubling to 1,450 in 2022, the number dropped to 1,353 in 2023 and was down to 473 in the first half of 2024, demonstrating that safety has improved while the number of autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles on the road, and the number of miles driven, has greatly increased.
In October 2024, Waymo reported that its self-driving taxis were providing more than 150,000 paid rides per week – up from about 100,000 in August and 50,000 last May – over a total distance of more than one million miles.
Of the 3,979 accidents reported to the NHTSA, Tesla accounted for 2,146, Waymo for 415, GM for 219, Cruise for 187, Honda for 155, and Subaru, Toyota, Ford, BMW, Kia, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and some 40 other companies for the remainder. Cruise was acquired by GM in 2016 and shut down in December 2024. This was also a setback for Honda, which had formed a partnership with GM to develop self-driving vehicles and invested in Cruise.
Citing a study by the iSeeCars website, Road & Track reports that Tesla has the highest fatal accident rate among auto brands in the US. There is even a tesladeaths.com website, which says it “is a record of Tesla accidents that involved a driver, occupant, cyclist, motorcyclist, or pedestrian death, whether or not the Tesla or its driver were at fault,” with “as much related crash data as possible.” The website, which was updated on October 20, notes 51 fatalities related to Tesla Autopilot and two related to FSD (Full Self-Driving).
This is important because, as The Wall Street Journal reported in August, “Since 2021, Tesla has reported over 1,200 crashes related to its driver assistance system called Autopilot to federal regulators,” and the NHTSA has “tied at least 14 fatalities to the tech[nology]. But it’s been hard for the public to understand the role Autopilot plays in crashes because NHTSA’s reports are heavily redacted. Tesla considers information about Autopilot proprietary, and key details like the crash narrative and even the exact date are obscured in public reports.”
In the US, Waymo’s self-driving taxis are currently operating in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with commercial service in Austin, Atlanta and Miami scheduled to start in 2025. In Austin, a limited test service began in October.
Tesla’s much-hyped robotaxi, which it also calls Cybercab, probably won’t be on the road until late 2026 at the earliest. At its public unveiling in October, CEO Elon Musk said it would be in production “before 2027.” Cybercab has been driving Tesla’s stock price higher, but not much else. Furthermore, Tesla has been in Japan since 2014, but there are very few of its vehicles on the road.
Meanwhile, a Japanese venture called Turing is working on autonomous driving software that uses neural networks to transform camera imagery directly into driving commands to enable a self-driving vehicle to go anywhere in all conditions, “equipped with human-like knowledge and decision-making capabilities.”
Believing that “what is necessary for autonomous driving is not good eyes but a good brain,” Turing is developing generative AI that “directly issues driving instructions from camera images … without using many sensors or high-precision maps.” Its biggest challenge now appears to be catching up and keeping up with Waymo.
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