Waymo is expanding to Canada, starting with Toronto, after getting approval to join Ontario’s automated vehicle pilot program, the company said Friday. Its announcement sets a goal of “welcoming our first riders in 2028.”
Nothing is driving itself yet. Waymo will start by driving its cars manually to build high-definition maps, then test with trained specialists behind the wheel. The Globe and Mail reported that more than a dozen cars will be part of the initial testing, and CBC News says Torontonians may see them “in the coming days.”
It’s Waymo’s first city outside the US and its first serious test of a real Canadian winter.
The playbook
Waymo, owned by Google parent Alphabet, runs every new city the same way, TechCrunch notes: manual mapping, then supervised testing, then removing the safety operator, then opening rides to the public.
The pace of that playbook has sped up. Two years ago Waymo operated in only three commercial markets and didn’t drive on freeways, per TechCrunch. Its expansion took off with Austin in March 2025, then Atlanta. It now runs robotaxi service in 15 US cities and tests in London and Tokyo.
Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana called Canada an important milestone and said Waymo wants a shared commitment “to safer streets and more accessible mobility.”
The local partner
Toronto-based Element Fleet Management will handle end-to-end fleet operations, including maintenance and customer service. Using a local fleet operator is now standard for Waymo’s faster rollouts.
Waymo says it and its partners will invest in “hundreds of roles over time” in fleet maintenance, validation driving, customer service and operations.
Waymo also played up its existing Canadian ties: the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board is a longtime investor, and Magna International is a manufacturing partner. Per the Globe, CPP Investments joined funding rounds in 2020 and 2021 worth more than US$3 billion in total.
What Ontario actually approved
Ontario’s automated vehicle pilot program launched 10 years ago. It initially required a driver in the seat, but changed in 2019 to allow driverless vehicles under certain conditions, CBC reports.
The province is careful to say this is step one. A statement from Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria’s office, quoted by Taxi News, said that “at this stage, vehicles will be driven by human drivers for mapping and data collection.” To move beyond that, Waymo “must continue to meet Ontario’s stringent safety and operational requirements” and deliver “a credible jobs plan” with projected positions and hiring timelines.
Why it matters: Ontario has tied Waymo’s next step to job promises, not just safety. A pilot permit can be narrowed or pulled, so Waymo’s 2028 date depends on the province as much as on its software.
The city isn’t in charge
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow told CBC her biggest concern is safety and making sure autonomous vehicles are held to the highest standards. She also pointed out that the legislation allowing them is provincial and doesn’t involve the city.
Her office had said after meeting Waymo earlier this year that any move toward autonomous vehicles must not put people out of work. The taxi industry wasn’t consulted before the approval. The Canadian Taxi Association learned of it from the minister’s office the day before the announcement, per Taxi News, and was told it would be included in future stakeholder meetings.
The safety pitch, and its limits
Waymo’s safety pitch came with its usual headline number: across more than 400 million fully autonomous kilometers, it says its cars were involved in 95% fewer crashes involving serious injury or worse than human drivers in the cities where it operates.
The catch: that’s Waymo’s own data, measured in places with far milder winters than Toronto. Past performance in Phoenix is not a snow-tire guarantee.
The weather problem
TechCrunch calls Toronto “the northernmost and possibly most wintry city” Waymo has tried to operate in. Local critics agree. “Waymo cars in Toronto will have to navigate blizzards, heavy rain and flooding,” Adam Motaouakkil of the advocacy group Technologists for Democracy told the Globe.
Sidney Givigi, a robotics professor at Queen’s University, put the technical problem plainly to CBC. “All the sensors can get occluded by snow,” 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?” In good weather, he said, he trusts the machine at least as much as a human: “The system does not get tired.”
Waymo’s response, via spokesperson Amanda Galbraith, was that it has spent years testing in snow and ice and already runs below freezing in several cities, including Denver and Detroit.
Toronto’s track record with robots
Ontario has allowed AV testing since 2016, with mixed results. The Globe notes Magna ended a Toronto pilot of three-wheeled delivery robots early after they were often confused by construction sites. City staff wrote to the province that Magna’s vehicles were “incapable of making right turns at red lights” and would even reboot in the middle of traffic, CBC reports.
Not everything has gone badly. CBC notes California-based Gatik began rolling out 50 autonomous box trucks for grocer Loblaw last year.
The Uber problem
Toronto’s ride-hailing market belongs to Uber and Lyft, and Uber has its own autonomous ambitions, including a partnership with Toronto-based Waabi. Uber says it has more than 30 autonomous vehicle partners.
Uber Canada’s Laura Miller told the Globe that driverless rides for paying passengers are still at least two years away in Ontario, which, to be fair, is also Waymo’s timeline. In a statement to CBC, she said “the future of mobility will be hybrid,” and urged the province and industry to “prepare for the impact on workers.”
The industry lobby is cheering. Flavio Volpe of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association told CBC he’d like to see thousands more autonomous-driving engineering jobs in the Toronto region.
Who it affects
- Taxi and ride-hail drivers: the obvious losers if robotaxis scale, and the group Ontario says the jobs plan has to account for.
- Riders: a 2028 option at best. Residents CBC spoke to ranged from “absolutely not” to “depending on the price.”
- Other AV companies: if Waymo cracks Toronto winters, colder markets open up.
Our read
Waymo is running its usual playbook (map, test, then launch) in its hardest climate yet, under a provincial permit that comes with strings attached. The 2028 target is a goal, not a promise, and it rests on snow performance and on job commitments Ontario hasn’t seen yet.
What to watch: how its cars handle a real Toronto January, what the jobs plan says, whether the city gets any say, and whether labor opposition like the kind that paused its New York testing shows up here too.
Image: Can Pac Swire / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
