Waymo Is Partnering With Toyota To Design Autonomous Vehicles

Toyota Motor and Waymo, the world's largest automaker, said in a joint statement that the two sides have a "strong sense of purpose and a shared vision" in using autonomous driving technology to improve safety. "We believe this collaboration will help us promote solutions to more people around the world, and take us a step forward to a zero-accident society," said Toyota Motor Executive Vice President Hiroki Nakajima.

Toyota has had an in-house self-driving car program for years and is expanding its application of advanced driving assistance in Toyota and Lexus product lines, although it has not announced its own self-driving taxi service plan. Waymo also partnered with Hyundai, which will start supplying electric Ioniq 5 hatchbacks to its rapidly growing fleet of self-driving taxis later this year.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said when asked about Waymo's long-term growth on the company's quarterly results call last week that the automotive sector "future options revolve around individual ownership" but did not elaborate. This reaffirms the plans first announced in 2018 by Waymo former CEO John Krachik, though the company has since mentioned it.

Waymo books over 250,000 paid self-driving taxi services in Phoenix, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and Austin every week. The company is preparing to expand its services to Atlanta, Miami and Washington, D.C. and test its electric Jaguar I-PACE SUV in Nashville and Tokyo.

Working directly with Toyota to develop a self-driving car platform (which both companies may share) can help reduce the cost of such vehicles and thus increase their operating profitability. Making Waymo’s system available for personal vehicles (unlike Tesla’s so-called “fully autonomous” feature, which is truly autonomous driving and takes over control without manual monitoring) could be offered as a subscription service and become a lucrative new revenue source for the Mountain View, California-based company outside its self-driving taxi business.

The two companies said the scope of their cooperation “will continue to evolve through ongoing discussions.” They did not provide any financial details about the collaboration, and a Waymo spokesperson did not immediately comment on the matter.

More information from Forbes

Forbes Waymo and Uber join forces to launch self-driving taxi in Austin Author: Alan Ohnsman Forbes Waymo raises $5.6 billion to drive its growing self-driving taxi business Author: Alan Ohnsman Forbes Self-driving taxi business is Elon Musk’s dream—but it’s a reality for Waymo Author: Alan Ohnsman

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