- Toyota and Google’s Waymo have announced a partnership to develop a next-generation autonomous vehicle platform.
- Waymo will “begin to incorporate aspects of its technology for personally owned vehicles” as well.
- Waymo also has partnerships with Hyundai and China’s Zeekr.
Two of the biggest names in autonomous vehicles and human-driven ones might be teaming up.
Today, Google’s Waymo and Toyota Motor Corporation announced they are beginning talks to partner on a new autonomous vehicle platform. Moreover, Waymo officials say that with Toyota’s help, they may seek ways to extend their self-driving car technology to personally owned cars.
“Together, we aim to combine our respective strengths to develop a new autonomous vehicle platform and explore how to leverage Waymo’s autonomous technology to enhance the next generation of Toyota’s personally owned vehicles,” Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli said in a statement. “Our two companies share a vision of improving road safety and delivering increased mobility for all.”
The exact nature of how Waymo’s technology could come to passenger vehicles is unclear. But Waymo said that it continues to build a “generalizable driver” platform for ride-hailing and commercial purposes, and in the future, it seems that could extend to passenger cars too.
A Waymo spokesperson said he was unable to provide specific details at this time. Both companies called the move a preliminary agreement and a “potential collaboration,” but said they shared a common vision for a zero-traffic-accident future.
The Google-owned company has emerged as the leader in autonomous taxi rides in the U.S., having now logged tens of millions of miles without a driver and operates in San Francisco, Phoenix, Arizona and Los Angeles, with Austin and other cities seeing wider deployments soon.
As for Toyota, besides adding improved automated driver assistance systems to its cars as any automaker is doing, it too has dabbled in fully autonomous concepts before. In 2020, at the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games, Toyota used the autonomous e-Palette concept vehicles (pictured above) to shuttle athletes about. That vehicle used software from another Toyota partner, May Mobility, for deployment at a Toyota factory in Japan late last year.
The potential partnership would also hardly be the first tie-up Waymo has had with a major automaker. Besides running autonomous Jaguar I-Pace vehicles (which ended production last year) for years, Waymo has also announced tie-ups with Hyundai and the Geely Group brand Zeekr. Driverless Ioniq 5s will enter Waymo’s taxi fleets eventually, and a purpose-built Zeekr vehicle shown at CES is more bus-like to move larger groups of people.
Bonelli said both plans remain in place for the Waymo One taxi service. “To scale our technology, we are building an AV industry ecosystem, which includes multiple vehicle manufacturing partners,” he said.
Now the question is: what does this mean for the potential deployment of Waymo tech onto personally-owned cars? Sound off in the comments.
Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com
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