Toyota to build Waymo-ready bZ4X at Takaoka for 2027 Japan test fleet

Toyota will assemble the robotaxi at its Takaoka plant in Toyota City, Aichi Prefecture, and fit Waymo's self-driving hardware at the same site.

The first visible changes for riders are modest: extra rear legroom, automatic doors, a power liftgate and ambient lighting. Waymo did not share sensor specifications, unit volumes or what each vehicle costs. Initial operations to test and validate the fleet begin in Japan in 2027. The two companies said deployment to the UK and other Waymo-serviced markets is planned for later years, with no dates attached.

The vehicle is the first product from the preliminary agreement the two companies announced in April 2025 to explore autonomous driving, including for personally owned cars. Toyota said the whole process, from assembling the base vehicle to fitting Waymo's hardware, happens under one roof. Toyota is the world's best-selling automaker. Electrek's take on the announcement was that Waymo's binding constraint is cars rather than software.

Why Waymo needs car factories

Electrek counted the bZ4X as Waymo's fourth vehicle platform, after the Jaguar I-Pace, the Zeekr-built Ojai van and the Hyundai Ioniq 5. Waymo's US fleet is still mostly I-Pace SUVs, a model Jaguar no longer produces. Hyundai is reportedly in talks to supply up to 50,000 Ioniq 5 robotaxis by 2028. In the US, the refreshed bZ4X is sold simply as the Toyota bZ, starting at $34,900. Toyota and Pony.ai began mass-producing bZ4X-based robotaxis in China earlier this year. A cheap, high-volume base car matters when the bottleneck is vehicles rather than software.

What the expansion costs

Alphabet does not report Waymo as its own line. It sits inside Other Bets, a catch-all segment that analysts treat as a rough proxy for the robotaxi business. That segment posted $372 million in third-quarter revenue, up 8% from a year earlier and equal to 0.3% of Alphabet's total sales. It lost $2.047 billion at the operating line, up from $1.426 billion a year earlier. Revenue grew by roughly $28 million while the operating loss grew by roughly $621 million, so the segment added more than twenty dollars of new loss for every new dollar of revenue.

Each new country needs regulatory work, local staff and a fresh round of testing before it can charge a single rider. Shattered.io, which analysed the results, described the overseas expansion as running on borrowed money and noted Waymo's first debt deal.

Tokyo first, then the map

In September, Waymo said it is targeting fully driverless commercial rides in Tokyo in 2027 with taxi operator Nihon Kotsu and ride-hailing app GO, scaling to about 100 vehicles, pending regulatory approval. For scale, Waymo now does over 500,000 paid rides a week across 15 US metros. It picked Toronto as its first Canadian city earlier in October, with riders targeted for 2028. Toyota said the partnership marks a major milestone in the expansion of Japan's first fully autonomous ride-hailing service using high-volume, domestically manufactured vehicles.

Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov said the company has shown it is "up to 20x safer than human drivers" on serious crash injuries where it operates. The figure is Waymo's own.

He said the Toyota partnership would help bring autonomous driving to "key international markets like Japan". Hiroki Nakajima is a Toyota executive vice president. He said "safety technology makes the biggest difference when it reaches as many people as possible".

What happens next

Commercial driverless rides in Tokyo still depend on regulatory approval. Toyota and Waymo will keep working on autonomous technology for personally owned Toyota vehicles, and on safety projects with Woven by Toyota, the automaker's software arm. The UK fleet has no date at all.