Toyota will build Waymo's autonomous bZ4X and fit its hardware at the Takaoka plant

Toyota Motor Corporation and Waymo announced on October 30 what they described as the next phase of their autonomous driving collaboration, building on a preliminary agreement reached in April 2025. Toyota will build the vehicles at its Takaoka plant in Toyota City, Aichi Prefecture, and Waymo said the entire process would take place under one roof, from assembling the base vehicle to integrating Waymo’s autonomous hardware.

The two companies said they would begin initial operations to test and validate an autonomous Toyota bZ4X fleet in Japan in 2027, with deployment to the United Kingdom and other markets Waymo serves planned for the following years. Waymo described the program as a milestone in expanding Japan’s first fully autonomous ride-hailing service using high-volume, domestically manufactured vehicles. The custom-outfitted bZ4X was described as carrying automatic doors, a power liftgate, ambient lighting and additional rear legroom.

Dmitri Dolgov, co-chief executive of Waymo, said the company’s own figures put it up to 20 times safer than human drivers for serious crash injuries in the areas where it operates — a claim attributable to Waymo and not independently established. Hiroki Nakajima, a member of Toyota’s board of directors and an executive vice president, said Toyota would in parallel continue to explore how integrating vehicles with traffic infrastructure could make roads safer.

Both companies said they would continue to explore autonomous driving technology for personally owned Toyota vehicles. Woven by Toyota said separately the same day that it was exploring how Toyota vehicles could connect with the infrastructure around them, work it described as complementing both fully autonomous fleets and vehicles with partial automation. Neither company disclosed fleet volumes, financial terms or an ownership structure, and Alphabet, Waymo’s parent, filed no current report with the Securities and Exchange Commission about the agreement; its quarterly report had gone in the day before it.