Waymo Enters Singapore as the Third Robotaxi Operator

Waymo will offer fully autonomous ride-hailing in Singapore in 2028, arriving as the city-state’s third public autonomous vehicle operator. An initial fleet of all-electric Jaguar I-PACE cars is due in the coming months, then a year of manual mapping in 2027, before any paid trip on the Waymo app.

The Alphabet unit is not opening an empty market. Grab and ComfortDelGro already carry residents on driverless shuttles in Punggol, and Grab is moving toward on-demand trips this year. Waymo is bringing a robotaxi that books on its own app, two years after those shuttles went public.

Waymo Joins a Market That Already Has Riders

On 18 September 2026, at Google’s office in Mapletree Business City, Transport Minister Jeffrey Siow stood with Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana and said the company was coming in. The Land Transport Authority put the same fact in plainer terms, joining ComfortDelGro and Grab as Singapore’s newest autonomous vehicle operator.

That wording is the story the overseas launch copy skipped. Singapore is running three stacks at once: Grab with China’s WeRide, ComfortDelGro with China’s Pony.ai, and now Waymo with the system it already uses for paid trips in the United States. LTA framed the addition as a bid to attract world-class players and keep the industry competitive, not as a blank-slate debut.

Waymo still has no local permit to carry paying strangers. Cars must pass a safety assessment at the Centre of Excellence for Testing and Research of AVs at Nanyang Technological University, known as CETRAN, before they can run on public roads. LTA and CETRAN built those tests with the Traffic Police. Insurance and a black box recorder are required too.

THREE OPERATORS, THREE CLOCKS

Siow told the room the national passenger fleet is 16 passenger vehicles, all in Punggol. Grab’s own count on 14 September was 10 WeRide GXRs. He said existing operators plus Waymo should take the total to several hundred vehicles in the next two years, still a sliver of the human taxi and private-hire ranks.

Look who has landed in Singapore! 👀
 
Fresh off the plane from the US, we're welcoming Waymo as Singapore's newest autonomous vehicle (#AV) operator, joining ComfortDelGro and Grab. 🚗🛜
 #RideTheFuture pic.twitter.com/IaS4iIqdul

— LTA (@LTAsg) September 18, 2026

The transport authority’s welcome post treated Waymo as a guest joining a club of two. Replies immediately asked when Tesla would get the same nod. That is a different product fight. Tesla has no robotaxi permit here. The live contest is among the three operators LTA has already named.

The Decade Singapore Spent Waiting for a Robotaxi

Siow has been around this file longer than the current trial. He said Singapore has been preparing for driverless vehicles for more than a decade, and that he was a transport officer when the CETRAN test idea took shape. In the years after that, he said, the machines did not look ready for a real city, so the state put them in closed places: the airport, the seaport, factories.

The public version of the dream is older than Punggol. In August 2016, MIT spin-off nuTonomy began a public self-driving taxi trial in the one-north district, using a handful of modified Renault Zoe and Mitsubishi i-MiEV cars with an engineer in the seat. Officials at the company talked about a commercial self-driving taxi fleet in Singapore by 2018. Grab signed on that September so its app could call the cars. Aptiv later bought nuTonomy; the tech fed into Motional. The 2018 fleet date never became a citywide service.

CETRAN itself was established in August 2016 as a government-NTU centre. Its two-hectare test track opened on 22 November 2017, built to copy Singapore roads, signs and rules. Every autonomous vehicle still has to clear that gate. The decade was not empty. It was a long closed-course and geofenced interval that never produced a scaled robotaxi.

FROM ONE-NORTH TO A 2028 DATE

1. August 2016: nuTonomy starts a public self-driving taxi trial in one-north and talks up a commercial fleet by 2018.
2. August 2016: CETRAN is established; the test centre opens on 22 November 2017.
3. June 2025: Siow takes his first driverless ride and later says the second one is when he stopped watching the wheel.
4. 1 April 2026: Grab and WeRide open public shuttle rides in Punggol, after community rides in January.
5. 22 June 2026: ComfortDelGro opens Zig Driverless public rides in the same town, on Pony.ai tech.
6. 7 July 2026: the transport ministry, manpower ministry, NTUC, Grab and ComfortDelGro announce a driver transition package.
7. 14 September 2026: Grab pledges to grow its fleet fivefold and to trial on-demand trips.
8. 18 September 2026: Waymo sets 2027 mapping and a 2028 paid launch on its own app.

Siow told Mawakana in March 2026, at the Googleplex in Mountain View, that Singapore’s attitude toward driverless vehicles had changed. He wanted the country to move past small-scale testing and to bring in the best operators. The Punggol shuttles were the proof of life. Waymo is the first operator with a large paid US robotaxi record to put a public year on the same city.

Grab and ComfortDelGro Already Run the Roads

About 20,000 people have already ridden driverless vehicles in Punggol, Siow said, and 99% of passengers would recommend the trip. After nine months of trials he said residents were asking when the cars would leave that town, and when they could ride to other places. The existing fleet has covered more than 160,000 km on fixed routes without a major accident.

Grab got there first on the public calendar. Community rides with WeRide began in January 2026. Public rides followed on 1 April. On 14 September, four days before the Waymo event, Grab said it would grow from 10 to 50 vehicles over the next six months. Its ten WeRide GXRs have logged over 110,000 km in autonomous mode and served more than 12,000 unique riders, with over 1,000 people on a waitlist for new trips.

Alex Hungate, Grab’s president and chief operating officer, said the company has the most experience operating autonomous vehicles in Southeast Asia and will add them in a way that sits beside its driver network. GrabAcademy and WeRide have certified 30 safety operators, and six of those people are also certified as remote operators. Grab is preparing an on-demand, point-to-point service across selected Punggol stops, with commercial fares from the fourth quarter of 2026. The current fixed-route shuttles stay free while that trial runs. Hungate’s longer target is thousands of autonomous vehicles across Southeast Asia by 2030.

ComfortDelGro’s path is the taxi incumbent’s path. Zig Driverless public rides began on 22 June 2026, booked in the Zig app or on BookingSG, free of charge, as the group’s second autonomous public service after a robotaxi pilot in Guangzhou. Cheng Siak Kian, ComfortDelGro’s managing director and group chief executive, tied the launch to a goal of moving about 10% of the group’s global point-to-point fleet onto autonomous vehicles by 2030. Those cars still run loops with set stops. They are not yet a citywide hail.

Siow said the next step inside Punggol is point-to-point service across the estate, adding pick-up points toward places people actually name, including Sengkang General Hospital. Beyond Punggol he named one or two more HDB towns further from the city, Tampines North and Tengah, as candidates that need more options. Grab wants to leave Punggol too, subject to approval. The Chinese-stack operators are already arguing for the same expansion Waymo will have to earn from scratch.

Booked Only Through the Waymo App

Waymo’s product is the thing Grab and ComfortDelGro have not shipped: a paid, fully driverless hail on a dedicated app, using the same Driver software that already carries passengers in US cities. The company said the Singapore work follows more than 20 million fully autonomous rides and more than 300 million fully autonomous kilometres, with a 94% reduction in injury-causing crashes compared with human drivers in the US cities where it runs fully on its own.

The cars will be Jaguar I-PACE crossovers, all electric. Waymo did not give a headcount. In 2027, trained specialists will drive them by hand so the system can learn local road geometry and monsoon rain. Paid rides, if LTA signs off, open in 2028 through the Waymo app. That last clause is the competitive cut. WeRide’s shuttles live inside Grab. Pony.ai’s shuttles live inside Zig. Waymo is keeping the customer.

Singapore has built one of the safest, most efficient, and most forward-thinking transportation ecosystems in the world. Their focus on reliability, sustainability, and human-centric progress directly mirrors how we have built Waymo’s technology and service.

Tekedra Mawakana, Co-CEO of Waymo, Singapore launch statement

She also said Waymo would listen to the community, create skilled local operations jobs, and work with MOT and LTA to sit beside the transit network rather than replace it. In cities where Waymo already sells rides, more than a third of San Francisco trips start or end near a transit station. The pitch here is first- and last-mile, late hours, and industrial pockets where human drivers would rather not go. Siow used the same list. Trains and buses stay the cheap, high-capacity spine. Driverless cars fill gaps.

He added a smaller, local note. Google and Singapore already share digital infrastructure and research ties, and MOT sits next door to the Mapletree office. The first people to ride a Waymo here, he said, will probably be Google staff working in that building. He offered his own team for the tests. That is how a reference-customer state talks when it wants a famous operator on its roads without pretending the MRT is going away.

Waymo listed Tokyo, London and Munich as other cities on the same global calendar. Singapore is the first Southeast Asian date, and the first time the company has to teach the Driver a monsoon. Rain, spray and tropical downpours are not a San Francisco edge case. They are the 2027 syllabus.

Seventy Thousand Drivers Set the Pace

LTA’s line on labour was as firm as its welcome. The government, it said, will not allow autonomous deployment to run ahead of its ability to retrain and support affected drivers. Siow put numbers on that caution. Several hundred driverless cars in two years would still be a small fraction of more than 70,000 taxi and private-hire drivers. New work will appear in fleet management, remote operations, maintenance, testing and data. Some of those jobs, he said, will be open to today’s drivers, and the state will subsidise up to 90% of salaries during training.

THE DRIVER MATH THE CARS MUST CLEAR

• Human bench: More than 70,000 taxi and private-hire drivers now, against 16 passenger autonomous vehicles in Punggol.
• Near-term fleet: Several hundred autonomous vehicles in the next two years if Grab’s expansion and Waymo’s arrivals both land.
• Salary support: Up to 90% during reskilling on career conversion programmes for safety operators, remote operators and fleet roles.
• Training cash: S$20 an hour for short courses, capped at 80 hours, or S$1,600 (US$1,240) per driver, from January 2027.

The July package was built with the manpower ministry, NTUC, Grab and ComfortDelGro. It adds career guidance and a conversion track for public-transport jobs, including buses, so a driver who does not want a remote-ops headset still has a path. GrabAcademy is a registered training provider. Siow repeated the 90% pledge at the Waymo event so the new operator would hear it in the same hour as the applause.

That is why a 2028 robotaxi date can coexist with a government that is already letting shuttles run. The constraint is not a slogan about innovation. It is a headcount. Siow also reminded the room that Singapore still records one fatal road accident every three days. He listed the usual human failures driverless systems do not copy: drink, rage, speed. Safety is the political permission structure. Labour is the throttle.

Testing Starts in Labrador and Harbourfront

Waymo’s first Singapore map is not Punggol. Siow said testing and preparations will start in the west, at Labrador and Harbourfront, with trips to work, weekend runs, and industrial areas that have fewer transport options. That is a different street diet from a new-town shuttle loop: harbour traffic, malls, the cable-car zone, and the roads that feed the container side of the island.

He also said Waymo will open a local office and joked that young Singaporeans could hand resumes to the visiting team that day. Mawakana’s jobs line and his office line are the same bargain. The state wants the software and the headcount onshore, not a ghost fleet run from Mountain View.

WHERE THE NEXT CARS ARE MEANT TO GO

• Punggol, now: Fixed-route shuttles already public; point-to-point across the estate comes next, with more stops including Sengkang General Hospital.
• Tampines North and Tengah: HDB towns further from the core that Siow flagged for extra options after Punggol.
• Labrador and Harbourfront: Waymo’s first mapping and test patch, including work, weekend and industrial trips.
• Island-wide hail: Still a 2028 intention on the Waymo app, after CETRAN and LTA sign off.

Grab will try to leave Punggol with a larger fleet before Waymo’s specialists have finished a year of monsoon driving. ComfortDelGro will keep using Zig, the booking habit its taxi riders already have. Waymo will spend 2027 teaching a Jaguar how to read this island, then ask to sell rides on an app that does not belong to either incumbent.

nuTonomy once said 2018. The shuttles said 2026 and meant a few neighbourhood loops. Waymo said 2028 and meant a commercial hail. The winners on that calendar are the operators who already have riders and a local app. The loser, if the throttle stays on labour, is any plan that treats 70,000 drivers as a rounding error. LTA has now invited a third stack into that argument, and the first paid Waymo trip is still a date on a slide.