Waymo has a date for Singapore, and it’s 2028. It still doesn’t have one for New York City, Chicago or Washington, DC.
That gap tells you more about the state of the robotaxi business than any milestone announcement does. The Alphabet-owned company says it will launch a commercial robotaxi service in Singapore in 2028, adding another foreign flag to a map that’s filling up faster abroad than at home.
The timeline is slower than the headline suggests
Vehicles start arriving in Singapore in “the coming months,” according to the company. Then comes mapping and autonomous testing with human safety drivers behind the wheel in 2027. Only after that does Waymo say it is “working toward offering fully autonomous ride-hailing to the public” by 2028.
So that’s roughly two years of groundwork before a paying rider gets in. Anyone reading the announcement as a launch should reset the clock.
Singapore gets to say no
Waymo needs approval from Singapore’s Land Transport Authority before it can accept passengers. The city-state requires every autonomous vehicle to pass a safety assessment at the Centre of Excellence for Testing and Research, known as CETRAN, before it touches a public road.
Those tests were developed by the LTA and CETRAN with input from the Traffic Police. It’s a harder gate than most US jurisdictions impose, and it’s the part of this plan least under Waymo’s control.
The company isn’t arriving cold, though. It set up a corporate entity in Singapore earlier this year and sits on the country’s Steering Committee on Autonomous Vehicles.
It’s crowded ground already
Singapore has spent years turning itself into a proving ground for this technology. Local authorities have green-lit autonomous freight delivery and road-sweepers, plus self-driving buses for airport workers.
And Waymo isn’t the first robotaxi operator to try. Motional, the US-based company majority owned by Hyundai, ran a robotaxi pilot there back in 2016. A decade later, nobody’s running a commercial service.
The overseas list keeps growing
Singapore joins a queue. Waymo has said it plans to launch in London by the end of 2026 and Tokyo in 2027, and it will bring robotaxis to Munich, Germany, in late 2027, its first expansion into the European Union.
“Singapore has built one of the safest, most efficient, and most forward-thinking transportation ecosystems in the world,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a statement. “Their focus on reliability, sustainability, and human-centric progress directly mirrors how we have built Waymo’s technology and service.”
Where the cars actually are right now
Domestically, Waymo announced several new markets this year, including Nashville, Denver, San Diego and Las Vegas. It runs around 4,000 vehicles across about 15 US cities.
But regulatory hurdles and political opposition have locked it out of some of the country’s most important ones. While that fight drags on in America, the company has signaled it intends to keep growing overseas, with no signs of slowing down.
Watch the CETRAN assessment in 2027. That’s the checkpoint that decides whether 2028 is a launch date or a press release.
