Waymo has arrived in Tokyo.
The Alphabet-owned robotaxi company announced on Wednesday that its Jaguar I-PACE vehicles will begin mapping out seven central wards of Tokyo — Minato, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Chiyoda, Chūō, Shinagawa — which represent some of the city’s major commercial hubs.
The cars, however, won’t be driverless yet.
Nihon Kotsu and GO, two of Japan’s largest taxi platforms, will manage the fleet and manually drive the vehicles. This will help the Waymo cars gather data and learn the country’s unique driving patterns, such as left-hand traffic.
“Initially, the Nihon Kotsu drivers will manually drive the car, just like you or I would with our hands on the wheel and no autonomous driving enabled,” Sandy Karp, a spokesperson for Waymo, told Business Insider in an email. “Waymo will use the information from these driving missions to begin adapting and validating its autonomous driving technology for operation in Japan.”
Waymo will begin the mapping process with 25 vehicles, Karp said.
The spokesperson sent BI a photo of one of the vehicles backing out of a shipment container at an undisclosed port in Japan earlier in March. In the photo, a Nihon Kotsu crew member watches the Waymo as it pulls out of the container.
Karp said the vehicles have since been moved to a depot and are “getting upfitted with some adjustments” to comply with local laws and regulations, including new vehicle signage and an additional blindspot mirror attachment.
Yasuharu Wakabayashi, president of Nihon Kotsu, said in a statement that the company’s drivers have trained in the US and are “well-prepared to begin introducing Waymo’s vehicles to Tokyo.”
“We anticipate that autonomous robotaxis will help address driver shortages in the future,” he said. “We view this initiative as the first step toward building an ideal ecosystem that unites people and advanced technology.”
Waymo’s approach to a fully autonomous driver system includes mapping out a specific area with its vehicles before it can launch to the public without human supervision.
This differs from other autonomous vehicle-focused companies like Wayve or Tesla, which rely more heavily on end-to-end learning models for its self-driving software. This essentially allows the car to learn to drive in its environment on the go without the need to map out an area beforehand.
Proponents of this approach argue that end-to-end learning allows for a more efficient ability to scale. Waymo’s director of product management, Vishay Nihalani, told BI at a recent autonomous vehicle conference in Los Angeles that as Waymo’s driver continues to learn, the robotaxi will require less time to map out any given city.
Waymo has also sought partnerships with third parties, including rideshare platforms, to help manage its fleets in some cities.
In Austin and Atlanta, for example, Uber manages Waymos’s fleet, which includes vehicle maintenance and depot operations. In San Francisco, Waymo maintains the vehicles on its own.
According to the company, Waymo now provides more than 200,000 paid passenger weekly trips.
The service now operates in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta, and Silicon Valley geofenced areas.
