Waymo and Toyota join up to challenge Tesla in self-driving car race

Waymo and Toyota have announced a preliminary agreement to jointly develop and deploy autonomous driving technologies. Waymo is a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google's parent company), and it has established itself as a frontrunner in the autonomous driving sector. The company currently operates a successful autonomous ride-hailing service, providing approximately 250,000 paid rides weekly in select markets.

Tesla is still a dominant force in the electric car market and is now looking to expand its offerings in the autonomous ride-hailing space. The company plans to launch a similar service to Waymo's in Austin, Texas, starting with a limited fleet of 10 to 20 vehicles in June.

Despite not yet delivering on its promise of fully unsupervised self-driving for consumers, Tesla uses the same underlying technology in its customer vehicles as it intends to use in its upcoming Austin ride-hailing fleet. This overlap is a potential opportunity for Tesla to strengthen its lead in the personal EV market if it can successfully refine its self-driving capabilities on the existing hardware.

The newly announced collaboration between Waymo and Toyota will combine their respective strengths to accelerate the advancement of autonomous driving. Woven by Toyota, the automaker's strategic entity focused on advanced software and mobility innovation, will also be part of this partnership. The primary goal is to develop a new autonomous vehicle platform. Simultaneously, the companies will explore integrating Waymo's autonomous technology into Toyota's future personally owned EVs. This suggests that consumers might soon have access to Toyota vehicles equipped with Waymo's highly regarded self-driving system.

This approach by Waymo echoes statements made by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who has previously mentioned ongoing discussions with other automakers about licensing Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" technology. No concrete progress on these discussions has ever been publicly disclosed. Interestingly, Waymo also announced a partnership with Hyundai last year, with the initial focus being the integration of Hyundai vehicles into Waymo's autonomous ride-hailing fleet.

The agreement between Waymo and Toyota is a big step towards making self-driving technology widely available in the electric car market. By combining Waymo's expertise in autonomous systems with Toyota's automotive manufacturing base, the partnership could challenge Tesla's dominance.

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