Waymo is coming to Munich, with commercial service targeted for late 2027

Waymo has announced it is laying the groundwork for autonomous ride-hailing in Munich, starting with high-definition mapping and manual driving in the coming weeks. It aims to open a commercial service to the public toward the end of 2027.

Munich is getting robotaxis, though not for a while. Waymo says it is laying the groundwork for fully autonomous ride-hailing in the city, with vehicles appearing on local streets in the coming weeks under manual control.

The sequence is deliberate. High-definition mapping comes first, then testing with trained autonomous specialists behind the wheel, before the company aims to open a commercial service to the public toward the end of 2027.

It arrives with numbers behind it. Waymo reports more than 20 million trips completed and hundreds of thousands of commercial rides a week, on a sixth-generation fleet built to be cheaper to build.

“Munich is a world-class hub for mobility and engineering, and becoming part of this city marks an important milestone in our global expansion,” said co-chief executive Tekedra Mawakana, promising investment in local fleet operations and jobs.

The company also brought its safety case. It says data from more than 350 million fully autonomous kilometres shows 16 times fewer serious injury crashes than human drivers, alongside 14 times fewer injury crashes involving pedestrians.

Berlin’s welcome is where it gets interesting. Waymo “has now recognised Germany’s potential as a location offering legal certainty,” said Christian Hirte, parliamentary state secretary at the federal transport ministry.

Then he kept going. “Our goal must be to ensure that we in Europe not only use these technologies but also develop and operate them here,” Hirte said, in the same statement welcoming an American company to Munich.

That tension has a date on it. Germany passed the world’s first framework for commercialising Level 4 vehicles in 2021, and no German company has used it to run a driverless commercial fleet at scale.

The domestic contender is a shuttle. Volkswagen’s MOIA is putting autonomous ID. Buzz vehicles into Hamburg, while Wayve is on an Uber waitlist in London and Verne runs a commercial service in Zagreb.

Bavaria wants the pace picked up. “Now we need to move quickly from testing to real-world deployment,” said Florian Herrmann of the Bavarian State Chancellery, promising to “cut red tape and remove regulatory barriers.”

So Germany wrote the rulebook and is now hosting the company that read it most carefully, which is roughly where Europe stands on autonomy generally.