Waymo's Self-Driving Taxis Are Heading to Munich
Waymo will start sending self-driving taxis to Munich within weeks. The cars will first drive around the city to create detailed digital maps and test the routes with a human safety driver behind the wheel. The goal is to launch a paid, fully driverless ride service in Munich by the end of 2027. This makes Germany the second European country Waymo is entering, after the United Kingdom, where the company plans to start offering rides in London as early as September 2026. Munich would be Waymo's first city inside the European Union. Engadget
Waymo, which is owned by Google's parent company Alphabet, is working with officials at every level of government in Germany to get the permits needed to offer rides without a human driver. That process runs alongside the technical work of mapping Munich's streets, which must happen before any driverless cars are sent out. The approach follows the same playbook Waymo used in U.S. cities: first map the streets and drive with a safety driver, then test under supervision, then gradually remove the human driver once the system meets safety targets.
The Munich plan is part of a wider European expansion. Waymo set up offices in France, Spain, and the Netherlands in June 2026, around the same time it opened its German office. It also registered a subsidiary in Switzerland, confirmed earlier in August. None of those countries has a launch date yet, but the offices suggest Waymo has plans well beyond the two announced cities. Engadget
Waymo's push into Europe is backed by safety data the company has been sharing publicly. Its latest report covers more than 220 million miles driven in fully autonomous mode through the end of March 2026, across five areas including Atlanta for the first time. The company now drives more than 4 million fully autonomous miles every week. Waymo
Compared to human drivers in the same areas and time periods, Waymo's system had 94% fewer crashes causing serious or fatal injuries, 82% fewer crashes serious enough to trigger airbags, and 82% fewer crashes involving any reported injury. For people outside cars, the results were also strong: 93% fewer injury-causing crashes involving pedestrians, 84% fewer involving cyclists, and 84% fewer involving motorcyclists. In Atlanta alone, across more than 5.4 million autonomous miles, the system had 94% fewer airbag-deployment crashes and 86% fewer injury-involving crashes than the human benchmark. Both results were described as statistically significant. Waymo
Over the full history of its operations, Waymo estimates it has avoided 47 crashes causing serious or fatal injuries, 305 airbag-deployment crashes, and 707 crashes causing any kind of injury, compared with what would be expected if humans had driven those same miles. The full dataset and methodology are available at waymo.com/safety/impact, and the safety criteria used before deploying on public roads are documented in a research paper. Carol Flannagan, a research professor at UMTRI, has said Waymo now drives enough miles to make fair comparisons to human drivers on crash rates. Waymo
The safety record does come with setbacks. In December 2025, Waymo recalled 3,067 vehicles in the United States because of a software issue. The problem was fixed through an over-the-air update, meaning the cars were patched remotely without a visit to a repair shop, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Reuters
The company is also raising money on a scale that matches its ambitions. A January 2026 Reuters report, citing Bloomberg News, said Waymo was seeking about $16 billion in a funding round that would value the company at nearly $110 billion. Reuters
The rules in Germany and across the EU will differ from what Waymo faces in the United States. Germany has its own laws for testing and deploying self-driving vehicles. On top of that, EU-level rules on data protection, liability, and vehicle certification add requirements that U.S. operators have not had to deal with in the same way. Waymo's decision to work with federal, state, and local officials in Munich at the same time suggests the company knows the permitting process will be neither quick nor straightforward.
The broader context here is that Waymo is arriving in Europe at a moment when no European city has a commercial fully driverless ride service running at scale. If Waymo meets its London target in 2026 and its Munich goal by end of 2027, it would be the first to offer such a service in two of Europe's largest ride-hailing markets, ahead of any local or rival autonomous operators. The offices in France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland suggest the company is laying the groundwork to expand even further, though no dates have been set for those markets.
The safety data, while published by Waymo itself and therefore subject to the usual cautions about self-reported numbers, has reached a volume where outside researchers consider the sample large enough for direct comparison to human drivers. That matters because European regulators will be evaluating permit applications based on accumulated evidence, not on promises. The December recall, fixed through a software update, is a reminder that system-wide issues will surface even in a mature autonomous fleet, and that the ability to fix problems remotely is itself part of the safety story.
Whether Munich's 2027 target holds will depend on how quickly regulators approve permits, how completely the streets get mapped, and whether Waymo can match its U.S. safety record in a driving environment with different road layouts, street signs, cycling paths, and winter weather. The plan is ambitious, but it is not without precedent for a company now racking up miles at this pace.
