Waymo Targets Munich for Its First EU Robotaxi Service by 2027
Waymo will begin deploying robotaxis in Munich within weeks to map streets and conduct testing with safety drivers, with the goal of launching a commercial fully autonomous ride-hailing service in the German city by the end of 2027. The expansion makes Germany the second European country Waymo is entering, following the United Kingdom, where the company plans to start offering rides to the public in London as early as September 2026. Munich would be Waymo's first location inside the European Union. Engadget
The Alphabet subsidiary is working with local, state, and federal officials in Germany to secure the permits required to operate fully driverless rides. That regulatory engagement runs alongside the technical work of mapping Munich's streets, which will precede any driverless deployment. The sequencing mirrors what Waymo has done in U.S. markets: an initial mapping and safety-driver phase, followed by supervised testing, then a gradual removal of the human operator once performance criteria are met.
The Munich announcement comes amid a broader European buildout. Waymo established subsidiaries in France, Spain, and the Netherlands in June 2026, around the same time it set up its German office. It has also registered a subsidiary in Switzerland, confirmed earlier in August. None of those countries has a stated commercial launch timeline, but the corporate footprint signals intent well beyond the two announced cities. Engadget
Waymo's European push is backed by safety data the company has been publishing at increasing scale. Its latest analysis covers more than 220 million fully autonomous miles driven through the end of March 2026, across five operating areas including Atlanta for the first time. The company now logs more than 4 million fully autonomous miles per week. Waymo
Compared with human-driver benchmarks in the same areas and time periods, the Waymo Driver recorded 94% fewer crashes causing serious or fatal injuries, 82% fewer airbag-deployment crashes, and 82% fewer crashes involving any reported injury. For vulnerable road users specifically, the company reports 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 Waymo Driver was involved in 94% fewer airbag-deployment crashes and 86% fewer injury-involving crashes than the human benchmark, with both results described as statistically significant. Waymo
Over the lifetime of its operations, Waymo estimates it has avoided 47 crashes causing serious or fatal injuries, 305 airbag-deployment crashes, and 707 crashes causing injuries of any kind, compared with what would be expected had those miles been driven by humans. The full dataset and methodology are published at waymo.com/safety/impact, and the safety acceptance criteria used to evaluate the Waymo Driver's readiness before public-road deployment are documented in an arXiv paper. UMTRI Research Professor Carol Flannagan has commented that Waymo now drives enough miles to make direct comparisons to human drivers on crash rates. Waymo
The safety record provides a counterweight to operational setbacks. In December 2025, Waymo recalled 3,067 vehicles in the United States over a software issue, which was resolved through an over-the-air update, per the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Reuters
The company is also raising capital at a scale that fits its expansion ambitions. A January 2026 Reuters report, citing Bloomberg News, indicated Waymo was seeking approximately $16 billion in a financing round that would value it at nearly $110 billion. Reuters
The regulatory landscape in Germany and the EU more broadly will differ materially from the U.S. states where Waymo currently operates. Germany has its own framework for autonomous vehicle testing and deployment, and EU-level rules on data protection, liability, and vehicle certification add layers that U.S. operators have not had to navigate in the same form. The fact that Waymo is engaging federal, state, and local officials simultaneously in Munich suggests awareness that the permitting path will be neither short nor uniform.
The broader context here is that Waymo is entering Europe at a moment when the competitive field is far less developed than in the U.S. No European city currently has a commercial fully driverless ride-hailing service operating at scale. If Waymo meets its London timeline in 2026 and its Munich target by end of 2027, it would establish a first-mover position in two of Europe's largest ride-hailing markets before local or rival autonomous operators have built comparable services. The subsidiaries in France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland suggest the company is laying groundwork to extend that position further, though no timelines have been attached to those markets.
The safety data, while published by Waymo itself and thus subject to the usual caveats around self-reported metrics, has now reached a volume where external researchers consider the sample sizes meaningful for direct human comparison. That matters for European regulators who will be evaluating permit applications not on promise but on accumulated evidence. The recall in December, resolved via software update, is a reminder that fleet-wide issues will surface even in a mature autonomous system, and that the remediation model for software-defined vehicles is itself part of the safety story.
Whether Munich's 2027 target holds will depend on regulatory throughput, mapping completeness, and the company's ability to replicate its U.S. safety performance in a driving environment with different road geometry, signage, cycling infrastructure, and winter conditions. The plan is ambitious but not unprecedented for a company now accumulating miles at this rate.
