Waymo Targets Singapore for 2028, Two Rivals Already Carry Riders

Waymo said Sept. 17 it plans to open a fully autonomous ride-hailing service in Singapore in 2028, its first Southeast Asian market. Two competitors, WeRide and Pony AI, have already been carrying riders through a fixed route in the city-state's Punggol district since April.

Waymo's own blog post says an initial fleet of all-electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles will arrive in Singapore "in the coming months," followed by a 2027 phase in which trained specialists manually drive the cars to adapt the Waymo Driver to local road geometry and monsoon weather, ahead of a public launch through the Waymo app in 2028. Waymo co-chief executive Tekedra Mawakana said "Singapore has built one of the safest, most efficient and most forward-thinking transportation ecosystems in the world," while Singapore Transport Minister Jeffrey Siow said the country "welcomes Waymo's entry as our newest autonomous vehicle operator," according to Fortune's report on the announcement. Waymo's post does not give a fleet size, a fare structure, or a service area for Singapore.

What is already running in Punggol

Grab and WeRide put the Ai.R autonomous ride service into public operation in Punggol on April 1, running two full shuttle routes plus a shorter "Mini Route" on weekdays from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., according to Grab's own release. By launch the fleet had logged more than 30,000 kilometers of autonomous mileage and carried over 1,000 riders during an earlier trial, with rides free until a discounted commercial fare begins in mid-2026 and 14 Grab driver-partners certified as onboard safety operators. "This achievement reflects our technological readiness and shared commitment with Grab to advance the future of urban mobility," said Kerry Xu, WeRide's general manager for Singapore.

Pony AI, a Chinese autonomous-driving company, and ComfortDelGro, Singapore's largest taxi operator, began an invite-only passenger service on a 12-kilometer Punggol route the same week, linking the Northshore and Waterway Sunrise residential estates to Punggol Coast Mall and Oasis Terraces, CnEVPost reported April 7. Pony AI founder and chief executive James Peng called it "an important step in the company's global commercialization strategy." The service moved onto ComfortDelGro's Zig ride-hailing app for public bookings on June 24, Zagdaily reported, with Peng saying the focus was now "delivering safe, reliable and convenient autonomous mobility that can complement existing public transport systems."

Operator	Singapore passengers since	Status as of September 2026
WeRide + Grab	April 1, 2026	Public rides in Punggol, paid fares from mid-2026
Pony AI + ComfortDelGro	April 7, 2026 (invite-only), June 24 (public app)	Public bookings via Zig app
Waymo	Not yet operating	2027 test-driving phase, 2028 public launch planned

Tokyo got a fleet number. Singapore didn't.

Singapore is not even Waymo's first Asian commitment this month. Two days earlier, on Sept. 15, Waymo, Japanese taxi-app operator GO and taxi operator Nihon Kotsu announced a 2027 target for Tokyo, naming a specific fleet target of about 100 Jaguar I-Pace vehicles built on manual mapping done throughout 2025 and supervised testing across seven central Tokyo wards since. Waymo's Singapore post gives no comparable number for fleet size, target wards, or how long supervised testing has already run, which makes Tokyo the more specific of the two announcements despite Singapore's later, better-defined 2028 date.

The gap is the timeline, not the technology

Waymo cites 20 million fully autonomous rides and more than 300 million fully autonomous kilometers in the U.S. cities where it already operates without a safety driver, a scale neither Punggol operator is close to. But scale in California and Arizona does not shorten the localization work Waymo itself says Singapore requires: a full year of manually driven adaptation to left-hand traffic patterns, dense urban geometry and monsoon rainfall before the Waymo Driver runs there unsupervised. WeRide and Pony AI, by contrast, went from regulatory approval to a fixed, limited route with an onboard human operator in a matter of months, a narrower bet that trades Waymo's driverless-everywhere ambition for a route Singapore's regulators could sign off on faster. Both Punggol services still carry a human in the loop: Grab certified 14 driver-partners as onboard safety operators for Ai.R, and neither company's public materials say when, if ever, that requirement comes off. Waymo's pitch is the opposite structure, a car with no seat for a supervisor at all, which is also why its own timeline runs two years longer than either competitor's route through the same regulator.

What would change this read

The number to watch is not 2028, which Waymo can move in either direction before anyone can hold it to a date, but whether WeRide and Pony AI still require an onboard safety operator when Waymo's driverless cars arrive. If both Chinese-linked services are still supervised in two years, Waymo enters a market where the regulatory bar for a truly driverless robotaxi has not yet been cleared by anyone, and arriving second matters less. If either has gone fully unsupervised before Waymo's first Singapore rider, the story becomes that Waymo let two competitors define what a safe robotaxi looks like to Singaporean regulators before it ever put a wheel on the road there. The same question applies to Tokyo, where Waymo's 100-vehicle target and its 2027 date arrive a full year ahead of Singapore's; whichever city actually seats a paying rider first will tell you more about how Waymo sequences an Asia rollout than either announcement does on its own.