The three-way MOU marks Uber’s first autonomous vehicle partnership in Japan, and adds Tokyo to a global rollout already targeting ten cities.
Tokyo’s streets are, by common consensus, among the most demanding driving environments on Earth. Dense junctions, narrow lanes, complex signage, and a culture of precision that tolerates neither delay nor error make the Japanese capital a city where even experienced human drivers proceed with caution. It is precisely this difficulty that makes it the right place to prove something.
Uber, British autonomous driving startup Wayve, and Nissan announced on Thursday that they have signed a memorandum of understanding to develop and pilot a robotaxi service in Tokyo, with the first deployments planned for late 2026, pending regulatory approval.
The partnership marks Uber’s first autonomous vehicle collaboration in Japan.
Under the arrangement, Nissan LEAF electric vehicles will be fitted with Wayve’s AI Driver, an end-to-end autonomous system the company has been testing in Japan since early 2025, and made available to passengers through Uber’s ride-hailing platform. In the initial phase, a trained safety operator will remain in each vehicle.
Uber intends to launch the service through a licensed taxi partner in Japan and is currently in the process of selecting one.
For Wayve, founded in Cambridge in 2017 by Alex Kendall and Amar Shah, the announcement is a further step in a commercialisation push that crystallised last month. On 25 February, the company raised $1.2 billion in a Series D round led by Eclipse, Balderton, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, valuing it at $8.6 billion. Uber, Microsoft, Nvidia, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Stellantis were all among the participants.
Uber has separately committed up to $300 million in milestone-based capital to support multi-year robotaxi deployments across Wayve’s network.
Tokyo is the second city confirmed for that network. London is first, with robotaxi trials there expected to begin earlier in 2026. The broader plan covers more than ten cities globally.
Wayve’s core technical argument is that autonomous driving should not require city-by-city re-engineering. Its AI Driver learns from real-world data and operates without high-definition maps, which the company says enables deployment in new environments with minimal localisation overhead.
It claims to be the first autonomous vehicle developer to have driven zero-shot, without prior city-specific tuning, across more than 500 cities in Europe, North America, and Japan in a single year.
“Tokyo represents an important step forward in bringing embodied intelligence to one of the world’s most sophisticated mobility markets,” said Wayve CEO Alex Kendall. “We have been testing our technology throughout Japan since early 2025, building extensive experience in the country’s unique road environments.”
For Nissan, the partnership deepens an existing relationship. The automaker has been integrating Wayve’s AI into its next-generation ProPILOT driver-assistance system, with first consumer vehicles expected in fiscal year 2027. The Tokyo robotaxi pilot is, in effect, a commercial proving ground for technology that Nissan plans to embed in mass-market cars.
“Nissan’s vision is to bring mobility intelligence to everyday life,” said Nissan president and CEO Ivan Espinosa. “This initiative reflects how we translate that ambition into real-world applications.”
For Uber, Japan has long been a complicated market. The country’s taxi licensing regime is strict, and Uber operates there primarily through a licensed-partner model rather than the direct driver network it uses elsewhere. The robotaxi partnership sidesteps that structural constraint: autonomous vehicles operated through a licensed taxi company fit more neatly into Japan’s regulatory framework than a conventional Uber deployment.
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi framed the collaboration as part of a longer-term commitment rather than an opportunistic move. “Autonomous mobility is becoming an increasingly important part of the Uber platform,” he said. “We look forward to expanding into Tokyo and introducing new, modern ways to travel in some of the world’s largest cities.”
The late-2026 timeline is subject to discussions with relevant authorities — a caveat that matters more in Tokyo than in most cities. Japan has developed a relatively permissive legal framework for autonomous vehicle testing, but commercial deployment at scale requires ongoing engagement with national and municipal regulators, and the country’s safety culture means that any incident during the pilot phase would draw intense scrutiny.
That scrutiny, arguably, is the point. If Wayve’s AI Driver can establish a credible safety record in Tokyo traffic, the argument for deploying it elsewhere becomes considerably harder to resist.
