Waymo and Toyota have announced a partnership aimed at competing with Tesla in the development of personally owned self-driving vehicles.

Waymo is already widely regarded as the market leader in autonomous driving, as it currently provides approximately 250,000 autonomous paid rides per week in the few markets where it operates.

Tesla is playing catch-up as it plans to offer the same service Waymo offers, starting in Austin in June, with 10 to 20 vehicles.

However, there’s an area of autonomous driving where Tesla is still seen as the market leader: personally owned self-driving vehicles.

While Tesla has yet to deliver on its promise of unsupervised self-driving capability in its consumer vehicles, it uses the same technology in those as it plans to do in its internal fleet in Austin, albeit with more Austin-specific training and some teleoperation assists.

Some see this as an opportunity for Tesla to take the lead in personally owned autonomous vehicles if it can solve self-driving on its current hardware, which is a big if.

It already has smoothly integrated sensors that don’t clash with the designs of its vehicles, which is something that car buyers care about, but it’s not a big deal for an autonomous ride-hailing fleet, which is what Waymo has focused on so far.

Now, Waymo and Toyota have announced that they are exploring collaboration on autonomous vehicles :

Toyota Motor Corporation (“Toyota”) and Waymo reached a preliminary agreement to explore a collaboration focused on accelerating the development and deployment of autonomous driving technologies. Woven by Toyota will also join the potential collaboration as Toyota’s strategic enabler, contributing its strengths in advanced software and mobility innovation. This potential partnership is built on a shared vision of improving road safety and delivering increased mobility for all.

More specifically, the collaboration will focus on “next-generation personally owned vehicles (POVs)”:

Toyota and Waymo aim to combine their respective strengths to develop a new autonomous vehicle platform. In parallel, the companies will explore how to leverage Waymo’s autonomous technology and Toyota’s vehicle expertise to enhance next-generation personally owned vehicles (POVs). The scope of the collaboration will continue to evolve through ongoing discussions.

This would point to Waymo integrating its technology into Toyota’s vehicles for consumers.

While it’s still early, Waymo appears to be doing something Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, claimed Tesla would be doing soon: announcing deals to integrate its ‘Full Self-Driving’ technology in vehicles built by other automakers.

For more than a year, Musk has said that Tesla has been in discussions with other automakers about licensing its self-driving technology, which is still in development; however, no progress has been disclosed about those discussions yet.

Waymo also announced a similar partnership with Hyundai last year, though this one is expected to first focus on Waymo using Hyundai vehicles for its own autonomous ride-hailing fleet.

Electrek’s Take

This is a big deal. The world’s leader in autonomous vehicles is partnering with the world’s largest automaker.

It’s still early in the collaboration, as per the press release, but it does sound like Waymo is going to develop a hardware suite that can be fitted into Toyota’s consumer vehicles.

This would go after Musk’s argument that Waymo can’t compete with Tesla due to the high cost of its autonomous vehicles.

Waymo’s counterargument is that it hasn’t focused on cost because safety is the priority, and the cost of the vehicles doesn’t matter as much if they are to be used in an internal ride-hailing fleet.