@itsolelehmann: btw the legal hoops Waymo has to jump through just to launch in Germany are insane Germany is easily the hardest regula…
Summary
Waymo faces extensive regulatory hurdles to launch its autonomous ride-hailing service in Germany, with a target start in late 2027.
View Cached Full Text
Cached at: 08/28/26, 05:56 PM
btw the legal hoops Waymo has to jump through just to launch in Germany are insane
Germany is easily the hardest regulatory environment they’ve ever faced.
Waymo had to register to lobby the German government more than 4 years before announcing the service
run a 2-year campaign aimed specifically at changing Germany’s rules for commercial autonomous driving
spend €170k-180k on German lobbying in 2025 alone
submit a 12-page filing to Brussels arguing over how “safe” should be measured, down to whether one death per 10 million driving hours is the right approval benchmark
warn that Europe’s proposed 1,500-car annual cap per robotaxi model would make a fleet impossible to scale
now they still have to pass tests designed to prove the cars are safer than human-driven vehicles
face tests where regulators can deliberately trigger system failures, scramble the sensor inputs and take the cars outside the conditions they were built for just to prove they fail safely
hard-code Germany’s rules for an unavoidable crash: protect human life above property and never rank one person’s life above another based on personal traits
build a control room where the robot asks a human for permission when German traffic law leaves it unable to continue
program the robot to ignore that same human if the approved move is unsafe
hire a supervisor with an engineering qualification, special Waymo training, the right driving licence and at most 3 penalty points
begin every day by test-driving every car, inspect it again every 90 days and send it through a government inspection every 6 months
clear 3 separate approval systems: one for the robot itself, one for the exact streets it can use and one just to charge passengers
all this for a company with 20M+ completed trips and hundreds of thousands of commercial rides every week
the first Munich cars will still be driven manually to map the city
their paid driverless target: late 2027
Waymo (@Waymo): Servus, München! 🇩🇪 We’re bringing the Waymo Driver to Germany. Over the coming weeks, our vehicles will arrive in Munich to begin laying the groundwork to launch our fully autonomous ride-hailing service in late 2027!
Read more:
Similar Articles
Free Waymo rides in California? You can thank a regulatory quirk.
A California regulatory delay prevents Waymo from charging for rides in its new Chinese-made Ojai robotaxi, offering free rides until at least September. The delay also blocks Waymo's expansion plans in Northern and Southern California.
@tnertz: I wonder if @waymo will soft launch Detroit service in Q3 @gbrulte
A Waymo Zeekr was spotted on I-96 near Detroit, fueling speculation about a possible soft launch of Waymo service in Detroit in Q3.
Waymo – Dallas Open to All
Waymo opens its fully autonomous ride-hailing service to everyone in Dallas, after onboarding nearly 150,000 riders since February, and announces upcoming testing at Love Field Airport and on freeways.
Uber’s Autonomous Vehicle Strategy: Slow Their Adoption
Uber is lobbying lawmakers to adopt regulations that would require robotaxi services to operate on hybrid human-robot networks, potentially forcing autonomous vehicle developers like Waymo and Tesla to use Uber's platform instead of their own apps, as seen in a proposed New Jersey bill.
@itsolelehmann: Waymo gets all the attention, but i think self-driving trucks will be even more important because they'll make *everyth…
Gatik secures $200M in funding at a $1B valuation to expand its driverless trucking operations, which have commercially completed over 100,000 fully driverless orders with high on-time delivery rates in supply chains.