Waymo Prepares First-Ever Loan of Over $3 Billion from Pimco and Blackstone

Waymo, the autonomous vehicle development company under Alphabet, announced on September 18 that it plans to launch a full driverless electric vehicle ride-hailing service in Singapore by 2028, marking its first entry into the Southeast Asian market. The first batch of driverless electric vehicles to be deployed will be the Jaguar I-PACE, which will be shipped to Singapore in the coming months. Under the plan for 2027, trained vehicle operators will begin human-supervised test drives to train and tune the Waymo Driver system to familiarise it with Singapore's road characteristics and monsoon weather, before officially opening the service to the general public in 2028. Waymo is working closely with Singapore's Ministry of Transport and the Land Transport Authority, or LTA. Singapore's Minister for Transport Jeffrey Siow said Singapore welcomes Waymo's entry as the latest autonomous vehicle service provider. The move comes after Waymo earlier this week announced plans to launch Japan's first full commercial driverless taxi service in Tokyo by 2027. Waymo is currently valued at 126 billion US dollars as of last February, after raising 16 billion dollars, and continues to expand its fleet of driverless taxis amid fierce competition in the autonomous driving market with major rivals such as Amazon's Zoox and Tesla.

U.S. electric vehicle maker Lucid Group and Estonian ride-hailing startup Bolt announced on the 17th that they will partner to roll out an autonomous robotaxi business across Europe. As part of a broader effort to expand its autonomous vehicle fleet to 100,000 by 2035, Bolt plans to deploy 25,000 of Lucid's advanced autonomous vehicles in major European cities. The vehicles will be based on a new dedicated electric vehicle platform that Lucid will launch in the future and will use U.S. semiconductor giant Nvidia's autonomous driving architecture, Hyperion. The two companies will jointly develop a vehicle platform compatible with Level 4 autonomous driving under the U.S. Society of Automotive Engineers standards. Bolt's autonomous driving unit will help define requirements for vehicles, software, safety, and passenger experience, and will also handle the vehicle infrastructure, operational systems, and city partnerships needed for full-scale deployment. The partnership reflects in particular how robotaxi development in Europe is shifting from trial deployments to commercial rollout.