Waymo is coming to Spain. On 20 October 2026 the Alphabet company said it is "laying the groundwork" for its fully autonomous ride-hailing service in the Region of Madrid, that its electric Jaguar I-PACEs will appear on the region's streets "in the coming days", and that it aims to welcome its first riders in 2027. Madrid is Waymo's first region in Spain and its second in the European Union, two months after it named Munich.
Nobody will ride yet. As in Munich and Toronto, the cars will first be driven by hand, then validated with trained local specialists behind the wheel. Waymo told Xataka that testing covers urban areas of Madrid city, Alcobendas and Getafe, by day and by night, with a fleet it describes only as "small". The cars carry the fifth-generation Waymo Driver, one generation older than the system in its newest US vehicles.
A permit to test, not to sell rides
According to Xataka, Waymo already holds a permit from the DGT, Spain's traffic authority, to test on public roads under instruction VEH 2025/07. That covers testing only. Charging passengers for a driverless ride also needs a passenger-transport authorisation, the ground on which Madrid's taxi drivers fought Uber and Cabify with a 16-day strike in January 2019. Waymo's own post speaks of launching "fully autonomous ride-hailing" in 2027, but it has not said whether the first riders will have a specialist in the driver's seat, and it has not named the "local operating partners" it says it is working with.
Madrid already has a robotaxi race
Waymo is not first in the queue. On 10 September the DGT granted Spain's first national Level 4 passenger-vehicle permit to WeRide, Uber and AVOMO, the autonomous-vehicle division of Moove Cars Group, for mapping and validation in Greater Madrid, The Next Web reported.
| Operator | Status in Madrid | Stated target |
|---|---|---|
| WeRide, Uber, AVOMO | Level 4 test permit since 10 September; 20 WeRide GXR vehicles with a specialist on board | Commercial rides by the end of 2026 |
| Waymo | Test permit; manual driving first, then validation with specialists | First riders in 2027 |
| Tesla | FSD (Supervised) test cars, always with a driver supervising | No robotaxi plan announced for Spain |
Waymo brings a scale the other Madrid entrants lack. It reports more than 20 million completed trips and hundreds of thousands of paid rides every week, and Xataka puts its US fleet at more than 4,000 cars in 15 cities. On 8 October Waymo closed a $5 billion term loan, its first debt financing, to pay for expansion in the United States and abroad. InsideEVs, citing a Semafor report, says Waymo plans to have 20,000 cars by the end of 2027. Waymo has not confirmed that figure.
What it means for Tesla owners in Spain
Spain is not among the nine European countries where FSD (Supervised) is approved. Tesla's European website now sells the system as Tesla Assisted Driving, and the EU committee that could approve it for the whole bloc cannot vote before December. Tesla has been testing the system on Spanish roads under the DGT's framework, always with a driver in charge. Its Robotaxi app has been in Spanish app stores since October, but the service carries passengers only in the United States.
Two robotaxi operators now have target dates for Madrid. A Tesla owner on the same streets has no date for the supervised system that Tesla already sells in nine other European countries.