On September 15, GO, Waymo and Nihon Kotsu said they want driverless taxis carrying paying passengers in Tokyo sometime in 2027, scaling up to about 100 cars. The same announcement also says the launch date will only be set once the permits come through. Japan has had a law for driverless vehicles since 2023. The trouble is that the application form asks for something a taxi is unusually bad at supplying: a route.

Japan never banned driverless cars

The assumption abroad tends to be that Japan is a place where this sort of thing is illegal. It is not. In April 2023, a revised Road Traffic Act created a legal category for driving with nobody in the driver's seat. It is called tokutei jido unko, which translates roughly as specified automated operation, and it occupies Articles 75-12 through 75-28 of the act.

The move was deliberate. By defining driverless operation as something other than "driving," the law detached it from the entire apparatus built around human drivers. The person who monitors the vehicle remotely, formally the tokutei jido unko shunin-sha, is not required to hold a driving licence at all. The National Police Agency's own drafting guide lists the requirements: not having lost the sight of both eyes or the hearing of both ears, and being able to operate the necessary equipment properly. A licence appears only as a footnote, for cases where the supervisor will drive the vehicle away after automated operation ends.

Permits come from prefectural public safety commissions, so Tokyo means the Tokyo Metropolitan Public Safety Commission. And the commission has less discretion than outsiders usually assume. Its own published review standard states that where the plan satisfies the five statutory criteria and the applicant is not disqualified, the commission must grant the permit. The published standard processing period is 45 days, not counting administrative holidays.

The form asks for a route and a timetable

The drafting guide, published by the National Police Agency to make the process clearer for applicants, is unusually blunt about vagueness.

On the route: rather than a loose entry such as "between A and B," it is to be written out concretely, for instance by drawing it on a map. On days and hours: rather than "daytime," the operating days and time bands are to be written so they can be pinned down, for example by showing a timetable. On who is carried: a mobility service is expected to specify the profile of its likely passengers, with local residents and tourists given as examples. Weather assumptions get the same treatment. Not "no bad weather," but a description of exactly which conditions stop the vehicle.

That list adds up to a recognisable shape of service. Something that departs at set times, along a line you can trace with a finger, carrying a predictable population.

A taxi is the opposite of all of this. The destination is chosen by the passenger after they close the door. Whether the street network of seven central wards can be submitted as "the route," and whether an on-demand service can produce anything resembling a timetable, is not a question the law answers either way. It is simply a question nobody has put to a public safety commission yet.

The fifth criterion is qualitative. The operation must be for the purpose of transporting persons or goods, and that transport must be found to contribute to the convenience or welfare of local residents. A prefectural police manual from Saitama gives a sense of what applicants attach to prove it: documents showing local government support, records of briefings held for residents, evidence that talks with existing transport operators have concluded, or a place in the regional public transport plan.

What has actually been approved

Japan's first permit under the new law went to Machizukuri ZEN Connect on May 11, 2023, in the town of Eiheiji, Fukui. The vehicle was a seven-seat road-legal electric cart with a top speed of 12 km/h. The route ran about 2 km along a municipal road built on a disused railway right of way, following an induction wire with RFID tags. Service was weekends and holidays, three runs an hour, with a planned shutdown from December through March. An adult paid 100 yen, about 64 US cents.

In January 2026, a mid-size bus began commercial Level 4 operation on an ordinary public road in Kashiwa, Chiba, running a shuttle between Kashiwanoha Campus Station and the University of Tokyo's Kashiwa campus. The automated section is 700 metres, the speed limit for it is 40 km/h, and a crew member sits in the driver's seat. The law also allows the supervisor to ride in the vehicle rather than watch from a remote station.

Then there is JR East's Kesennuma Line BRT in Miyagi, which holds a permit from that prefecture's commission and ran Level 4 over 15.5 km at up to roughly 60 km/h in mid-2026. According to JR East it is the fastest and longest Level 4 bus operation in the country. It is also on a dedicated busway with magnets buried about every two metres and RFID tags about every ten, it carries a crew member on board, and the Level 4 runs were scheduled for Fridays and Saturdays between May 29 and July 4.

Every one of these is a line you could draw on a map before the vehicle moved. The Tokyo plan is a hundred cars going wherever a stranger asks, across Minato, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Chiyoda, Chuo, Shinagawa and Koto.

One accident, and a police chief can switch it off

Under Article 75-28, if a vehicle in specified automated operation is involved in a traffic accident and there is an urgent need to prevent danger on the road, the chief of the police station with jurisdiction over that spot can provisionally suspend the permit. The suspension runs up to 30 days from the day of the incident, and the operator has to be given a chance to state its case within five days. Separately, the public safety commission can suspend a permit for up to six months, or revoke it outright.

None of that is automatic; it turns on an urgent need judged on the spot. But the power sits with a police station chief rather than a national regulator. Saitama's police manual goes further as guidance rather than as a binding condition, suggesting operation should pause after an accident until the cause is established and preventive measures are in place.

There is one precedent. On October 29, 2023, the Eiheiji vehicle made contact with an unattended bicycle parked at the side of the road. The four men in their seventies riding it were unhurt, and the operator stopped the service until safety could be confirmed. It resumed on March 16, 2024. The stated cause was that the AI behind the obstacle-detection camera had not been trained on enough images. Even allowing for the planned winter shutdown in between, one parked bicycle cost about four and a half months.

Waymo's co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in the announcement that the company now provides more than 500,000 rides a week and has been shown to be more than 15 times safer than human drivers. That is the company's own figure, and being safer than human drivers is not the same as never having a collision.

Some countries draw an area, Japan draws a line

It would be wrong to file this under Japanese over-regulation, because the alternatives are not obviously simpler.

In California, a company needs two agencies. The Public Utilities Commission issues the permit to carry passengers, and it can only do so once the company holds the appropriate underlying permit from the Department of Motor Vehicles. Germany passed its Autonomous Driving Act in 2021, in force from July 28 that year, allowing Level 4 with no fallback driver in the vehicle. Japan's framework arrived two years later and covers the whole country at once.

The real difference is the unit of measurement. California and Germany both bound the permission by territory: an operational design domain, an approved operating area. Japan chose the route.

In June 2024 the transport ministry and the National Police Agency published a set of measures to make the review process more transparent and predictable, including the drafting guide itself and a rule that repeat applicants no longer re-enter duplicated material.

2027 is a target, not a permit

Three companies have agreed to work together and have named a year. No permit has been granted, and the process will involve the opinion of the head of every municipality whose area the route touches, which in central Tokyo means ward mayors, plus consultation between commissions if the route ever crosses into Kanagawa, Chiba or Saitama. Changing the plan afterwards means applying again.

Ichiro Kawanabe, who chairs the national taxi federation, is a director of Nihon Kotsu and chairs GO, framed it at the press conference as a milestone: Tokyo's taxi trade began in Yurakucho in 1912, which would make 2027 its 115th year. On the jobs question he was measured, saying a little under 10 percent of drivers turn over each year, so even if hiring stopped the work today's drivers do would not disappear, and new roles such as collecting map data are already appearing. Tokyo's designated taxi area had 54,587 company-driver cards and 8,460 owner-operator cards at the end of August 2026. A hundred cars is a rounding error against that.

That rounding error would still have to pass through a form designed for a village shuttle, and nobody yet knows whether it fits.

When a driverless service opens in your country, what does the permit cover: a neighbourhood, or a line on a map?

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