If you’ve been to downtown Austin, Texas, recently, you’ve seen one or 600 Waymo One self-driving taxis cruising around without drivers. Waymo is one of the biggest names in the autonomous ride-hailing market, with self-driving units ferrying people in four major US cities. Now, Waymo has an upcoming deal with Toyota to produce self-driving cars, and Tesla might have its hands full with it. 

Toyota and Waymo to pen deal for future self-driving, personally-owned cars

Granted, Waymo is neck-deep in autonomous driving. The company operates the better part of a thousand self-driving taxis through smartphone apps. However, Toyota is seeking to bring Waymo into a partnership, with self-driving cars in mind. But not the ride-for-hire kind. No, this partnership has personally owned autonomous vehicle platforms in mind.

That doesn’t mean Waymo will back off from its One ride-hailing service in Austin, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Instead, Waymo will leverage its self-driving chops with Toyota’s tenure as one of the world’s highest-volume automakers. The goal? Simply put: to create autonomous vehicles that you can take home and park.

The deal could mean trouble for Tesla’s vision of its role in the autonomous vehicle market

The move may be a problem for Tesla and its plans to dominate the autonomous vehicle market in the future. Currently, Tesla vehicles like the best-selling Model Y offer the brand’s Full-Self Driving (FSD) and Autopilot functions, which take much of the action of driving out of the equation. 

However, while CEO Elon Musk asserts that Tesla vehicles will be capable of unsupervised Level 5 self-driving in the future, the brand’s EVs aren’t quite there yet. The partnership between Waymo and Toyota, on the other hand, could introduce Waymo’s autonomous vehicle technology into production Toyotas soon.

Tesla has already thrown its hat into the ring of autonomous taxi services with the incipient, self-driving Robotaxi. However, unlike the existing Waymo One services and the self-driving Jaguar I-PACEs dotting Austin’s roads, the so-called Cybercab will be a small, two-seater with no steering wheel and no pedals.