TORONTO — Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google's parent company Alphabet, will begin testing its robotaxis in Toronto after Ontario approved its entry into a provincial pilot programme, the company said on Friday. It aims to carry its first passengers in the city in 2028.

Toronto will be Waymo's first Canadian market and the fifth city outside the United States it has announced, after London, Tokyo, Munich and Singapore. It is also the northernmost and possibly most wintry city the company has tried to serve, conditions TechCrunch said would test its technology.

A robotaxi is a ride-hailing car with no one at the wheel. Passengers summon it through an app, and the car steers, brakes and chooses its route using software fed by cameras, radar and lidar, a laser sensor that measures distance. Waymo's newest taxis carry 13 cameras, six radar units and four lidar devices, The Canadian Press reported, against nine cameras and no radar or lidar on most Tesla models.

The rollout will come in stages. Waymo vehicles will appear on Toronto streets "in the coming days," driven by people to build high-definition maps of the road network, the company said in a blog post. Trained specialists will then sit behind the wheel while the system is tested in local conditions. Only after that will Waymo remove the human driver and open rides to the public, the sequence it has used in other cities.

"Expanding into Canada marks an important milestone in Waymo's global journey," co-chief executive Tekedra Mawakana said.

Waymo has hired Toronto-based Element Fleet Management to run the fleet day to day. The partnership is expected to support hundreds of jobs in fleet maintenance, validation driving and customer service, according to Waymo, which already works with Canadian manufacturer Magna International and counts the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board as an investor.

Jobs were central to the province's response. The rollout will follow a phased approach that prioritizes safety and job creation, Dakota Brasier, a spokesperson for Ontario Transportation Minister Prabmeet Sarkaria, said in an email, according to The Canadian Press. Brasier said it would include a "credible jobs plan" setting out projected positions and hiring timelines.

Waymo says its cars have been involved in 95% fewer crashes causing serious injury or death than human drivers in the cities where it operates. It bases that claim on internal data from more than 400 million fully autonomous kilometres.

Independent experts said weather is the open question. Sidney Givigi, a professor of robotics and machine learning at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, said Waymo's heavier sensor load was an advantage. "They have way more sensors, which makes the whole system more robust," he told The Canadian Press.

But Givigi warned that "all the sensors can get occluded by snow," and raised the prospect of a car on ice or in a blizzard failing to stop on a hill. Of the more than a dozen U.S. cities where Waymo runs fully driverless taxis, Denver may be the only one with significant snowfall, the news agency noted.

Canada's taxi industry was measured in its reaction. "There's a possibility that some drivers would be replaced at one point in time," said Marc-André Way, president of the Canadian Taxi Association. He added that "no one should be pressing the panic button."

Laura Miller, Uber Canada's head of policy, said the future of mobility would be "hybrid, with human drivers and autonomous vehicles operating side by side." She urged the province, industry and communities to "prepare for the impact on workers." In January, Uber and Lyft drivers protested at California's utilities regulator in San Francisco, asking for self-driving taxis to be taken off the streets.

Some see gains for disabled riders. Michelle McQuigge, chief executive of Balance for Blind Adults, is blind and travels with a guide dog, and said drivers often refuse to carry service animals. "We get service denials at least once a month, I would say, if not more," she said. She called herself "cautiously optimistic" but said driverless rides were not a "magic bullet," pointing to cost and ease of use. Her organisation is among the accessibility groups Waymo named as partners.

Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association, brushed aside concerns about leaning on an American company while Canada-U.S. relations are strained. Waymo, he said, is "a world leader, and it is definitely the No. 1 player outside of China."

Ontario already has some driverless freight on its roads. Gatik began rolling out 50 self-driving box trucks across Loblaw's distribution network in the Greater Toronto Area last year, and many now run with no one behind the wheel, according to The Canadian Press.

Two days before the Toronto announcement, Waymo opened its app to anyone in San Antonio, San Diego and Tampa, where it says it has carried hundreds of thousands of riders since launching service earlier this year. On Oct. 8 it closed a $5 billion term loan, its first debt financing. Abroad, it is testing in London and Tokyo and has said it plans public services in Tokyo and Munich in 2027 and Singapore in 2028.

The provincial pilot covers testing, not paid rides. Ontario's automated vehicle pilot regulation is due to expire on Oct. 13, 2027, AutoGuide reported, arguing that the province will need a new framework for commercial driverless ride-hailing before Waymo can take its first paying passengers in Toronto in 2028.