Toyota Invests in Tier IV to Build Global Autonomous Driving Ecosystem

On June 9, 2026, Toyota invested ¥1 billion through a fund operated by its subsidiary Toyota Invention Partners in autonomous driving company Tier IV, acquiring a 1% stake. Founded in 2015, Tier IV is a key player in the open-source autonomous driving software space and led the development of Autoware, the world’s first Linux-based open-source operating system for autonomous vehicles. The Autoware Foundation now boasts over 100 members spanning academia and industry. In July 2025, Tier IV unveiled an end-to-end AI architecture supporting Level 4+ autonomous driving. In March 2026, it launched a data-driven, hardware-agnostic Level 4 autonomous driving software stack, integrating NVIDIA’s Alpamayo vision-language-action model and the Cosmos world foundation model platform to address long-tail edge cases. Toyota plans to equip its e-Palette electric shuttle with Level 4 autonomous driving technology by 2027, with Tier IV serving as a key technology partner. Additionally, Japanese companies such as Suzuki and Sony have also invested in Tier IV to advance a “Made-in-Japan” autonomous driving ecosystem. Globally, Toyota is pursuing a regionally coordinated strategy: partnering with Tier IV in Japan; collaborating with Waymo in the U.S. to develop autonomous ride-hailing services (Waymo has been testing around 25 autonomous taxis in Tokyo’s Shinjuku and Shibuya districts since April 2025); and teaming up with Pony.ai in China, where the first production-model Botrider 4X robotaxi rolled off the line in February 2026, with commercial operations planned in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Beijing, and other cities. Meanwhile, Nissan is advancing Tokyo-based autonomous taxi trials in partnership with Uber and the UK-based Wayve, while Tesla is pushing to deploy its Full Self-Driving (FSD) system in Japan—intensifying competition in the market.