If you follow the robotaxi industry closely, you are probably familiar with Waymo, Motional and the Chinese operators expanding across Singapore. A company attracting less attention in Australian coverage — but which is quietly building one of the most consequential autonomous vehicle networks in the Asia-Pacific — is May Mobility. Founded in 2017 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, May Mobility carries paying passengers without a safety driver across multiple cities in the United States and Japan, has a strategic partnership with Grab to expand into Southeast Asia, and counts Toyota among its core investors and vehicle partners. For a country that sits at the edge of the Asia-Pacific and shares the same left-hand road system as Japan and most of Southeast Asia, May Mobility’s expansion trajectory is worth understanding in detail.
What Is May Mobility?
May Mobility was founded in 2017 by Edwin Olson, a robotics professor at the University of Michigan, with the stated mission of making transit “more sustainable, safe, accessible and equitable for everyone.” The company operates what it calls an Autonomy-as-a-Service (AaaS) platform — licensing its autonomous driving technology to cities, transit agencies and ride-hail operators rather than owning and managing every vehicle fleet directly.
That partnership model has attracted investment from an unusually well-connected group of backers: Toyota, NTT Group (Japan’s largest telecommunications company and a significant enterprise IT provider in Australia), SoftBank, MUFG Bank and international trading company ITOCHU. In 2026, May Mobility was recognised on Fast Company’s list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies, placing it among a small group of commercial autonomous vehicle operators with verified, large-scale deployments across multiple countries.
The company’s focus from the outset has been on community mobility — operating in suburbs, university campuses, retirement communities and industrial facilities where conventional public transport is thin or absent. That orientation toward the gaps between major transit routes makes May Mobility’s model directly relevant to the challenges discussed in the context of regional and outer-suburban mobility in Australia.
MPDM — The Technology Behind the Platform
The autonomous driving technology at the core of May Mobility’s vehicles is called Multi-Policy Decision Making, or MPDM. Rather than relying on vast banks of pre-collected, geographically specific training data — the approach taken by many of the largest autonomous vehicle programmes — MPDM applies real-time reasoning, evaluating thousands of possible driving scenarios every 200 milliseconds and selecting the safest manoeuvre based on what the vehicle is actually facing at that moment.
May Mobility describes this as “live, online learning” that supplements conventional offline training, and it has a practical consequence for international expansion: MPDM can adapt to new cities and new driving environments — including left-hand traffic, unfamiliar intersection geometry and different pedestrian behaviour — without requiring the kind of city-by-city re-engineering that other approaches demand. For readers interested in the broader sensor and AI systems that underpin autonomous vehicles, the technology behind self-driving taxis provides useful context. The ability to adapt to left-hand traffic is a structural advantage in the Asia-Pacific, where Japan, Southeast Asia and Australia all share the same road orientation.
Nine Cities in Japan — Toyota’s Robotaxi Proving Ground
Toyota AI Ventures made its first investment in May Mobility in 2018 — the company’s first international investor — a relationship that deepened into vehicle supply, joint deployment and continued investment. Two Toyota platforms have been adapted for autonomous operation with MPDM technology: the Toyota Sienna minivan and the Toyota e-Palette, a purpose-built mobility platform developed by Toyota for autonomous transit at scale.
By February 2026, May Mobility had deployed its autonomous vehicle technology across nine cities in Japan, working with MONET Technologies — a joint venture between Toyota and SoftBank that specialises in Mobility-as-a-Service deployments — and NTT Group. Deployments include a campus-and-public-road service called Hiromobi near Hiroshima University in Higashi-Hiroshima; a free-ride programme near the Tokyo Bay waterfront intended to build public trust before Level 4 certification; and an e-Palette service carrying employees and guests across the Toyota Motor Kyushu factory campus in Fukuoka.
Japan’s urgency around autonomous transit is partly demographic. By 2030, Japan projects a shortage of 36,000 bus drivers, and more than 64 per cent of the country’s taxi drivers are currently over the age of 60. The same dynamic — an ageing workforce, declining regional populations and a shrinking pool of professional drivers — is beginning to emerge in regional Australia, creating parallel pressure on transport access in outer-suburban and rural communities. The implications for mobility for older and disabled Australians point in the same direction.
Grab, Southeast Asia, and Left-Hand Roads
In October 2025, May Mobility and Grab — Southeast Asia’s largest superapp, operating ride-hail, food delivery and financial services across Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines — announced a strategic partnership, with Grab making an investment in May Mobility. The agreement commits both companies to a multi-year programme to deploy May Mobility’s autonomous vehicle technology across Southeast Asia.
The integration combines MPDM with Grab’s proprietary GrabMaps technology, built from high-volume data collection across the densely populated cities of Southeast Asia and maintained through constant real-time feedback. The partnership announcement explicitly noted MPDM’s adaptability to “Southeast Asian traffic conditions and left-hand driving” — the same road orientation used across Australia.
Grab’s regional reach connects May Mobility to markets directly north of Australia. The wider Asia-Pacific robotaxi expansion — including Waymo in Tokyo and WeRide and Pony.ai in Singapore — shows the pattern that commercially proven operators follow as they build regional footholds. Grab already has a history of piloting autonomous technology in Singapore; May Mobility’s integration into that ecosystem adds another operator to the competitive landscape that will eventually shape services available to Australian commuters.
Uber, Lyft and the Scale Proof
Two partnerships in 2025 confirmed that May Mobility’s platform has cleared the commercial viability test with the world’s largest ride-hail operators. In May 2025, Uber and May Mobility announced a multi-year agreement targeting the deployment of thousands of May Mobility autonomous vehicles on the Uber platform, beginning in Arlington, Texas, with plans to expand to additional US markets in 2026. In September 2025, Lyft and May Mobility deployed their first autonomous vehicle fleet together in Atlanta — the first autonomous fleet Lyft had launched in a major US city.
Both programmes use Toyota Sienna vehicles equipped with MPDM, transitioning from onboard safety operators toward fully driverless operation. Understanding how robotaxis compare to the rideshare platforms Australians already use helps explain why both Uber and Lyft treat these partnerships as core commercial infrastructure rather than research exercises. Uber described the autonomous vehicle market in the United States alone as a potential USD $1 trillion opportunity — a figure that underscores the strategic weight behind each of these operator agreements.
What May Mobility’s Expansion Means for Australia
May Mobility has not announced any Australian operations. Any deployment here would require approval under the framework being developed by Australia’s National Transport Commission, which is advancing the regulatory infrastructure for automated vehicles with commercial deployments expected to become possible from the late 2020s.
The case for watching May Mobility closely comes from the convergence of several practical factors. Toyota — which manufactures and sells more vehicles in Australia than any other brand — is both a core investor and the vehicle platform partner for May Mobility’s global deployments. The Toyota Sienna deployed in US markets and the e-Palette operating in Japan come from a manufacturer with established dealer, service and parts networks in every Australian capital city and most regional centres. NTT Group, another investor-partner, operates in Australia through NTT Ltd. ITOCHU, a further Japanese partner, has significant investment interests across Australian industry.
The MPDM technology’s explicit adaptation for left-hand driving — validated through nine Japanese cities and now being integrated with Grab’s Southeast Asian infrastructure — removes one of the most commonly cited technical barriers to deploying US-developed robotaxi technology in Australian conditions. The company’s focus on suburban and community transit maps directly onto the outer-suburban mobility gap that is consistently identified when examining which Australian cities are best positioned for robotaxi services.
The realistic timeline for robotaxis in Australia remains primarily a regulatory question, and the safety record accumulated by commercial operators globally is the evidence base that Australian regulators are drawing on. May Mobility’s network — nine cities in Japan, proven deployments across multiple US states, a strategic partnership with Grab covering Southeast Asia, and commercial validation from both Uber and Lyft — places it in the group of operators best positioned to move quickly once the Australian regulatory window opens.
Sources
- May Mobility — Official Website
- May Mobility — MPDM Technology Overview
- May Mobility — Expanding Autonomous Footprint in Japan (February 2026)
- May Mobility — Expanding AV Technology into Southeast Asia with Grab (October 2025)
- May Mobility — Uber and May Mobility Announce Strategic Partnership (May 2025)
- National Transport Commission — Automated Vehicle Programme
