Three cars, one city, a future to learn: inside newmo's JOTO Base

Startup newmo opens a dedicated hub in Osaka's Joto district, where three cars are already collecting road data for autonomous taxi training.

Japanese startup newmo has opened JOTO Base in Osaka, a dedicated facility for its autonomous taxi project. This is not a showroom for visitors but a working hub: data collection, road testing, and preparation for the commercial launch planned for 2028 will all happen here.

The site sits in Osaka's Joto Ward. The ground floor houses a garage with capacity for around 15 vehicles, three of which are already on duty collecting data. By autumn, newmo plans to add new autonomous vehicles to the fleet. The upper floor holds driver rest areas and workstations for staff — a telling detail, because even a robotaxi service in its early days needs people: engineers, operators, test drivers, and a maintenance crew.

JOTO Base will run tests not only in Osaka but also in the nearby city of Sakai. For Japan, this is a sensitive topic: the population is aging, taxi and bus operators are short on drivers, and demand for reliable urban transport refuses to fade. Autonomous taxis here are not being sold as futurism for the cameras but as a practical answer to the driver shortage and the rising cost of urban mobility.

Competition in this segment is no longer theoretical. Waymo in the United States has shown that a robotaxi can operate as a real service, but only with huge investment, precise mapping, complex infrastructure, and a long fine-tuning phase. China's Baidu Apollo Go and Pony.ai are pushing scale and speed of rollout. Japanese players will have to win not on fleet size but on safety, regulator trust, and the ability to navigate dense urban environments.

For the passenger, the question is simple: will such a ride be cheaper, more accessible, and calmer than a conventional taxi. For automakers and service operators, the question is different: who gets the data on routes, demand, and how the vehicles behave on city streets. That data today is worth no less than the cars themselves.

For now, JOTO Base looks like a modest garage built for 15 cars. But in the robotaxi business, scale usually doesn't start with a thousand vehicles. It starts with three cars learning, day after day, to drive through the same complicated city.