Grab's Autonomous Vehicle Playbook for Singapore and Southeast Asia | Dominic Ong, GM Autonomous

Southeast Asia should be the last place AV's arrive. Dense, improvised traffic, monsoon rain and some of the cheapest driver labor in any middle-income region. Yet in April 2026, Punggol in northeast Singapore became the first residential neighborhood in Southeast Asia with a public autonomous passenger service.

In this episode of Autonomy Insiders, Daniel Abreu Marques talks with Dominic Ong, General Manager Autonomous at Grab, who runs that program with WeRide and Singapore's Land Transport Authority (LTA).

We cover:

→ Why Grab's case for autonomous vehicles is about reliability, not driver cost

→ How Grab's hybrid model dispatches robotaxis and human drivers on one network

→ How Grab, WeRide and LTA split the work in Singapore

→ Why vehicle uptime now matters more than miles per critical intervention

→ What breaks an AV stack in Southeast Asia: vehicle costs in Singapore, monsoon rain, motorcycles and right-hand drive

→ Delivery robots, and why Grab takes equity in AV partners like WeRide, Momenta and Vay

→ How Grab views Waymo's planned entry into Singapore

Chapters
00:00 Why Southeast Asia is the hardest robotaxi market
00:55 Grab and the GM Autonomous mandate
04:57 What autonomy actually solves for Grab
08:45 The hybrid model: robotaxis and human drivers on one network
14:02 Punggol: how Grab, WeRide and LTA split the work
19:02 From fixed-route shuttle to robotaxi ride-hailing
21:56 The metrics Grab actually watches
25:43 What breaks an AV stack in Southeast Asia
30:31 Autonomous delivery and robotics
33:48 Equity stakes, AV partners and Vay
42:01 Waymo enters Singapore
44:05 Who owns the fleet at scale

About the guest

Dominic Ong is General Manager Autonomous at Grab. He has worked on autonomous vehicles for more than a decade, first at Singapore's Economic Development Board and for the past ten years at Grab.

Newsletter: The AV Market Strategist (avmarketstrategist.substack.com)
Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/daniel-abreu-marques-)

#robotaxi #Grab #autonomousvehicles