Waymo to launch a self-driving car hailing service in Phoenix later this year, will partner with multiple companies to expand its autonomous cars to more cities
In a huge surprise, Google invited Waymo CEO John Krafcik on stage at its I/O 2018 developers conference.
Context & Ripple Effects
Waymo's commercial launch announcement caps a year-long on-ramp in Phoenix: the company has been giving free rides to residents through its early rider program since 2017, building the operational track record a paid service requires. Putting CEO John Krafcik on stage at Google I/O frames the launch as a flagship moment for Alphabet's autonomy bet rather than a quiet regional pilot.
The partner strategy was already visible in the coverage that followed — deals with Walmart, AutoNation, and Avis to ferry customers around Phoenix (partnering with Walmart, AutoNation, Avis, and others), plus work with the metro authority on connecting riders to public transit. This article is the moment those threads converge into a stated multi-city expansion plan.
First-order effects
- Phoenix residents move from free test rides to a commercial hailing service later this year, making Waymo the first of the big autonomous programs to charge riders for driverless trips.
- Partner companies in Phoenix gain a new logistics layer: retailers and rental firms can route customer trips through Waymo's fleet instead of operating their own transport.
Second-order effects
- Ride-hail incumbents face a competitor whose marginal cost structure excludes a human driver, pressuring them to decide between building their own autonomy or partnering with Waymo — a choice Uber eventually made by signing its multi-year Phoenix partnership years later.
- Fleet-management partners like Avis and AutoNation shift toward servicing and staging autonomous vehicles, a revenue line that scales as Waymo adds cities under the same partner playbook.
Third-order effects
- If the partner-plus-fleet model holds across cities, autonomous driving consolidates into a platform business — a 'Waymo Driver' licensed into other companies' operations — rather than each operator running its own vertically integrated fleet.
- City-by-city launches tied to local partners and transit authorities set the regulatory template: autonomy expands one metro's approvals at a time, as later seen when Waymo pushed into fully driverless San Francisco testing (fully autonomous rides without a safety driver).
The trend: Autonomous ride-hailing is moving from closed pilots to commercial platforms distributed through retail, rental, and mobility partners, with Phoenix serving as the proving ground for the multi-city rollout.