Waymo partners with Walmart, AutoNation, Avis, and others to ferry their customers to various locations in Phoenix, Arizona
Waymo, the Alphabet company that spun out of Google's former self-driving car division, is partnering with some of the country's largest companies to expand how many people ride in its self-driving vehicles.
Context & Ripple Effects
Waymo's Phoenix operation has been building toward this for over a year: free rides through the early rider program in 2017, then an Avis deal to manage its self-driving minivan fleet, then a planned commercial hailing service announced in May. The Walmart, AutoNation, and Avis partnerships are the next step — instead of waiting for consumers to open a Waymo app, Alphabet is embedding its robotaxis into brands that already own large customer bases.
That makes Phoenix less a single-city pilot than a distribution testbed: Waymo gets ridership volume and real-world data from partner traffic, while retailers get a futuristic errand-running perk. The pattern holds up over time — by 2023 Waymo was doing the same thing at larger scale through an Uber partnership also starting in Phoenix.
First-order effects
- Walmart, AutoNation, and Avis customers in Phoenix can now be ferried by Waymo's self-driving vehicles as part of those companies' services, giving Waymo immediate rider volume without building its own consumer funnel.
- Avis deepens an existing relationship — it already manages Waymo's minivan fleet in Phoenix under the 2017 agreement, so the new partnership layers customer transport on top of fleet operations.
Second-order effects
- Ride-hailing incumbents lose ground on the retail-partnership front: Uber's eventual response was to stop competing directly in Phoenix and instead sign its own multi-year Waymo Driver deal there.
- Retailers gain a new differentiator in local services — if Walmart's driverless customer shuttles perform, rival grocers and dealerships face pressure to strike similar autonomy deals or cede the convenience edge.
Third-order effects
- Autonomy distribution is shifting from direct-to-consumer apps toward B2B embedding, where established brands supply demand and Waymo supplies the driver — a structure that scales city-by-city as Phoenix did, from free rides to a public fully driverless service to freeway-speed operations.
- If the partner-fleet model holds, fleet management and vehicle servicing become a distinct business layer — the role Avis carved out — sitting between robotaxi operators and the brands whose customers they carry.
The trend: Robotaxis are scaling not through standalone consumer apps but through partnerships that plug autonomous fleets into existing retail and mobility brands, with Phoenix serving as the template market.