Waymo has partnered with Allianz Partners to build the insurance, claims and safety research infrastructure needed to deploy its autonomous ride-hailing service across Europe, the companies announced on Wednesday.
Allianz Partners, a subsidiary of Munich-headquartered Allianz SE, will provide tailored fleet coverage, liability protection and digital claims handling for Waymo’s European operations.
Handelsblatt reported the collaboration is initially set for three years.
The announcement came a day after Klaus-Jürgen Heitmann, chief executive of Huk-Coburg, Germany’s largest motor insurer, told an event in Hamburg that autonomous driving would reach Germany across the board but probably not for a good ten years.
The deal arrives as Waymo prepares for its first commercial operations on the European mainland.
Munich — Allianz’s home city — is set to become Waymo’s first European Union market for commercial rides toward the end of 2027.
It will follow London, where vehicles have been on the roads since late 2025 for mapping and manual driving, with autonomous validation using trained specialists from around April 2026.
The company has yet to secure regulatory approval for a commercial launch.
What the Partnership Covers
The collaboration spans four areas. Fleet insurance and risk management, including new insurance models designed for autonomous platforms.
A digital claims ecosystem. Joint safety research with the Allianz Center for Technology, covering crash analysis, safety modelling and risk evaluation. And potential future work on vehicle recovery operations tailored to driverless fleets
Waymo cited real-world safety data showing a 16x reduction in serious injury crashes compared to human drivers across the cities where the Waymo Driver currently operates.
Those multiples have risen as Waymo’s mileage has grown. Its dated safety release of September 2025 reported roughly 80% fewer any-injury crashes and roughly 92% fewer pedestrian-injury crashes, which work out at about five times and about 12.5 times.
“Autonomous mobility is one of the most significant shifts our industry will navigate in the years ahead,” CEO of Allianz Partners Tomas Kunzmann stated.
Tilia Gode, Waymo’s Head of Risk and Insurance, noted the partnership would allow the company to pair its US safety record with European risk and claims expertise.
Munich Ties Run Deep
Allianz SE, Europe’s largest insurer by revenue, was founded in Berlin in 1890 and has been headquartered in Munich since.
Waymo registered Waymo Germany GmbH with the Munich commercial register on June 15, listing Google’s local office as its address.
Vehicles were expected on Munich’s streets for manual mapping runs within weeks of the August 25 announcement, with supervised autonomous testing to follow before a targeted commercial launch at the end of 2027.
Bavaria has explicitly pushed for a faster path from testing to deployment. Florian Herrmann, Head of the Bavarian State Chancellery, said in August the state would continue to cut red tape and remove regulatory barriers to maintain its position in autonomous driving.
Germany permits Level 4 operation in defined areas under its 2021 Autonomous Driving Act. Britain has a national Automated Vehicles Act of 2024 and a permit for automated passenger services issued by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, with the remaining friction at Transport for London’s consent and Vehicle Certification Agency type approval.
Transport for London warned in April that no autonomous vehicle currently met its standards, and the licensing path was still unfinished into the autumn.
VW’s Robotaxi Setback
The Allianz partnership was announced on the same day Manager Magazin reported that Uber and Lyft had both walked away from talks to invest in Volkswagen’s autonomous driving unit, ending the German carmaker’s first attempt to bring in outside capital for its robotaxi programme.
Volkswagen has not confirmed the report as of publication time.
The magazine put Volkswagen’s spending on the division, which houses its Moia ride service, at about €2 billion, and said the unit would need at least another €1 billion to reach commercial readiness.
It described a search for a technology partner other than Mobileye, with Wayve and Nvidia as favourites, as an idea circulating inside the company rather than a decision taken.
Waymo’s move to lock in a major European insurer before its first ride on the continent underlines the diverging pace between the Alphabet subsidiary and its would-be European competitors.
Volkswagen is targeting driverless approval in Europe in 2027, the same window as Waymo’s Munich target, but its Hamburg service still runs with safety drivers and carries only pre-registered residents.
Global Push Accelerating
Europe is one front in a broader international campaign.
Waymo, the taxi app GO and Tokyo operator Nihon Kotsu announced on Monday an agreement to launch what would be Japan’s first commercial driverless taxi service, targeting operation in Tokyo during 2027 with a fleet of about 100 vehicles.
Waymo’s vehicles have been driving autonomously under supervision in the Japanese capital for about a year.
Beyond London, Munich and Tokyo, Waymo registered subsidiaries in France, Spain and the Netherlands during June, in Switzerland on July 31, and filed in South Korea in July, building a legal presence in markets where no commercial dates have been set.
In the United States, Waymo now runs fully autonomous operations in 15 cities, delivers more than 500,000 paid trips per week and has completed more than 20 million total trips, according to the company.
Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov said in April the company was targeting one million rides per week by the end of 2026.
Waymo raised $16 billion in February at a $126 billion valuation, led by Dragoneer, DST Global and Sequoia with Alphabet remaining the majority investor.
The company said at the time the capital would support its expansion into more than 20 additional cities in 2026, including Tokyo and London.
The Allianz partnership adds another local building block in a pattern Waymo has repeated in each new market, pairing with an established regional partner before the first commercial ride. In London, fleet management firm Moove will run the vehicles.
In Tokyo, Nihon Kotsu handles depot operations and regulatory compliance. Allianz Partners is a different kind of partner, supplying risk, claims and research rather than fleets and depots, but it fills the same slot in the sequence.
