The German insurer has agreed to build the insurance and claims infrastructure for Waymo's European robotaxi fleet, starting in Munich, a template UK insurers will be watching as London's own driverless pilots edge toward a commercial launch
Munich, not London, is where Waymo's first European robotaxi will actually go into commercial service. But the insurance deal announced this week to make that happen has direct relevance for Britain's own autonomous vehicle market, which is moving through the same regulatory growing pains at roughly the same pace.
Allianz Partners, the assistance and mobility arm of Allianz SE, has agreed a multi-year deal to provide Waymo with fleet insurance, liability cover and digital claims handling as the Alphabet-owned company prepares its first driverless rides on the European mainland. According to the companies' joint announcement, Allianz's Center for Technology will also work alongside Waymo on crash analysis, safety modelling and risk evaluation, with vehicle recovery for driverless fleets flagged as a likely future addition. A separate report picked up by German financial press put the initial term of the agreement at three years.
For UK readers, the relevant detail is less about Munich and more about what the deal signals: a top-five global insurer has decided the commercial case for underwriting robotaxi fleets is strong enough to justify building dedicated infrastructure for it, rather than treating a handful of pilot vehicles as an extension of an existing commercial motor book. That is precisely the question British insurers have been wrestling with since Waymo confirmed London as its first European market last year.
Waymo's UK operation is, in some respects, further along than its German one. Vehicles have been mapping and running manual test drives across roughly 100 square miles of London since late 2025, in partnership with fleet operator Moove, with supervised autonomous validation beginning earlier this year.
What London doesn’t yet have is a firm commercial launch date, or full regulatory sign-off. Transport for London said as recently as this spring that no autonomous vehicle currently met its standards for unsupervised operation, and the licensing pathway remained unresolved heading into autumn.
Read next: Google joins line up of London robotaxi launches
Britain's Automated Vehicles Act 2024 takes a different legal approach to Germany's model, creating two new categories of responsibility that sit apart from any human driver altogether: an "authorised self-driving entity", typically the vehicle manufacturer or technology provider, and a "no-user-in-charge" operator, which could be a mobility company such as Waymo or Uber.
On paper that offers more clarity than the older, court-led process of untangling driver blame after a crash. In practice, as Insurance Business UK has reported, the framework's fine detail, including data-sharing rules and the licensing of self-driving entities, is not expected to be fully in force until 2027, leaving insurers to work out how incidents during the current trial period will actually be pursued and settled.
Uber and British AI firm Wayve have already given that framework its first real-world test, launching paid robotaxi rides in London earlier this year with a small fleet that still carries a human safety driver.
As Ben Gardner, a partner at law firm Shoosmiths, has put it, the Act creates two new legal actors that liability now attaches to, in place of the older process of courts apportioning blame between drivers after the fact.
Whether a claim from one of those journeys actually lands with the safety driver or the technology stack, though, remains genuinely unresolved in practice.
Read next: Uber's robotaxis hit London streets as insurers watch a new liability test
Allianz's move to embed itself in Waymo's European rollout came a day after Klaus-Jürgen Heitmann, chief executive of Germany's largest motor insurer, HUK-Coburg, told an industry audience in Hamburg that nationwide autonomous driving was probably still the better part of a decade away, even if it eventually arrives.
It is a useful contrast: one of Europe's two biggest motor insurers is racing to build the infrastructure for a driverless future, while the other is telling the market not to expect it soon.
That split has an echo on this side of the Channel. Aviva and Admiral, Britain's two largest motor insurers, have both pushed back this year on suggestions that robotaxis are about to reshape the market at speed. Admiral's chief executive told the Financial Times she expects self-driving vehicles to account for roughly 4% of the UK car market by 2035, a notably conservative figure that one analyst house described as lower than many had assumed.
Yet Barclays has separately warned that motor insurers, naming Aviva specifically, face a "slow-burn" structural squeeze from autonomy and AI-driven platforms that markets are only beginning to price in, estimating that carriers seen as being on the wrong side of that shift could face a further 5–25% de-rating.
Read next: Aviva and Admiral play down threat from self-driving cars
Waymo's pitch to insurers rests on its US operating data. The company points to what it describes as a 16-fold reduction in serious-injury crashes compared with human drivers across the cities where it currently operates, broadly consistent with the roughly 90% reduction in serious-injury crashes Waymo cited when it closed a $16 billion funding round in February at a $126 billion valuation, a round led by Dragoneer Investment Group, DST Global and Sequoia Capital, with Alphabet remaining the majority shareholder.
Whether that safety record translates into lower premiums for UK consumers is a separate question. Goldman Sachs has projected that per-mile insurance costs could eventually fall by more than 50% as autonomous systems reduce human error, but the bank has also flagged rising repair costs for sensor-heavy vehicles and a broader migration of liability away from the driver and toward manufacturers, software providers and fleet operators – exactly the kind of product-liability and cyber exposure that UK claims teams are already bracing for.
Insurance Business UK has previously reported that an AV collision could plausibly touch motor liability, product liability and cyber cover all at once, turning claims handling into an exercise in reading vehicle telemetry rather than taking witness statements.
Read next: Robotaxi risk: what potential "skulduggery" tactics mean for UK motor insurers
Waymo has followed the same playbook in every market it has entered: pair with an established local partner to handle the parts of the operation a technology company cannot build from scratch. In London that role belongs to Moove, which manages the fleet; in Munich, it now belongs to Allianz, which manages the risk. There is no reason to assume Waymo's European insurance model stops at the German border once Munich launches on schedule at the end of 2027 – and Allianz already has a substantial commercial presence in the UK market through which any equivalent arrangement could extend.
The Association of British Insurers has said the sector has "long supported the development of automated vehicles" given their safety potential, while stressing motor insurers need to stay closely involved as policy is finalised, a position that leaves plenty of open questions for brokers advising fleet and mobility clients right now.
Three are worth raising before London's first genuinely driverless rides arrive: whether existing commercial motor wordings adequately capture product-liability and cyber exposure once a software fault, not a driver error, is the likely cause of a claim; what data-retention and disclosure commitments an operator can offer to support prompt settlement where liability is uncontested and credible subrogation where it isn't; and how a claims team distinguishes a genuine sensor or software failure from a staged or exaggerated claim against a vehicle that, by design, cannot argue back.
Those are precisely the questions Allianz and Waymo's research partnership is designed to start answering in Munich. Whatever claims data and pricing models come out of it over the next three years will land on London's desks long before this country's own regulatory framework is fully in force.
