Waymo dips its wheels back into delivery, this time with DoorDash (techcrunch.com)

Waymo and DoorDash announced a multi-year pilot in Phoenix that will match DoorDash orders within a 315-square-mile area to self-driving Waymo vehicles. Initially limited to DashMart convenience and grocery orders, deliveries will be loaded into the trunk of a driverless Jaguar I‑Pace and customers will retrieve items by unlocking the trunk via the DoorDash app. Not every order will use Waymo; the program is a measured test of both logistics and customer acceptance as the companies plan to add more local merchants and offerings over time. Waymo says it has no other active delivery partnerships right now. The tie-up is significant because it signals Waymo’s renewed, targeted interest in last-mile delivery without reviving its shuttered truck unit, using its robotaxi stack to explore commercial diversification and new revenue streams. For the AI/ML community the pilot will generate operational data on perception, routing, and fleet integration in mixed urban environments, plus human-robot interaction metrics around remote trunk access and curbside handoffs. Key technical and product challenges include secure app-controlled trunk access, geofencing and routing within the pilot area, real-world autonomy edge cases, and whether the convenience tradeoff—customers walking to a vehicle versus doorstep handoff—supports broader scale-up.