Element Fleet Management is expanding its partnership with Waymo to support the autonomous vehicle company's planned launch in Toronto, marking Waymo's first market in Canada.

The Toronto expansion, with passenger service targeted for 2028, builds on a multi-year partnership announced in June 2026, when Element began supporting Waymo's autonomous mobility operations in San Diego.

Through its Element Mobility division, the fleet management company will oversee onsite operations for Waymo's Toronto fleet, including vehicle maintenance, charging, infrastructure, and fleet readiness.

Managing the Operations Behind Autonomous Fleets

Element will coordinate the personnel, facilities, infrastructure, and vehicle operations needed to support Waymo's fleet.

Its responsibilities will include fleet lifecycle management, vehicle readiness, maintenance, charging infrastructure, energy management, and connected vehicle data.

Element will also help manage routine operational requirements to keep vehicles charged, cleaned, maintained, and ready for deployment.

The arrangement reflects the operational requirements of autonomous mobility services, where vehicles must be maintained and positioned for service even without a human driver handling daily vehicle responsibilities.

For fleet managers, the partnership illustrates how established fleet management functions, including preventive maintenance, vehicle utilization, charging coordination, and downtime management, remain central to autonomous vehicle operations.

Preparing for Toronto Operations

Waymo plans to begin its Toronto rollout with manually driven vehicles gathering mapping data and evaluating local road conditions before progressing through autonomous testing.

The company is targeting its first public riders in 2028.

Waymo and Element expect to support hundreds of jobs over time across fleet maintenance, validation driving, customer service, and other operational functions.

We asked Avinder Buttar, senior vice president and head of electrification for Element Fleet Management, about primary operational, regulatory, or infrastructure gaps that need to be bridged:

“One of the biggest shifts as autonomous mobility scales is moving beyond managing individual vehicles to coordinating an entire operating ecosystem. That means bringing together maintenance and readiness, charging and energy management, compliance and connected intelligence to keep fleets running reliably and efficiently," he said. "These capabilities aren’t new to fleet management. What’s different is the level of scale and coordination autonomous operations require: keeping every vehicle cleaned, charged, maintained, and ready-to-operate, while minimizing downtime and maximizing availability. Autonomous mobility depends on more than the technology driving the vehicle.”

The companies have not announced how many vehicles they plan for the Toronto fleet.

The expansion extends Element's role in autonomous mobility beyond its existing work with Waymo in San Diego, adding another market in which the company will provide the operational infrastructure supporting driverless transportation.