Walt, the inspector was out in the field and I had my inspector hat out doing lots of inspections in the Lone Star State while we were there. We rode in Cyber Cab, we rode in Robo Taxi, we rode in AV Ride, you rode in May Mobility, you rode in the Kodiak truck, and you went to Aurora Invest yesterday. Boy, did we get a lot of inspections packed in 48 hours. And let's not forget, yes, we did visit depots. Let's kick things off with Cyber Cab. I'm going to tell you, Walt, I was impressed. Very thoroughly, truly impressed.
Yeah, we did take a lot of autonomous miles over the past week, you know, primarily in the great state of Texas. So, but let's just, to your point, let's start with Cyber Cab. How was it?
It was awesome. It's awesome. I'll summarize it to you this way, in a little bit of tongue-in-cheek, but I am dead serious. Once you go Cyber Cab, you don't go back. Our good friend David Moss said go Robo Taxi, then go Cyber Cab and compare and contrast. No. I'm sorry, I didn't like Robo Taxi after riding in Cyber Cab. I felt like I was traveling in a movie theater. It was awesome. I just needed popcorn and a cocktail and then life would have been awesome. But it was a really great experience.
Can you be a little bit more specific? Because when I get in my own FSD or yours, and I also took Robo Taxi rides, it's pretty smooth. The Y itself, you know, the new Ys have better suspension, so they're more comfortable than the old Ys. Is it possible it just felt more comfortable because the Cyber Cab sits lower to the road, maybe better suspension? Be more specific in terms of what was better. Was it the software and how it was braking and turning, or was it just the comfort of the car and the quietness of how it was manufactured?
I'm going to give you a LightShed answer, your partner, Rich Greenfield. It was the screen. It was the experience, the entertainment. And when you're sitting in there, it's really cool. You can recline the seats all the way back. You can move them forward. It was just, I know this sounds silly, but that screen, you just forgot that you were in a car. You felt like you were in your living room sitting on a sofa. And it didn't have any intersection problems. We didn't have any remote operations. The ride was very smooth. Some of the routing needs to get better, but overall great suspension. The audio could use a little bit of an upgrade there, but overall very good. But there's just something magical about sitting in a vehicle with no manual controls and on a seat or a bench, if you want to use that term, that feels like you're on a sofa. I mean, from an aesthetic standpoint, Tesla hit a home run.
Okay. So, to dissect that inner cab experience, I get. But what about the ride itself? Like, was it because, you know, one of the things that I noticed, which I'll get to in a little bit, was, you know, when you hop in from an AV to a Waymo, from a May to a, you know, to a Robo Taxi all in the same day, you can notice those differences. Now look, I'm going to say, you know, I've used this analogy before. It's like, you know, if you go to a Best Buy and you look at an HD or a 4K or an 8K television, you can see the difference when it's right next to each other or back to back. That might not be as relevant if you're just taking the same car every day or, you know, there's not as much time in between it. So I just want to zero in, if you really focus in on, like, was there anything about the ride itself, like how the software controls the car, that you think is different than Robo Taxi in a Model Y?
From a software perspective? No. What you could tell though, from a rider perspective, of being lower to the ground, a little bit smoother than Y. But from a driving performance perspective, no material difference. I would even challenge individuals. You could probably blindfold one individual, put them in a Y, and then immediately put them in a Cyber Cab, and they couldn't tell the difference besides how high they're sitting in the vehicle.
Okay, so let me give my context here. You know, because the last time I was in Dallas, I did note on this very podcast that, you know, the way the Waymos drove in Dallas felt different than California. And even in California, when you go back from time to time, things change in terms of the feel. Look, Dallas drivers are pretty aggressive, especially relative to California drivers. So that maybe they have to provide a different profile for those rides. But to me, you know, in Dallas at least, the Robo Taxi had the smoothest ride. And I'll be more specific in terms of the braking. Like, you know, a lot of these cars, they're perhaps on a software load that's being more cautious. They're braking, you know, a little bit more aggressively. Again, if you rode in those cars in a vacuum, totally fine and probably better than most human drivers. But if we're going to compare these things and split hairs, as they may say, then, you know, in my case, you know, the Robo Taxi was much smoother than I think all of their peers. Obviously, Waymo is a smooth ride, but, you know, there was a lot of braking and more of an aggressive ride than I was familiar with.
That tends to be a characteristic of Waymo in Texas. So, I've ridden in Houston. So, thank you, Waymo, for early rider access in Houston. I was able to ride in Houston. I've ridden in Dallas. And you're right, they tend to be a little more aggressive. Friend of the pod, Matt Mullen from Covenant, he FaceTimed me this morning riding in a Waymo, showing me how aggressive it was. So, it's not just you and I noticing how aggressive or assertive the driver is. We're getting it from other individuals, friends of the pod. But I got to say, while I did that drive in a manual car, which was the worst experience because it had no FSD from Austin to Dallas, 15 minutes into the ride, I was joking. This individual went all the way from the far left to the far right to get off. So the drivers down there are very aggressive. So I understand why if you want to say the Waymo driver is tuned to that aggressiveness. So I get it.
Let me also provide my own context relative to human drivers that I experienced on this trip to Texas, which again, we're splitting hairs relative to these autonomous vehicles. Two different experiences. I think I had three total human rides. On one case, I was going to the airport and the driver, you know, pulls up. He's like, "Hey, do you mind if I stop at the gas station on the way to the airport?" I'm like, "I kind of have to get my flight." So I didn't, quote-unquote, allow him to stop at the gas station because I needed to catch my flight, but apparently with autonomy that's not going to happen. The second thing is a bit more disturbing. You know, I had to connect through Atlanta to get to Dallas. There's a lot of weather. You had a fiber cut, which don't even get me started on that since I know a lot about fiber cuts and how ridiculous that they had no redundancy for basic infrastructure. But I digress. In any event, I got in late. I got in late to Dallas and, you know, we're on that highway between DFW and downtown and I'm looking in the rearview mirror and I can see that my driver is like dozing off and the car is like starting to swerve into lanes. I'm like asking him, "Hey, it's a little warm in here. Turn up the air conditioning." And, you know, and look, I feel bad. The guy is trying to earn a living working at 2 o'clock in the morning to drive people, but that's not a safe situation. And it just speaks to how I think consumers are going to seek out what is safest, what is most consistent, right, in terms of their experience from getting point A to point B. So I thought that was, I think that's notable. These are exact experiences that I've had and notable to bring up when we're talking about this comparison between, hey, maybe Waymo's a little bit more brakey than Tesla in a given market.
The comparison's spot on. I only had to use a human-driven vehicle twice on this trip outside of me driving. One was to come meet you in Arlington and the other was to get to the airport. And my first human-driven ride after, you know, fully autonomy going to meet you in Arlington, I was like, "Oh, this stinks." I mean, it just, no consistency in the product. I understand why Travis built the Uber X here, but boy oh boy, no consistency of a product. I'll tell you something. There is no loyalty. I'm going, who's the fastest, who's the cheapest when I have to use human, but I would gladly wait for a Robo Taxi because that consistency of experience and just being able to be myself, to make a phone call. And I'm sorry to say this, but I have to be very honest, the overall cleanliness of Robo Taxis tends to be cleaner than a majority of the human-driven transportation network vehicle companies.
Just to be clear, this was not an Uber X I was in. This was Uber Comfort and I still have these issues. But let's go back to your Austin experience. Tell us a bit about the rest of it. How were the pickups? How were the wait times? You know, what was the availability? You know, what was the routing? Tell us more about Cyber Cab in Austin.
Sure. So, the pickups were consistent. There was at the hotel, and you and I have stayed at the same hotel. And it's funny, we were Robo Taxi both when you and I were at supervised, then we were unsupervised, and then I was in Cyber Cab. It picked up at the exact same spot right there on the side every consistent time. First of all, wait times averaged, I would say, two to five minutes. So, really good wait times. My longest wait time, I took dozens of rides, was 17 minutes. I went from the south of the OD all the way to the north of the OD and all the way to east to west and started zigzagging around the OD. Some of the routing was odd, taking some more side streets versus more of a traditional road that you and I would take, but the experience didn't bother me. And then I got to one place when I had that 17-minute wait. It was hotter than hot. And I mean, it was hotter than hot. So, I went and got an ice cream. So, that 17-minute didn't wait me. I got an ice cream and waited for the next Cyber Cab to come. But, uh, Tesla does need to work on the routing. That would be my one big takeaway for this audience that Tesla needs to do: improve the routing.
I mean, I would say that the Robo Taxi, which is again unsupervised that I took in Dallas, which is great, right? No driver in there. So, that's awesome. The routing there was more than just odd. I mean, it looked like it was avoiding sections of Dallas to get from point A to point B. So, a 10-minute ride, you know, effectively turned into a 20-minute ride. Now, this is, you know, a similar concept to what we've experienced with Waymo pre-highway, right? When you're using these back roads to get from point A to point B, you're effectively adding minutes that consumers are not going to want. So I suppose that as they go into these markets and in Tesla's case build them out more and as Waymo adds highways, that these things will be resolved as part of the roadmap on technology. I can't see why you can make it work in certain areas and not others unless you were specifically avoiding, you know, certain times, certain types of rides, and less, but that shouldn't rule out whole effectively geographic areas that seemed like, you know, they were getting blocked out. So hopefully that changes over time. It's also an important point which we've made on this podcast many times as a reminder to those that are very bullish on Tesla, in that like it's not everywhere all at once, right? Individual markets are going to have their own quirks that are going to need to be worked out market by market, and that I think is an example of that.
Yeah. And I will give a shout out. Spencer was with us for some of the fieldwork that we did and the things that Spencer showed me on the Model Y. I'll just put it this way, completely reinforces exactly what you're saying. And I want to reemphasize that this is not turn on the switch. It's everywhere all the time. It's not going to happen that way. I would say, sorry Bulls, you can reach out to me. You can reach out to Spencer. There's a lot of differences that you're overlooking.
So tell us more about Austin, but is there anything else? You had your inspector hat. I assume it wasn't there just to ride Cyber Cabs. Can you give us a little taste of some of the things that you saw there?
Cyber Cab was the big thing that I wanted to see. But first thing I did, I landed, I went to Hertz. Gil, great job what you're doing at Hertz, sir. Got in my Hertz rental car and went on depot hunting because that's what we do. The inspector hat was on. I was in the Hertz mobile and going around inspecting depots. First stop, I went and visited the AOMO Waymo Depot. And well, remember how you and I went on the sidewalk in front of the building and the sidewalk behind the building? Those are all blocked now. They must have known that you and I were there. You can't see it anymore. It's all blocked. However, they did not block off the side where there's a public road. So, I sat there, parked on the public road, and I monitored the depot for roughly an hour or so, and I noticed something. The vehicles weren't being cleaned. Because I noticed when I was in downtown Austin, the vehicles were turning. The vehicles at the depot were not being cleaned. There was no car wash in sight. There was no cleaning bays in sight. And that's something to watch because the compare and contrast we'll get to later. The Dallas Depot, boy oh boy, they were clean and I saw individuals cleaning them. So that's something to point out there. Also visited Tesla's depot. They're under construction depots. They're operational depots. And I'll tell you something, Tesla's OD, this is just my personal opinion based on visiting these depots. It's getting ready to expand again. So, pay attention to that. And also, I think I would say probably the biggest highlight or the biggest surprise, we all follow the Texas Automated Vehicles database of the number of vehicles that are registered in Texas. I went and visited AV Ride's upfitting facility. Well, I kid you not, there must have been, I would say, 200 to 300 vehicles there. Some were upfitted, some were not upfitted. I don't think the market is paying attention to how large of a presence AV Ride has in Texas. I mean, that was just incredible the amount of vehicles that I saw at their upfitting facility in Austin.
Well, we'll get to AV Ride a little bit later. But in general, I think also Waymo had a big push in Texas. In the last three weeks, you've seen registered vehicles at least up 49%. Now, we know registrations aren't necessarily cars on the road. Like AV Ride has a lot of registrations, but those are in many cases cars that are building the miles and the safety case that they need, you know, to get to driver out. Again, we'll get to that later. So just keep in mind those differences when you see these numbers that are pushed out there. But I also do believe in the case of Waymo, you know, they don't need a lot of those cars for building the product to work. That's for commercial service. And this is again for our longtime listeners something that we talked about before, like if something's going to happen in a market, in this case Tesla, you know, building Cyber Cabs, you know, adding driver out in multiple Texas cities, that's when Waymo wants to come in and surge and show the market what their presence is. We saw that when Robo Taxi first launched a little over a year ago and obviously we're seeing it now that Cyber Cab has started and, you know, depending on when things clean up with NHTSA, probably ready to start ramping there.
I would agree with that. I could tell you visiting Waymo's Dallas Depot, I saw, oh, they had California plates but there were Ohio plates there. I want to ask you this question. One of the most interesting things I saw at Waymo's Dallas Depot. They have three of them. I visited two of them. There was a Waymo Jaguar I-PACE that Spencer knew took a photo of had Oklahoma plates. I have never seen a Waymo with Oklahoma plates. What do you think that means?
Yeah, I don't really know how that all goes down. We always check to see who owns the cars and take pictures of that stuff to see if there's any ownership change there. Obviously, these guys still have the issue of residual value in terms of getting third parties to really step in. I wouldn't want to speculate on what that means at this point.
That is fair. And then I will say, you know, when we were in Dallas, I did visit other depots. I visited the Zoox depot over by Love Field. I got to say, Walt, and I'm not saying this to be critical. I'm just saying this for fact, and we are going to release this in a field report. The depot was under construction. There was no charging infrastructure visible there. Counted four Highlanders. I'm not a construction expert, so I'm stating this as not a construction expert, but somebody that follows this stuff, it is going to be a long time before that depot gets operational. I would say at least 12 to 16 months, maybe 18 months. And just completely fascinating. And I want to dovetail that with to the audience that knows we have another field report coming. I was in Austin in March with you. We visited the Zoox depot and then I visited last week. Well, not one difference, not one construction movement, no visible changes and again only four Highlanders. So I don't know. I just want to point that out to the audience. I just think that the Zoox timeline is getting pushed based on their public press releases about getting ready to launch markets. The infrastructure, the Hollywood term below the line, that's where the details matter when it comes to scaling and they're not even ready. Now, one place you didn't get to, which I thought I wanted you to go to, was the proposed site for where Paramount was considering in Austin, which was near, I think, a trash dump, but I think that's now a moot point as our, I don't want to say friend, as our foil Rob Bonta caved this past week, so now not really relevant in terms of seeing them, at least for the time being, move out of LA into Austin. But with that said, let's go to the visits, the rest of the visits, from Austin to Dallas. The first being, and I'm going to do these in chronological order, May Mobility. You know, May Mobility, which I've been in these cars in multiple locations, and in the Arlington location, you know, I think this is probably my third time in these vehicles. They're definitely making progress, which is again commendable given that this company, which is in the process of trying to raise money through a SPAC, but has only raised less than $500 million. I don't know, like that's probably what SpaceX spends in months that this company spent, you know, for forever. But, you know, it was, we still had obviously a safety driver. The car itself was definitely cleaner in terms of like the overall, it looked like it was getting closer to ready to go. There's still, I think, issues that the company is going to need to hash out before they can really get to driver out. There's certain situations that the car faces that they're probably at least at launch going to avoid rather than doing that. And, you know, but overall, I think good progress for May Mobility, but just, you know, contextually not really at that phase where I think you're going to see scale driver out cars. Now look, they have indicated that, you know, there are software loads that are coming. Even when we were there, there was a software load that was going to address some of the issues that we were seeing right away. So these things can happen very quickly and autonomy development is accelerating. Like I said, things have improved over time. So it was a good visit and good to see that they had made progress with these Toyotas, which by the way, you know, is a hybrid car. So they've got the challenges of dealing with, you know, the engine and how braking works versus other cars. It's a more complicated task, you know, than perhaps having a cleaner vehicle.
It is a more complicated task. I remember the old days. Brian Salesky, when he was running Argo, would make the argument that hybrids have more uptime. I'm not necessarily sure that's the argument now, but I think it's all eventually going to go electric. I like the Sienna architecture. I think Toyota builds an incredible vehicle. Obviously, they have the dual redundant version of the Siennas, but overall it was very nice of them to host us and thank you for that. And just a really good team and we wish them well.
Yeah. Then there's, you know, there's details that exist in terms of how we think this is going to roll out that I think they're going to address during their, you know, the phase of raising this capital. And then after May, we headed over to Kodiak. Kodiak, of course, being autonomous for trucks, they are driver out off-road, right, in the Permian Basin. But they also named, I guess, a Dallas-Fort Worth to Houston as their first driverless long-haul lane. That's 219 miles on old I-45 and the expectation, I think, is that they can launch that by year end. The truck, again, just to be clear, when you get in a Class 8 truck, it is not a comfortable ride. Not relative to the autonomy, just there's, you know, there's bouncing. It's a big, it's a big heavy truck on things that are happening like the goods and the goods. I'm not going to say services. The freight doesn't care about a comfortable ride. But I think there was every time, I think this is maybe the fourth time, maybe third or fourth time I've been in a Kodiak truck. Again, progress in terms of entering lanes and dealing with stuff. So, clear improvement. And, you know, we did another 30-minute loop. We're doing 65 miles an hour. Sounds like that safety case is improving. I guess we're going to get an update on that next week. But the big news there is obviously if they can get to driver out, you know, on a road, you know, by the end of the year and we look forward to hopping back in that Kodiak truck without a driver in the driver's seat.
I think that's going to be awesome. Looking forward to that. I think it is very clear from what you and I experienced. I actually went there the day before, brought Spencer along, part of the Road to Autonomy friend group, and rode in.
Did you get Spencer in the Class 8? Did you get Spencer in the truck? And what was his impression?
Spencer went in the truck. He was very impressed. First time Spencer was ever in a Class 8 truck. So I got him going in and he's made a video and David Moss is going to be going for rides. So if you want to call Friends of the Road to Autonomy, we're getting them in Class 8 trucks. And they had a really good experience. But from a technology standpoint, Kodiak is clearly, clearly improving in the right direction. The technology is getting better. And from what Don told us when we had the private meeting with him is that a lot of learnings from the Permian Basin are coming over to the on-the-road and that's going to be really curious as they scale both in the Permian and the over-the-road driverless fully unsupervised. You know, the impact that that's going to have, I think it's going to be relatively positive.
And like a lot of these companies, look, there's just a need for capital, right? You can move through and get more driving miles. I mean, it's a little bit more apparent, you know, with cars, right? If May Mobility had more cash, you get more cars on the road, you get your miles testing. All of these things move faster, but, you know, they're dealing on leaner budgets than these larger companies who have been flushed with cash have dealt with. I think as a result, they're scrappier and as a result work more efficiently. They had a lockup that occurred this week. Good and bad, right? Because obviously it impacts the stock, but good in that it then creates flexibility or more liquidity and enables them to go shelf eligible, you know, a week later. So that increases the flexibility or availability of ways to raise cash. But look, capital ends up being one of the items that's important for all of these companies.
Yeah, we all know capital's important and the end of the lockup is basically, I believe it's their one-year anniversary of being a public company. So, congratulations on that. And, you know, we just, if you look at the economy and you look at the growing driver shortage, you look at what Secretary Duffy's doing with this crackdown on illegal drivers. I don't know any other way to say it. Elon said it in a video yesterday. We need autonomous trucking to shore up the supply chain. I mean, we need everybody to succeed because it's truly vital to the US economy.
We didn't end there. Spent some time at AV Ride in the cars, doing some drives there. Again, safety driver. This is, remember, you can hail these things on your own if you want to go to Dallas. I did that as well, multiple times. You know, in the Uber app, you just go to certain locations, call for Comfort. Again, I feel like a broken record here, but definitely progress. The car there, like, you know, which I think you had like an iPad kind of jerry-rigged up there. It looks like it's ready to go. Like the Ioniq 5 is a nice car. They have nice, you know, screens that are set up. It's got all the bells and whistles I think that you need for this initial launch. Key is again, when can they get that supervisor out from behind the car? And I think there's still, you know, some wrinkles that I think need to be worked out there. So my guess is like, you know, getting back to when I wrote about this for LightShed, whether, you know, just whether any Uber partner, like if you're a year out and it's like June of next year, a good scenario is AV Ride's got what, 10, 20, 30 cars driver out in this market. That's a positive for them. Like if they're, you know, want to raise capital and they're telling their investors, that's a positive. But the context of that is you, Waymo is going to be at 10,000 and, you know, given what's going on at Tesla right now, I think you're probably going to see Tesla in the thousands at that point. Now, from their standpoint, they look at that and say like, "Okay, so what?" Like if ultimately we're in this for the long haul, right? We're able to raise the capital. We continue to develop. We put... And look, we know AV Ride's got hundreds...
