Will you please welcome Autonomy Markets? Well, that's the opening line of Bill Graham from One from the Vault. I spent time in San Francisco. And when I was there, I went for a walk through Golden Gate Park. And when I was in Golden Gate Park, as I told my wife, I saw Moby Dick, the white whale, aka the Adams Autonomous Vehicle. And while I was in San Francisco driving around listening to Legion of Mary, a little Jerry Garcia band, I happened to go for a Waymo ride on the highway. I did a lot of incredible fieldwork while I was out there doing fieldwork. Dara got the terminology right. He rode in the back seat unsupervised. Dara, well done, sir. Ladies and gentlemen, we're not going into helping to slip. We're going into Autonomy Markets. And the inspector was in the field, Walt.
Yes, you were, Grayson. You were tweeting some stuff out. I'm sure there's other stuff that you've held back, which we can't wait to learn more about here and in the weeks to come. But I think my first question is, when you go to San Francisco, one of the long-standing things that our longtime listeners are always interested in is, did you have to go to the Kiss and Fly lot to get your Waymo? What was that experience like in getting a Waymo from the airports, which many people claim Waymo goes to the airport, but you and I know it's still a bit of a challenge.
The walk is horrible from the United Airlines terminal. And I don't know how I got lucky. Well, because oh boy, I got lucky. They put me in the last possible gate in the United terminal. It was exactly 24 minutes from the gates all the way to the Grand Hyatt. I was able to pick up Waymo at the Grand Hyatt. 24 minutes. I timed it. I got some of it on video, but I do have to give credit to the Grand Hyatt. When you get into the Grand Hyatt, it's a very nice experience. But I had sticker shock, Walt. I had to pay $11 for a large cup of coffee. I literally fell out of my chair. $11. Outside of the long walk, the $11 cup of coffee, which is not fancy. It was pure black, by the way. Great pickup. It was simple. It was easy. It was a shaded area. And then away I went down on the highway. And I know I've said this multiple times, and I'm going to say this again. Riding in a Waymo on the freeway is a truly magical experience.
Well, $11 for coffee is pretty bad. It kind of reminds me of those fees that they charge in Vegas to get picked up at certain locations. But the other thing that kind of stood out to me is you said you were at the United terminal. I didn't know you were a frequent flyer on United and maybe I will join you on some of your United trips. It's an airline that I generally avoid given its location at Newark, which is not that any of these airports in New York are good, but you know earlier this week the Delta CEO had some not so nice comments about Elon. So I think United has now offered me to match my Delta status over on United. So, I might take a look at that. What do you think? How is your United overall? Is it worthwhile? How was your internet on the plane?
I moved over to United. I have been on several flights with Starlink and it's a game changer. I just say you point blank. I no longer fly Delta. It's because of Starlink. I am that customer. This flight unfortunately didn't have Starlink, but it took off on time and we arrived 18 minutes early. So, I was able to make it to my meeting on time. So, overall great experience, but being able to work in the sky with Starlink makes a huge difference. And now I'm not a loyal United flyer. I am loyal to direct flights. Not to United, but every chance I have a route to take United and I give Starlink, I will take it. But I am loyal to direct flights.
So to some of our impatient listeners, this is a good crossover topic. As you know, I do cover space and telecom and wireless the industry. And it's interesting that you know, you're using internet that works so well. This is exactly what people told me years ago. Elon would never get to work, never get the CPE down enough for terrestrial, never get it to work on planes because LEOs are moving and planes are moving and here you are surfing at very high speed. So, and I think that is instructive about a lot of the things that we've heard about Tesla in recent years and robo taxi in recent years despite our real world experience not only in our own FSD cars but also in unsupervised robo taxis and cyber cabs in the great state of Texas. I will say, not to go down a telco corner, but I've been able to upload field reports from Starlink on United Flight. That upload speed, it's impressive. And I will say I won't say where I stayed in San Francisco. Starlink on a plane is better than some Wi-Fi in hotels in San Francisco. So, put that out there.
So, let's move on to, you know, you've been to many things, so we're going to go through these one at a time. The first thing that stood out to me and there's a lot of I think what I would call positive news from Uber Partners. The first being that you were able to get into a Waymo supervised ride around San Francisco. I think this was also on a highway. Tell us about that experience, the car, how it handled, compare it to other autonomous cars that you've driven in and give us an update on what's going on at Waymo.
Sure. First and foremost, Julianne, thank you. Alex, thank you. They picked me up in my hotel. This was not a mapped route and my request was I wanted to go on a freeway. I wanted to see how a Waymo handled a freeway and we went during dense San Francisco traffic. We're able to get some you want to call use the term open road and some dense environments. We went to urban to highway to I call it freeway, but some people call it highway. Any term you want to use, you can call it that. But the Waymo driver and I don't want to overemphasize this but I want to emphasize this was very very smooth and we were coming into on we're on the freeway very good merging and we were coming off you know some of these lanes to get off in downtown San Francisco are very congested and you have motorists that like to grip the wheel and not let you in. And the Waymo driver, and I want to say for the record, not one intervention, not one intervention, aggressively moved in, totally legal by the California DMV rules, and was able to get in there. Very smooth ride. Had to be aggressive when it was aggressive and felt totally comfortable and normal. I said this on X, and I'll say this again here on our show, Walt, it felt very similar to riding in robo taxi. It was very, very smooth. You didn't have that mechanical robotic jerkiness that you and I have experienced in some vehicles. It was very, very smooth and exceptionally well done by Team Waymo. And the commonality with robo taxi is this generalized approach that Waymo takes, which they've mentioned before and Waymo has also talked about and is testing products that don't necessarily use our favorite technology of debate LAR. So it'll be interesting to see there.
So great, great to hear that positive update about Waymo. I'm sure Uber is going to be happy to hear that there is no public rides on Waymo in San Francisco. These are friends only. Obviously you're a friend. Where do you think they are into unlocking either in San Francisco or London where they're giving supervised rides I think on Uber? And I guess as part of that question because I think it's a challenge for the industry, did you get to experience like pickup and drop off locations or was this more of a company guided visit in terms of the Waymo service?
This was not company guided. I was picked up right in front of my hotel door. And to put that in context and to my dear friend Bert Kaufman and I spent some time with him there in San Francisco when Bert and I rode in the Waymos. We had to go behind the hotel to get picked up and the Waymo vehicle picked me up directly in front. So it wasn't pre-planned. I said, "Okay, here's the entrance. It was right there. It pulled up and away we went." So really good pickup and drop off. And as far as timeline to where it's going, yes, you can play. Sorry D and Mac. You could play Autonomy Roulette in London if you want to get paired with it, but I don't want to give a timeline necessarily on where I think Waymo is on the L4. I do want to give a timeline where they are in L2 Plus. I will go on the record and I would say they're probably 12 to 16 months away from putting an FSD competitor product into market and having highly huge success with that. That's where I think they truly are that they have a I would say they probably have the world's best competitor today to FSD. Now FSD is obviously a product that you and I both think has a tremendous opportunity and provides potentially a revenue opportunity whether it's Waymo or WeRide or whoever. But does it you know some have criticized those that first go to level two FSD whatever you want to call it supervised where you have to be in the driver and that challenge to get to level four from level two is monumental. What was your sense there? Because let's not talk about it in the context of hey an FSD competitor. Tell me where Waymo is for what's beneficial to Uber which is fully unsupervised robo taxi.
If you're going to push me for a timeline I would say 36 months there but 36 months to going unsupervised. How large of a service area that is I don't want to make a prediction there but I would say 36 months to going fully unsupervised. And based on everything that's been publicly reported and based on where Waymo was founded and headquartered, I'll just go on the record and state that the first unsupervised market most likely will be London.
I like being more direct, Grayson, and I'm going to translate 36 months. That's three years. Three years. I could look at my model right now and tell you how many Waymos and Teslas I think are going to be on the road unsupervised in three years. I'm going to, you know, actually, this is going to shock you. I'm going to take the under. I think you know with the right funding and with the development I think Waymo can compress that fairly dramatically but it's again it's good to hear these positive updates in terms of Waymo so thank you for that. Should we move on?
Yeah, let's do it and I will add one more thing to it that you alluded to it that the L2 plus business for funding which we're seeing from Waymo you can see in their SEC filings I think is a very strategic move because it provides funding for these companies to grow as they pursue L4.
Okay. So, I was just looking at your Twitter and I see that you spotted a Waymo Jaguar I-PACE with 233,000 miles, which is I think the highest documented mileage on a car. I haven't had my AI bots scrape through Reddit quite yet. I think that's pretty high, but there's What is there? What do you think? 750,000 to go. The car was probably it looked like it was in pretty good condition.
The car was in great condition. The interior was phenomenal. It's funny of all the first thing I do and I'm a front seat rider. First thing I do when I'm in a Jag because the Ojai does not show you the mileage is I snap a picture of the mileage to see. So I have an ongoing archive which is available in Omega so subscribers can see all of the mileage of all the different various vehicles that we have there. And for the record Walt scraping is a no no. You don't want to scrape. No bots cannot scrape. That's a no no. You can't do that. Omega does not scrape. Omega plays by the rules.
Okay. So then also on Waymo, were you able to do back-to-back comparisons between the Jag and the Ojai? And I guess I have two questions here as you know as a great follow-up to the comparisons that we provided last week from both of our experiences in the great state of Texas. You know when you ride these things back to back you can tell a difference. So first the Jag compared to the Jag in Texas. Did the ride feel different? And then more specifically the Jag compared to the Ojai if you were able to get into both vehicles.
I was able to get into both vehicles. I want to highlight something and I have not reached out to Waymo for comment on this but I will say this from my personal experience of having freeway access in multiple markets is that the Waymo rider on the freeway and for the audience is unsure you can only get a Jaguar I-PACE on the freeway. It capped out at 65 miles an hour. It seemed less aggressive than it was previous times. But I do want to give the Waymo engineering credit. I would encourage Dimitri and the engineering team to pull up this data from my ride last night. Guys go through my file. We're cruising along in the second lane over and all suddenly while I'm listening to Legion of Mary because I got to stay on the dead from San Francisco and I'll say here. I'm like, "Oh, is it a Phil bomb? Is it a Phil bomb?" Getting louder and louder. And these two I'm sorry I'm going to say a mean word. Maniacs must have been going 110 120 mph on motorcycles in between the cars. And what did the Waymo do? It gently moved over and let these maniacs blow through. And me as a human driver, I would have been like, "What the heck is going on?" But really well done from an engineering perspective. Just want to highlight that there to the team at Waymo. But from a comparing, and I did I went Jaguar and then I went Ojai. The Ojai is still, if you want to say, working out the kinks. It's still, if you want to use the parenting term, it's still teething. But from the last time I was in it 3 weeks ago to being in the Ojai today, it is dramatically getting better.
First of all, these dirt bikes that are on our roads that have no license plates, that are not street legal. Can we just get some enforcement of the laws? But let me go back to a question. The Jag in California versus the Jag in Texas, did you notice any difference in the overall feel of the ride?
The overall feel of the ride? No. But I noticed a major major major difference because I am Mr. Pnicity and I wear an inspector hat, but I am polite pnicity. The vehicles in San Francisco spotless. The vehicles in Austin were on the dirtier side. That was the big comparison for me from a driving perspective, you really couldn't tell. If I was put a blindfold on you and put you in Austin, then put a blindfold and put you in Dallas and then in San Francisco in a Jag, I think it'd be very hard to be able to tell the difference outside of the cleanliness.
Well, you and I both know that the issue in Austin is it's a Vomo and that they're going to that depot and these cars are not getting cleaned. A Vomo minority owned by Uber. We haven't seen the contracts. Don't know when that deal was announced between them, between Waymo and Uber, whether the AOMO thing was forced in there. So maybe we have to wait for the ultimate divorce for them to get it. But I mean, if these guys are not performing, these guys meaning a Vomo in terms of the servicing of the vehicle. Why is that? Why aren't they just terminating that contract faster?
I would defer that question to the legal department. I don't have a legal answer for you. I can tell you as somebody that's ridden in every Waymo market, but two, that is by far the dirtiest market of any vehicle that I've been in. And that's fieldwork.
These are important factors, right? Obviously, we are closely and most interested in getting cars that are unsupervised, right? Commercial, you can pay for it 100 cars. But that third leg of the stool, which we've talked about many times, the servicing, cleaning the cars, and frankly just in Tesla's case, the routing of these things, the pickup and drop off locations. We at Autonomy Markets will not be falling asleep on that. Those are important elements because as you get more cars and they scale, you can't just route someone anywhere or drop them off two minutes from where their pickup is or give them a dirty ride. These are necessary things to check off the box if you're truly going to be a competitive service and you're truly not going to integrate with Uber. So let's get on it Waymo and let's get on at Tesla. You both have some of these things, these check boxes to clean up if you're really going to take share in this market.
And I want to highlight something and for the audience I want to publicly give you a lot of credit. Walt was the one who encouraged me to do field work. And if you want to say Walt let a bug underneath my turkey and that's why I'm out on the road every week, every other week doing this stuff. And as Walt told me a long time ago, it makes a big difference getting out there and doing field work because you can actually truly see things. And so Walt, thank you for putting that bug in there and thank you for dragging me to Austin to do the initial fieldwork and then look what we've become. I think we are the leading channel platform covering fieldwork. So sir, thank you for doing that because it's made a huge difference in what we cover. Where's my clappy hat? I think that deserves a clappy hat.
And this is right before I was about to give you the clappy hat because I've buried the lead on your Inspector Cluso activities in California because I was searching on my AI. I could not find anyone that has found Travis Kalanick's Adams test vehicle. There's been discussion of it. Obviously, this is not like shocking new that like Travis and Anthony Lewandowski would be working on an autonomous vehicle, but Grayson, you did it. And it reminds me of our fieldwork down to see a Vomo where you're like, "We found you." And I'm sure I could just see you and I'm sorry I wasn't there with you. See you on the streets of California saying, "We found you." As that Adams test vehicle was driving by. How excited were you when you saw that?
Well, first and foremost, clappy hat to you and clappy hat to the inspector for finding this. Well, I was over the moon. I was on the phone actually with David Welch Bloomberg and I said, "Hold on." I said, "There it is. Moby Dick. Hold on. I got to get a photo. I got to get a photo." And I snapped a photo of it because I was determined and you know me well. And I told my wife, I said, "Just so you know, for the record, I am not coming home until I find the whale." And sure enough, I find it after visiting the Grateful Dead house, which was really cool. And right by Golden Gate Park. And then, well, something must have went in the air. I said, "It's going to be a good day." And then I spotted it multiple times. And then I went into Autonomy AI's proprietary intelligence system, Omega. And I will tease this. I found the depot. Omega knew where the depot was. We visited the Adams depot and I will tease to the audience on Monday we'll be releasing a field report with an up close view of the Adams autonomous vehicle. And for the audience it's not what you think it is.
I mean this has to be some of the biggest news that has hit autonomy in a while. It's crazy. Like you've cited a new vehicle from none other than Travis Kalanick and Anthony Lewandowski. I assume Anony's involved with this aspect of it. I don't see why he wouldn't be. So it's incredible and I'm shocked that the tweet although you have a ton of views. Sorry, Mom. That it hasn't gotten more attention. So, look, you know, Anthony, or I guess more importantly, Travis, let's get you on the podcast. We'd love to hear more about it. Now that your car's on the road, I'm sure now that Grayson has unveiled it, you're going to have other people out there watching it. Maybe not. Maybe people don't like to do field work and figuring out what's going on at Adams. And of course, let's just give a throwback if you haven't listened to the podcast with one of Travis's good friends, Jason Calacanis, who we did the podcast with, who I think one of the most interesting things that we talked about there was, you know, maybe Travis is the guy to kind of come back to the helm at Uber on this kind of next. And again, nothing against Dara, as I said on that podcast, has done a great job getting them to the free cash flow when everyone doubted their ability to do this. But I don't know. It's just an interesting development. So, good job there.
I will tease something for the audience and I'll tease Anony's involved and watch the video and you'll understand why on that front. Travis, you know how to get a hold of me. We each follow each other on X. Shoot me a DM. I'd love to have you on the show because field work is good work and that's what we do here. And well, also, you know what else I found when I was out there? I found something new.
What did you find? Let us know.
I found a BMW cruising around San Francisco with a very interesting camera only and radar, no lidar rig on it. And this is the important part. I spotted it in San Francisco when I was talking to you when I was car counting. And later when I had dinner with my partner Rob Grant in Mountain View, we're running out dinner. I said, "Rob, hold my bag." I ran down the road and I got another photo of it. So, I spotted it in San Francisco and then I spotted it down in Mountain View later that evening. So, it's making the rounds.
So, let's go behind the curtains here a little bit on Autonomy Markets. I'm on the phone with Grayson. He's just sitting on the street in San Francisco. In one case, someone's coming up to him. Grayson, love the podcast. Which was great. Love to hear that. But then I'm talking to him. He's like, "Oh, hold on, hold on. I got to get the camera." And like this car drove by and that car drove by and this car. Look, we've given a lot of props to Texas and to a certain extent, we've denigrated the great state of California for, you know, legitimate reasons. So, I'm going to give a hat tip to California. You can go there and talk about a hot bed of autonomy. A lot of great things happening and obviously a lot of test cars and a lot of great and for good reason, right? You have smart people that have lived there, at least for now until they've been driven out of the state that are still developing products. So, you know, I think we need to spend more time out on the West Coast. Grayson, what do you say?
