Walt, notice the cowboy hat. And to the audience, that's a sign. Walt and I were in Dallas last week doing field work. And while Walt and I were doing field work and attending the wonderful Forward Fort Worth conference, Nissan was making news. And what did Uber do? They kept the printing press hot. Well, let's start with the Big D. What did you think of our trip to Dallas?
It was a great trip. Our listeners should settle in. We got a lot of ground to cover. But yeah, let's shout out Forward Fort Worth, and Kenny put on another great show this year. It was great to see everybody.
It was great to see everybody. We learned quite a bit, and one of the big takeaways from Forward Fort Worth is this hub-to-hub strategy is going by the wayside. Everything is going dock to dock. And then I noticed you were in the corner having quite the conversation with Paccar. I said, 'Oh boy, here he is. Walt the analyst is on patrol.'
Yeah, I was hot on the tail of Paccar and Volvo. Let's just say I'm doing my part to push autonomy for the trucking sector. And speaking of the trucking sector, shout out to Kodiak, who had a huge military win during the week. So we spent some time with the Kodiak team there, broadening into this military sector, which there's obviously tremendous opportunity for them there.
Yeah. Another thing we also uncovered, had a great conversation with Peter von Schmidt, CEO of Torc. Learned they're getting closer to commercial operations, and he told us the redundant trucks are coming. So Torc's progressing along and looks like their timeline should hold into 2027.
There's also such a breadth of quality people that show up at this thing. Still getting good feedback, and I'm still working through this concept of who the end customer ends up being for these autonomous category 8 — I guess you would call them — semi-trucks, and whether it's smart to wait for the likes of FedEx or Amazon to buy these trucks and own it on their own versus selling capacity or maybe upfitting and going to individual carriers. So a lot of good incremental feedback for me to consider in trying to understand that market.
A lot of good feedback. Not to get technical, because I'm going to get the text messages. It's not category 8, Walt — it's class 8. So we had to set that there. So we know who you are. I don't need the emails. We're on the record.
Now, this reminds me of earlier on the podcast when I screwed up calling an ODD — an operational driving domain, I think it's called — 'ODB', a famous rapper. Obie me.
And you know, every time that you and I travel to a new market, to an event, we're always doing field work. This time I went and did the Waymo fieldwork. You did the May Mobility, and jointly at different times we did AV ride fieldwork. Which part of the fieldwork do you want to break down first for our audience?
Let's start with Waymo. Tell us how your Waymo experience was and some of the things that you may have discovered.
The Waymo experience overall very smooth. No issues with drop off and pickup. What I did notice compared to Miami and the Bay Area, the driver seems to be a lot more cautious. And I did something that I didn't know I wasn't supposed to do. I went to Deep Ellum around 2:00 in the morning to have a bite to eat and had some interesting conversations there. And apparently I learned — you don't go to that part of town at 2:00 in the morning for food. But I digress on that point. Overall, really good experience. The individuals that I met with in Deep Ellum and the individuals that I spoke with around Dallas were new to the technology. There wasn't necessarily this comfort level — that was probably my biggest takeaway. 'Oh, that's cool. Sir, is there a ghost in there? What's going on? How does this work? How's this operate? Is it safe?' So a lot of questions from the residents and tourists of Dallas.
How was the ODD? And were you able to ride on highways?
The ODD was fantastic. I was able to go all around Dallas, and my Dallas geography is not very good, so the audience from Dallas, you have to go with me. Forgive me on this. I was able to go into Highland Park. I was able to go downtown. I was able to go out — I call it Logistics Row, because it was all the truck depots out on one corner. I was able to go into another corner of town. I did some rides, Walt, that were over 30 miles. So pretty good, significant ODD.
Now, is this product that you were on — did you get special access, early access, or is this currently available? How are you able to hail these Waymos in Dallas?
So it's early rider to the team at Waymo. Thank you for granting me the access, and we can check Dallas off for a new market I've gone into. So it's still early rider, even though Dallas is still an early rider. I saw quite a few Waymos on the roads with individual passengers cruising around in all different parts of Dallas.
And did you notice any difference in how these Dallas vehicles were driving versus the Bay Area? Because last time I was in the Bay Area, it seems like they tweaked up the aggression there, you know. Did they adjust it for a Dallas driver
To me, very cautious compared to the Bay Area driver, the Miami driver. Very, very cautious. Had some interesting intersections having to deal with a lot of traffic where the vehicle would nudge, where in the Bay Area it would just go for it. So a lot more conservative. I would say that the Waymo driver in Dallas still needs to be smoothed out a little, but overall really great experience.
Could it be that they start out that way in a new market just to avoid any incidents, and then as they get more comfortable with operating in a new ODD, that they start to dial up the aggression?
I think that's plausible, but I will caveat saying that when I was one of the first early riders in Miami, I noticed the vehicle in Miami was more aggressive. And I'm going to make an assumption here. I have no data to back this up. Perhaps Waymo, since we knew they were testing in Miami longer than Dallas, that's why it ramped up. And if that is the case, it tells me that from the time Waymo announces a market to the time they're able to deploy is going to get shorter and shorter.
Now, were you able to find that Avis depot? Because I believe Avis has been the selected partner of Waymo in Dallas. Were you able to identify that?
When I'm out, I have to go inspect things. I have the inspector hat for that. But today it's the cowboy hat in honor of our trip to the Big D. I uncovered two depots in the Dallas Metroplex region. One depot, I would give you an estimation, 30 to 35 minutes from downtown. Another depot, roughly 15 to 20 minutes from downtown. The depot that was further away was located in an area where you'd find other depots — a traditional industrial area. And what did I uncover there? Two very interesting things I uncovered at that depot. One, there is no energy infrastructure. They're using portable energy at that depot. And two, the individuals operating that depot were wearing bright neon green Transdev vests. Is that a sign perhaps Transdev is operating this depot and not Avis? That's the first depot. What do you think of that?
I mean, it probably does mean that. I don't know if that means that Avis is going to come on later. Now you said something that sounds a lot like a euphemism to me. Portable charging. Can you describe that a little bit more, Grayson, because I think I know what you mean, but why don't you spell it out for our listeners?
So at the first depot site, portable charging — these are large, and I'm going to assume either diesel or natural gas generators that come in on a trailer. I saw a truck bring this in, and I witnessed it and have it on video. And then the individual in the Transdev jacket went and grabbed the charger plug and plugged it into the JLR. So pretty significant. Had to come in on a trailer on a truck. And when I say on a trailer, it had a hitch — for the individuals that like to get pointy on things, it had a hitch.
I mean, look, there was some noise on this topic — not on that particular depot, I don't think — on Twitter talking about like, 'Oh, you know, electric cars and getting fueled by generators.' We've talked about this on Autonomy Markets. I am familiar, and we've talked about this, in the challenge of this third leg of the stool. And the fact that like when you launch a new fleet, I'm very familiar with companies that not only bring the generator in but also a large tank of gas to fuel that generator before they can get a hookup to the natural gas line, which takes some period of time. And then they have to wait — you know, I don't know, a year, maybe two years, maybe — to get the electrical hookups to actually charge this. So this is not an issue of these companies. Like, this is an issue of how electric works.
And we actually had a great speech by one of the guys that's in charge of that in Texas. As many people know, Texas is an island unto itself in terms of the grid. They generate a ton of, believe it or not, wind. I think he said more wind than I think most states, or maybe even a couple of the next two states combined. But the infrastructure still takes time. There still has to be capital investment, not only for the data centers that everyone's fighting about, but also, you know, to provide quickly the electric that's needed to provide charging. So in the meantime, what you're going to see more and more as autonomy launches — because in most cases these are EVs, right? Because of a variety of reasons, we'll get into that later maybe — but you're going to see, you know, generators generating electricity and in some cases being fueled by gas pulled up on a truck.
To me, it doesn't bother me. It has to happen. I remember going back to Yankee Stadium in the '90s. All the equipment, it was all running on generators. All the boosts there for all the times we're winning the World Series. You hear the generators going. It happens. It's part of society when you need to bring in infrastructure. It doesn't bother me at all.
So that was the first depot. Where was the second depot? The second depot, I'll give you a rough estimation, about 15 minutes south of downtown past Deep Ellum, to put that in perspective. This depot was a — I'll use the term — a professional depot. Putting on my architectural engineering hat, which I'm not an architectural engineer, but I do like to wear hats, so I'll put that out there. The depot looked very similar to the Waymo Santa Monica design depot. Also very similar to the Miami Waymo depot, the one that's currently operational. Big caveat: wasn't open yet. Extra power was there, fully secured. Counted roughly 36 chargers. Those are the dual chargers. This depot can move vehicles and get them to where they need to go. Not operational, no cars there, but the design was identical.
Is it possible that that's an Avis, or are you implying that because the design was identical, that it's one of the existing players in the market, not a new player like Avis?
The assumption based on the trends that we have seen in the market is that Waymo has a schematic of how they like a depot to be built, and it's that same schematic. Who owns the land? Unsure. Who's going to operate it? Unsure. But — and I want to point this out — there has to be a mother ship depot that I have not uncovered when I was there. No room to clean or service the vehicles. The temporary first depot had a garage to go in and do it. But the secondary depot is a security house, all the charging infrastructure. And for you, Walt, and the telecom corner, they had cellular galore on the backside, but just mostly pure charging.
So if it's a schematic that they're basically giving to the partners, what value add does Avis provide? So if you think about flipping gears here, FlexDrive is talking about engineering something and doing better than other companies that are out there. So in that case, you would think that whoever is doing this, they're not doing it just for Waymo. They're going to — I would hope — design a business model that handles multiple AV charging. So I don't fully appreciate the schematic concept there. But you know, you may be right. We'll just have to keep tabs on this one and see if Avis's branding ends up showing up there.
Because this site had no branding, so we're going to watch for that. Another thing we need to look for, Walt, in the markets: do we see a press release at some point around an energy management software layer that's managing the energy? Perhaps that's the secret sauce that goes to — because we know that Waymo, scaling this week, they announced they're over 500,000 rides a week. So clearly, clearly scaling.
Yep, that's good. That's a good bow to put on the end of our Waymo segment. Let's move on. While you were — I don't know where you were when I was doing this. I think you might have been heading back to Florida. I was able to hop into a May Mobility car. May Mobility, as you might remember, has a partnership with Lyft. I believe it's in Atlanta. But they have a handful of cars. They were expected to launch with Uber end of '25. They're still kind of waiting on that. This is the Arlington area of Texas. Longtime listeners might remember I did already ride in a May Mobility car — you and I both in Ann Arbor — and then I went in Arlington. Arlington, they had a project with the government providing effectively free rides, I think, to UT Arlington students in a very small ODD. Not a great experience at the time.
So getting back there now to Arlington, here's a couple of my observations. First of all, the ODD is clearly much larger and like a real ODD in terms of the size. Secondly, the ride itself, I think, felt smoother. Third, the car — you know, I've talked about this in May in the past where, you know, May Mobility is not using an EV, right? They're a hybrid Toyota, right? So they don't have that extra space where there's now a lot of gas or IC — is that what it's called? Yeah. Internal combustion engine taking up space. Nevertheless, you know, they have compute that they've now moved more into the trunk. It's a lot quieter. It's a lot cooler, because that thing was creating heat before. So that's a positive. But there's still — the passenger seat still has something in there that you can't take except a passenger in that front passenger seat. Externally, it feels like the sensors still need a little bit more subtle deployment compared to some of the other things that we've seen.
Again, the ODD, the overall feeling was good. I would say that, you know, it still hesitates — meaning like when it comes up to a stoplight, it's stopping too far in front of where the car in front of it is or where the stoplight is. It's a little heavy on the brake, or if someone's kind of coming out. It kind of reminds me of some of the FSD things that we've talked about on this podcast before, where like someone's walking up from the side and it's worried that that person's going to jump out in front of it. So it's being too cautious and then hitting the brake. And I think on one hand, you're like, 'Oh, that should be cautious.' But the problem is when you're a little heavy on the brake, it makes the rider feel less — or feel more concerned. If it's smoother, you're like, 'Oh, this thing is confident. It knows what it's doing.' So it has a bit of hesitation. I did have one intervention where it thought a green light was a red light. So it basically stopped, and since there were people behind us, the safety driver had to reinitiate and get the thing going to be along its way.
So I mean, it doesn't feel like it's imminent that you're going to see May Mobility launch with Uber in that market. Maybe it's going to take another couple months or six months. So I felt like it was much better than what I experienced with Arlington before, you know, better, but closer to what we both experienced, I think, back in Ann Arbor. So I think there's probably still some development work that needs to be going on at May.
Did you hail this ride using the May Mobility app, or did you use the Uber app for this?
So this was, you know, thanks to the team at May Mobility. We just got in there and they had an app. So I did not have an app. So there was someone with May with me, and there was obviously a safety driver there at the time. So ultimately you will be able to hail this in the Uber app when they launch. But again, this is one of these — you know, this is not considered launch, right, to be clear. But when it does launch, there will be, I think, that safety driver sitting behind the driver's seat to handle these types of situations. So, you know, there's nothing necessarily to prevent them from doing so. There are no safety issues, right? So they can move forward with the launch at Uber presumably anytime they want. I think probably at Uber's determination.
It's probably only going to be like 10, 15 cars, something like that. So it's not like they have to worry about like, 'Hey, can we scale?' It's not like it's going to go to 300 cars soon. And again, based on that performance, it doesn't seem like they're going to get to that 300 cars soon, but I think they can take the next step with Uber. But just important to understand this description when you see headlines, you know, from Uber and others about, 'Hey, we just launched in this given market,' and what you're actually dealing with in that market.
You learn a lot when you're in the market. I took a Waymo up to Highland Park, and I've got all my cameras out, and I ended up meeting the Dallas PD. And to the gentleman who I met — and I told him about our show, and if you're listening, thank you. The officer, the gentleman, told me where I can get an AV ride, because it's a nine-square-mile ODD. I'm struggling trying to get paired with this, and the officer tells me where to go, and lo and behold, AV ride. And they're operating with safety drivers. And you hit the nail on the head. One of the things that was pointed out to me by a safety driver is that the AV ride fleet is still in its infancy. What did you think of your AV ride experience when you went to this magical pickup point to get paired with it?
Well, I thank you for that, Grayson, because I only had an afternoon time, and I wanted to make sure that I did get the ride ID. So I went precisely to the location and I put precisely a destination. And actually, for some reason, I wanted to put a destination as the Jewel Hotel, which I've stayed at before, and it refused to give me an AV ride to the Jewel. So I changed it to whatever that other hotel is that we have video of, and I got it. And frankly, once I was in their ODD, I got one pretty much every time I was in Uber. Much more.
And by the way, I saw a decent amount of AV rides — specifically, they're called AV rides, right? This is a subsidiary of Nebius, however you pronounce it. Basically, every time I was trying to contact an UberX, which is very different than Austin, where, you know, it's sometimes a challenge to get a Waymo. And by the way, on the flip side, there was times when it didn't assign me an AV for whatever reason, and then it assigned me an UberX human 15, 20 minutes away. So the UberX experience in the Dallas area, especially out by SMU where obviously students — well, actually it's a country-club-type campus, but I would think students would rather take an UberX than like a premium ride there — and it was like the human rides were very long and it was much shorter to get an AV ride. So again, it's interesting to see that there clearly, while there was a decent number of AV rides on the roads in the greater Dallas area, not as much as Waymo, but much more success within that ODD of getting one.
And then the ODD itself was pretty, I thought, pretty large, right? I mean, downtown Dallas all the way out to SMU. You know, you're talking like that's a 25-minute ride. Now look, it's like, you know, some of the complaints we've had with when Waymo launched in LA — I was literally, it would refuse to take the highway. I was literally on a service road next to a highway because it was avoiding taking the highway. And then in terms of the ride itself, definitely a little heavy on the brake. You know, I honestly felt smoother when we first rode AV ride in Austin last year. Again, maybe it's the same issue that we were talking about with Waymo when they launched a new market. Maybe they're a little safer, and then as they get more confident, they'll dial up some of the smoothness. So that heavy on the brake, we could live without that. You got to chill out on that.
And I did have an intervention in this case. And this one was a little bit more troubling, I would call it, I guess, in that I was on the SMU campus and we were coming up to a stop sign, as there are many there, and there was like two cars in front of me, and the AV ride literally tried to go around the cars that were stopped at the stop sign. And in this case, it went around and it was going to go into traffic, right? So obviously the safety driver grabbed hold of the situation, got us through that, hit the button, and then re-engaged. And there was another situation, same thing, where it was almost impatient, and there was someone basically waiting to make a right, and again the AV ride went into the left lane — it was a left-turn-only lane — but then it did the squeeze over. So you're basically heading towards the person coming at you, and it did the squeeze over and the cut-off on the guy in front of me. Two incidents are really basically the same thing.
And again, whatever this is now, this is the difference here between AV ride and Waymo. This is a launch market, right? This is an Uber launch market where there is a safety driver there. And I actually saw someone at one of those drop-offs — I think it was at the W Hotel where I was waiting for my AV ride — and a regular consumer, a woman and her family, had gotten one. I'm like, 'Did you call for this?' I asked her, 'Did you change in your app to prefer AVs?' 'No,' was the answer. So this woman had requested an UberX. I noted probably the UberX issue that seems like it exists in Dallas in terms of lack of human drivers. And this woman and her family were assigned an AV car even though they hadn't. So they're obviously operating this thing. But clearly some issues to work through with AV ride as well.
It's interesting. I noticed — and I'm going to put another hat on, let's call it the in-vehicle inspector hat — different material on the seats. So I asked a safety driver, who said, 'Oh, it's easy to clean.' So not that cloth; they have this very interesting material. So I noticed that. And then I have to say, it's not the same going in an AV with a human safety driver versus going in a Waymo with a different driver. And I know I'm going to sound like a spoiled kid here, but being able to get into a Waymo and have your Spotify synced is a great feature. It's truly a great feature.
