Walt, I'm going somewhere that nobody's expecting me to go this week. Zoox said, 'Dollar dollar bill, y'all.' As Waymo continues to shadow box as we ride the enterprise. And yes, that's Wu-Tang for the children. Let's start with Zoox because they're saying cash rules everything around me, CREAM at the money, dollar bill. It says $12 starting price. It's high.
I don't even know where to begin with that opening. That was quite the opening. But I think for our listeners, what Grayson is talking about is, as a follow on from last week, Zoox did go launch with a paid service. Remember last week they described paid service as comfort tier. This is definitively not comfort tier. The base price is 12 bucks, $1.50 a mile, 40 cents a minute. You know, those kind of metrics, the per mile, the per minute thing would probably be comfortable, but when you throw in a $12 base fare, you're getting well above that. So they're pricing this at a premium to the market. So let's hear Grayson's take on the pricing of Zoox in Las Vegas for this first paid launch for Amazon Zoox.
I love this. You're acting like the hype man here. I mean, you can't go wrong today. Well, this is awesome. It is priced as a luxury product, but the downside is in all the reports and all the screenshots that we've seen on X and on Reddit coming out of Vegas, average wait time is 15 to 30 minutes. So you cannot price the product at that high for a 15 to 30 minute average wait time. And a luxury product does not allow you just to go to select destinations. You have to be able to go to any destination. So you said this, I think it was last week or the week before, that it's like a Disney World ride. And you're right. And in your note that you put out to Lightshed, you're right. It's not a premium product. It's a tourist attraction. And when Waymo enters the market and Tesla enters the market, I don't know how they're going to be able to maintain this level of pricing because I could sit here and make a very stern argument that riding in a Neuro or riding in a Cybercab is an attraction as well. So I don't know. Too much, too little, too long is how I would summarize it.
Yes, I did say I did call it a Disney ride and that's why I don't think pricing really matters until you have frankly scale in this market. But I just want to pick up on two specific things. First, the 15 to 30 minutes. I mean, on last week's podcast, you made a big joke out of correcting me to say that it was like a 75 minute wait. So while 15 to 30 minutes is, I wouldn't call a real service, it's still an improvement. So congrats to Zoox for getting your wait times down to 15 or 30 minutes. And then the second thing, Grayson, is what you brought up, I think, in your comments there, is like how is it going to work with Uber? Let's assume that Uber is not going to price this there, like are you going to have two separate prices in the market? I think that's fine, right? Because if someone really wants, they go to Vegas, they want to try it, they see this funny looking car that is the Zoox go by, they want to try it. Again, for the Disney ride aspect to it, if you go to the Zoox app, that's one thing. And they'll charge whatever they want to charge versus Uber where it's just going to be random when it gets assigned to you. So I suspect there'll be different pricing in the market.
That's a very interesting point. So hypothetically, let's say you can access Zoox on Uber X, you can access it on Comfort. You're looking at a minimum 20 to 40% discount. Does that undercut the Zoox service where somebody says, 'Okay, order, cancel, order, cancel, order, cancel until you get it to save that 20 to 40%'? That's a lot of money. Not to mention, you're in Vegas. That savings will be put towards gambling. So a lot of potential there.
Getting around Vegas is hard enough as it is. I'm not sure you're going to waste your time doing that. Again, I think you're going to basically, like we've said many weeks in the past, just go directly to the Zoox app. In the case of Uber, the thing that you describe and I think thing that we've asked about, let's say in Austin with Waymo, is my understanding is that Waymo is the one determining, you know, whether there's a separate tier for them on that Uber app as opposed to Uber making that determination. That may differ with how Zoox's relationship... I don't know. I just don't know. I think the typical thing we've seen is like with AV ride, it's just part of I think a comfort tier as opposed to its own tier. But in this context, like given it's like a novelty and all the branding there, you know, maybe Uber does put it on a separate thing. I don't know.
Uber is so sensitive about long wait times and pricing. I don't think that's going to be the case. I think it's going to be like they've done most of their, not all but most of their other markets, because I think overseas there is a separate autonomy tier, but I think in this case you'll probably see it, you know, just as hey you're going to happen to get assigned it. And then if they do, when will Uber ever assign to a rider a 15-minute wait time? So like what is the chance you'd ever match just based on Uber's obsession with having very short wait times? It'll just be fascinating to see. So I guess we don't necessarily need to make our road trip out to Vegas right now. I think we both know how the Zoox drives already. I'm not sure that that has dramatically changed since you and I both have tested it in Vegas among other locations. But once that Uber thing lights up, which I think is weeks, months, whenever it is, certainly by CES, that'll be a fascinating thing to observe and how that actually rolls out.
Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, based on the terms of service, we can't shoot an Autonomy Markets episode in the Zoox carriage or Zoox Mobile, but we can legally shoot it from the road because, as you and I know, that is public property. Very valid point on Uber's wait time. To me, in my humble opinion, it's built into their culture. Less wait time, better customer satisfaction. Overseas, you're right. The UAE is the only market where they have a dedicated tier. Uber seems very proud of that. It is my belief, and I have no data to back us up, is the reason they don't do it in America is they're worried about the driver rebellion. Again, that's pure speculation, but something doesn't add up there.
But then, let's hypothetically say that they do not do it here. They put it into X and they bundle it all together. Human drivers, Zoox, there's another equation in that, Motional. So then, how is Uber going to determine, okay, we're going to give 20% of rides to Zoox, we're going to give 20% autonomous rides to Motional? How do you think that's going to be determined? Right now we know that Motional has 100 vehicles currently in Las Vegas and we saw the wonderful video they posted on X. They're getting more vehicles from the Singapore innovation plant, so hypothetically they're going to have hundreds in Vegas. How are they going to determine who gets what share? Then who can operate where and when?
I mean, it's an existential question, right, for the field, as I would call them, in terms of is there going to be enough to eat to be fragmented within the Uber platform. When we talk about Waymo scaling, it's because it's all effectively going to be on their platform. It might be a little bit more challenging to scale if your partner is determining the volume that you get. And we'll talk later in the podcast about one of Uber's partners, Serve, on the food side of things and what happened in that relationship. In the case of Zoox, obviously, like they're backed by Amazon, they could presumably do this alone. This is what they've said for a long time that they're going to do. There's nothing about this relationship that prevents it. Motional, Neuro, and others, I think at least in the near term, might be more beholden to having to deal with Uber.
However, like let's not forget there's Lyft out there, right? We can get there, get to that later, and you know, there's an opportunity for Lyft to really kind of step up at a time when Uber might be maybe a little bit more confrontational with these AV players. Lyft has kind of been stuck in a distant second place. You know, this is their time when you have a major transition to try and bear hug. You know, maybe you're giving up more control, more economics, whatever it is, to try and bear hug some of these partners at a time when they have to grapple with these exact things that you just pointed out in terms of do you get enough volume when it's controlled by the platform partner and the platform partner is putting multiple players in a given market.
That is a very valid point. And let's not forget about the asset that is inside of Lyft that I got to give credit. You and I are some of the earliest folks to talk about Flexdrive. They've got that maintenance below the line built in there. And this is a hypothetical. Let's say, okay, Lyft says, 'Okay, we're going to put one AV partner per market and we're going to do the same deal we did with Waymo in Nashville where you can operate your own app and you can also operate with us non-exclusive.' That gets really interesting, and then in my opinion that becomes a threat to Uber: say, okay, I can go on the Acme app, I can go on Lyft, and I don't have to worry about what I'm going to get. There is a really interesting opportunity for Risher and the team at Lyft to accelerate into autonomy and say we're back.
So when you mention, and by the way that's true, whenever there's a technological change the opportunity for disruption exists. This is why there should be valid concerns over Apple, like we may interact with our data in a different way in the future. Maybe Apple positions itself well so far, not that hasn't done a great job. I've been using the new Siri on a beta basis. It's not good at all. But when you have these trends, these technical changes, that's when leadership is at risk of changing. And historically it hasn't gone well for those that are kind of maintaining cash and trying to protect the moat that they have. But the other thing that you brought up there, Grayson, is you're right, and we've talked about this since the earliest days, and I think it's often overlooked. It's represented in a way with Flexdrive, but it's the operational aspect of it. It is getting those locations. It's hard to do in terms of power and servicing. This is going to be an important item. Maybe not now, right? Because if you're only dropping, in Waymo's case, the volume share leader globally, a couple hundred cars per market, not as essential, but we're not far away from them scaling up and it's thousands. And then that element of the model becomes more important. I think some of these larger companies, whether it's Uber or Waymo, might need to think twice about whether they want better control of that.
There's a second now, there's an additional element of that, Grayson, which has emerged now because of Vegas. It's not only necessarily locations for charging and servicing the vehicle. What about actual pickups and drop offs? This week, we saw Waymo announce the deal with Allegiant Stadium for, I guess it's with the Raiders. So they drop off at Allegiant Stadium, which is where the Raiders play in Vegas. By the way, I've been there. Phenomenal stadium. Try to go to Vegas if your team ever plays the Raiders. It's a great experience. On the flip side, Zoox is at Sphere. Now, I don't know if these are exclusives or not. That's work for me to do. Next week, I hope to come back and report to you. I certainly would recommend the NFL maybe use this as an opportunity to create a partnership with one of these guys and encourage these companies to make those upgrades and to make those connections for autonomy. They certainly have done that on the telecom side of things. If you're getting a Super Bowl, you have to upgrade your stadium to get better Wi-Fi and these basically the femtocells, the DAS networks, the things that make your cell phone work better. Like the NFL has that ability. And locations are obviously going to be important. Do you think this is another battleground in terms of pick up and drop off location? They own the property. Like you could argue, maybe long-term you want to let everybody, but when you're small scale now and autonomy is considered a novelty, it seems like that can be a differentiation point.
Yes. It goes back to the early days. I feel like we're channeling back to the early days as we get closer here to episode 100. We're getting old here. Walt's experience. And in the Waymo press release, there was a key line because, you know, I like to go through things with a fine tooth comb. In the Waymo press release, there was a word that stood out to me. Dedicated. Dedicated drop off and pickup zone. That's right. Dedicated. What does that mean in theory? That means perhaps it is a closer drop off than you could get with Uber and Lyft. Less walking area. Perhaps you can get out of the vehicle and walk right in. So I reached out to Waymo and I said, 'Are you going to make a map public?' Waymo told me at some point they will make a map public. They have not shared it with me yet, but when they do make it public, we'll share it here. Could you imagine that? You and I are, I don't know, we just had a lunch at Spago and then we take the Waymo at Bellagio. We take the Waymo over to Allegiant and we get dropped off, and you know me, I don't like to walk far. Go to that Kiss and Fly. That's too far. The Waymo drop us off. We walk in 100 ft. We're in the stadium, and because you're Walt the baller and you, we got Wu-Tang going on today, we're in the skybox enjoying the game with Brady. That's a hell of an experience because it's dedicated.
Yeah. I mean, again, you don't want to piss off the people that are coming to your venue. But again, like let's look at the airport. It's not like we don't have a precedent for this and you pointed it out. Like if I can get Uber Black, I can walk out of the San Francisco airport and hop right in. Otherwise, I walk to the garage. And if I want Waymo, perhaps for political reasons, less so than actual monetization reasons, I got to go to the Kiss and Fly lot. This is private prop... let's put the airports aside now. This is private property we're talking about, right? Stadiums, venues. There are marketing partnerships. The Sphere is a company that can generate a lot of money, sorry, mom, I was about to say it, through advertising deals, which I think they have one with Zoox. They're plastered in the airport. You know, it's probably they can post it on the outside. You can sponsor bars if you've ever been inside of the Sphere. That is a huge opportunity. A lot of opportunities there in Vegas. And it could be ultimately a very fragmented market. And look, ultimately, could it be the point where they have to allow everyone in? Sure. But to your point, maybe it's a little bit further of a walk and that helps market share. So I don't know. It's certainly a new battleground that we should think about and we put that in the bucket of infrastructure. It's similar to again who's going to have the power and the charging and the cleaning in the right locations to maximize the performance of autonomy when we're talking about thousands, tens of thousands of cars in a market as opposed to like 200.
You hit the nail on the head with private. And for the audience that's not aware, when you're operating a service in Vegas, you have to cut a deal with each casino or each casino holding company. You cannot go on that property without a deal. And when you look at Allegiant, they have a big chunk of land on the opposite side there of the highway. Taking this one step further, Walt, this is a hypothetical. We don't have any details on this. It'd be fascinating. What if on top of the dedicated pickup and drop-off zone for Raiders games, they got a dedicated loading zone where they could stage the vehicles after the game? So not having to walk over the bridge, walk a mile this way to get an Uber, a mile that way to get a Lyft. They've got two, three, 400 vehicles staged to get you out of there and your wait time sub five minutes. Everybody's going to rave about that experience.
And all suddenly I got to say it. All suddenly all those vehicles are going back to the airport, to and from the airport. And because Waymo can go on the highway 55 miles an hour, that is a huge competitive mode as the Southwest flights go back to California for Raiders games. The other thing it opens up is obviously premium pricing, just like you get off at Uber Black at San Fran. You know, you can get picked up at the curb. You get me. Why walk out of this... Allegiant... Sphere is less of an issue. Sphere, I think, is closer to like where a lot of the hotels are. The Allegiant is a little bit further out, at least for me. Maybe I don't know all the hotels, but at least where I stay. So when I went to a game there, it was a long, long walk to get to where I needed to go. So if I could pay up for one of these autonomous vehicles at a specific location and get out of there, absolutely. And that would fit into premium pricing.
Well, Jason asked you this on X, so I'm going to ask you here for the public. You're Mr. Cosmo. Why Cosmo? You always talk about the Cosmo. Yes, the Mandalay Bay is the closest hotel, or the Four Seasons if you're a baller, to the game, but you're Mr. Cosmo. So for the audience here that doesn't read your X account, Walt Lightshed, why Cosmo?
I'm no huge fan of Cosmo. I think it's not the best hotel for sure, but you know, there's a lot of media stuff over there. We do things in the media on the Lightshed side of things. And our big party, as I mentioned last week, is at the Cosmo. I suspect it'll be there again this year. So who knows where I'll stay this year. I'm going to mix it up.
There's a hedge emerging. There's a hedge emerging. Bottom line is you want to have enough locations and you don't want to have to necessarily figure out what app you want to use in order to go to this. But I think this might be something somewhat unique to Las Vegas. I don't know, you know, in other cities whether you're going to have so many locations structured in a way where private property entrance is certainly going to be required. I would say in the United States it's a Las Vegas issue. Globally there could be real estate, infrastructure, licensing issues, but in the United States it is purely a Las Vegas issue. And if you're the weird wonky person I am and you look at economic data, Las Vegas has to do something to get that economy going again. They need to get people going there. Need to get their RevPAR up. For those that don't know, that's revenue per available room. It's down. Tourism is down. Conventions are down. Perhaps autonomy could be a jolt to Vegas's economy if they play their cards right.
I mean, I don't know. I think there are a lot of locations nationally. I mean, you talk about Disney World getting access to take you right into the parks. Again, private property. And I can think of commercial locations and movement of goods and services where this is going to matter. But let's move on to Waymo's expansion. Phoenix, remember Phoenix? This was the place where they had the joint where Uber you could get a Waymo on Uber, but it was now, we know, 10 cars, less than 10 cars maybe, and Waymo. So soon after that divorce, voila. Waymo has now added 55 square miles. This is weeks after that divorce in that market and obviously even less time since some of these news stories hit from the Financial Times about the broader issues between these two companies. So the service area is now 350 square miles. Let me just put that in context. 350 square miles in Phoenix, which is not like a highly talked about market in terms of Waymo, because WeRide, you know, which is perceived as one of the bigger guys, a lot of people think China is like going to really crush us and I don't know how many different things. I was on their call. Great call by the way. We'll get to that later. Talking about how Guangzhou, excuse me, the ODD tripled since the end of 2025. You know what they're up to, Grayson? Waymo did 174 square miles. 174 is less than 350. So we do have obviously impressive expansion from Waymo. And again, interestingly, in the market where they were previously partnered with Uber.
Yeah. And the fact that they got divorced, they add on 55 plus square miles, it clearly says to me demand is not a problem. The brand is resonant. Yes, I know they started in Chandler and that was for all practical purposes the home base of Waymo, but adding on that square footage, taking it to 350 square miles, that's the real deal, Holyfield. Demand is not a problem.
You've been putting on your Inspector Clouseau hat. Where else are you anticipating expansion in the US and let's say globally?
The US. We know because the Tampa Bay Times has reported today, actually, that Waymo met with St. Pete Department of Transportation officials. So there is an indicator, and as I say, an indicator that Waymo is going across the causeway to connect Tampa to St. Pete. So that's a big deal. That is a pretty interesting ODD because that causeway in the middle, as we know early on, robotaxis that were using LiDAR could not go across long bridges with water. Waymo has solved that. I've experienced it in Miami. So well done there for Waymo. That's an interesting market. And then the inspector hat on went on with the side of Omega, you know, Autonomy AI's algorithm. It uncovered a filing that Waymo has incorporated in Zurich, registered it to Google's headquarters, which for the audience, that is Google's largest engineering office outside the United States. And a week before that filing, the president of Switzerland was in Mountain View and went for a ride, saying he wanted to bring Waymo to Zurich. So Walt, the clues are there.
Now Grayson, I know your Omega, your AI brain ingests the Autonomy Markets podcast as part of its input. So it's going to be reading this or listening to this and it's going to hear that you called it on yourself, you denigrated being on the side as opposed to the forefront at identifying this info from Zor. So do you want to set that straight so Omega doesn't hack into some of your accounts?
If only I had a brain. That's what I would say. You know, Omega does a wonderful, wonderful job and she is ahead of all this stuff and it's what powers The Road to Autonomy. It powers the intelligence for the show and it powers the advisory business. It's truly amazing at the details that she uncovers and how far ahead of the market she is.
Before we move on to WeRide, just a question for you. Let's put Austin aside because Austin is a pseudo competitive market in that like if Tesla expands the ODD, there might be some pressure to have Waymo expand their ODD. But let's talk about Atlanta. If Waymo and Uber divorce at some point, well, I guess there's two questions here. Do you think Waymo will restrict the expansion of the ODD in Atlanta, you know, while that relationship continues to exist? And then, if yes, how soon after the divorce is finalized will they expand in Atlanta?
I think it is a very good possibility that they do not do the large, large expansion until post divorce. Post divorce, I'll say within under a month they expanded and within under three months of post divorce. I'm going to say it here for the record: they announce a deal with the Atlanta Falcons.
Continue to rack up NFL teams.
I love it. So Omega, please bookmark that and we'll come back to that at a later date, you know, when this relationship ends and maybe it won't end. Who knows? Let's go on to WeRide. They did report the quarter. Decent quarter, revenue is up, doubled sequentially. Fleet added 500 vehicles. That's good. Overseas is now 40% of revenue. So, as we've talked about in this podcast before, like recognizing the revenue and profit opportunity outside of China, Middle East particularly. The other interesting thing here is, which we've talked about a lot I think in recent months, is this ADAS business. 30,000 L2 plus L3 units were delivered. This is the start of scale commercialization. I mean, the concept here that we've talked about here is using ADAS, which is a very sizable market. It's something that Uber I think leads the world in in terms of the functionality. It's obviously getting built into a lot of Chinese cars, but it can be an opportunity for companies like this, technology companies, to generate sizable revenue to help in their development and in some cases longevity. Not saying that about WeRide, but other companies that need to raise capital, the longevity to fund L4. I mean, we've seen a bit of a pivot at Waymo. WeRide, I think, is showing that they can do this successfully. They're expecting positive cash flow by 2028 and full break even in '29. So, just an interesting, I think, report and just kind of, you know, confirmation of stuff that we've been talking about.
The bottom line that you and I know and that we've talked about and we've seen from reports that have come out with companies over the last several quarters is L2, L2 Plus is becoming a cash cow. It's spitting off cash. The demand is growing. Tesla, as you identified, and you are correct, is the leader in this technology. There was a great piece in the Detroit News talked about the growth of senior citizens, which we've talked about from an L2 Plus market and how it's giving mobility freedom back. But once you build the L2 technology, you commercialize it, it is highly, highly profitable. And then you can lock consumers into subscription services that are not heated seats, subscriptions that create value that they actually want to pay for. And you're seeing that ramp up now as Tesla reports the growth of FSD and the number of subscriptions that they're getting.
