Walt, I'm not saying this is an April Fool's joke. I'm saying this as a truth bomb. It was a slow week in the autonomy market. While it was a slow week, Waymo expanded access to the San Antonio airport. Baidu had a, let's just say it, a pretty big fail over in China, and Tesla went across the river and expanded. Let's start with Waymo. Another day, another city. What do we know?
It was another airport as well, Grayson. And these, as I've mentioned before, I think are important because these are high-value rides. It gets more connectivity, you know, to people using the app as we've been experiencing. The wait times are pretty solid. Um, you know, in terms of these Waymos, especially when you're using a Waymo One app, which I think, um, in the case of San Antonio, that is the case. You don't have to rely on, uh, waiting for Uber to allocate you. So that's a nice win for them.
For sure. It's a great win. And to the team at Waymo, thank you for granting me access. Perhaps I'm going to have to take a road trip there, but I will tease for the audience: I do have another Waymo road trip planned. Not San Antonio yet, but another road trip planned. So, well done there for Waymo.
You know, the interesting thing about this, Walt, the drop-off is at the curb and the pickup is less than a five-minute walk to designate a rideshare area. So, no kiss and fly. Getting closer to the curb.
I love the no kiss and fly. Uh, for those of you who are not longtime listeners, kiss and fly is a lot that are, you know, the people of San Francisco have assigned, I think, to, or at least at one point, I'm not sure where they are now, but assigned the Waymos to. You know, it's funny that Grayson, a lot of these groups that were like attacking Uber because, you know, whatever, are they employees, aren't they employees, are now the same groups that are basically now trying to save these jobs by making it very difficult for Waymo to jump through hoops. So, you know, when we look, when we think about San Francisco, which is obviously a huge market for Waymo, um, you know, when they sign up at San Antonio and they're picking up and dropping off at the curbside, we know now it's not a Waymo issue at all. It's just a ridiculous issue in San Francisco. So, you know, you've lived that world. Can you help me explain to me? I know I've probably asked you this question six or seven times, but it still gets me scratching my head. How the [__] are they not able to pick up at least at the rideshare garage at SFO?
One word and one word only: politics. That's all it is. Waymo technically can do it. There's nothing stopping them but pure politics and policy that is trying to protect an incumbent. That's all this is. If you go back to the early days of rideshare with Uber and Lyft, and there's been multiple, probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of posts and news articles about this where the taxi cab unions had a meltdown to try and stop it. This is just a classic case of history repeating itself. This time it's rhyming. First it was human-driven, now it's autonomously driven. It's purely politics.
But these aren't state politics because I don't think this is an issue for them in San Jose.
No, this is airport politics. The airports are regulated differently in each jurisdiction. Some airports are managed by the county. Some airports are managed by the city. Some airports have independent boards that manage the policies there. Each airport is unique unto itself. You are right with San Jose the way that they're picking up there because that's the way that they're managed. And we do know from Waymo's set of airports, Dallas Love Field is coming, while Dallas Love is coming, no talks about DFW. So it really truly goes down to the operations of the management of the airport. And it's sad when some airports decide to put politics above the convenience of the passenger. And as you and I well know, and every individual listening to this podcast knows, consumers have choices. And I could very well make an argument the consumer might choose to fly into San Jose versus SFO, or might choose to fly into Dallas Love Field versus DFW. Consumers have choices, and they could eventually vote with their pocketbook to go where Waymo is.
Well, also explain to me how the politics work on this. If Uber, who's developing a larger and larger presence in New York City, which is kind of an odd time to do that given the politics that exists in New York City, you know, the CEO is there and I think they've talked about adding more stories at that great building that they have there, which by the way, welcome them. You know, we need as many tax dollars as we can given how many are leaving. But Waymo is, you know, well-established in California. So how is Uber getting all this effectively? Um, because Uber, if I get a black car service when I arrive or whatever the term is, Premiere, um, I can get curbside pickup. How's Uber getting all this deference at SFO and a truly California company, Google and Waymo, who's there and continues to invest there? You know, they're still getting kind of relegated, um, to more hassle points in terms of picking up these rides.
It's the Waymo, and I'm going to use this term loosely, is the boogeyman. Oh boy, it's automated. It's the boogeyman. It's the ghost car. There's politics there. When you remove the science fiction, the comic book element of it, you remove that and you go down, it's the fees.
Black is paying a higher fee, right? I got you. I feel that. But I just demonstrated how some of those jobs, at least the corporate level, are getting built up in New York for one of these companies, and you know, the other company obviously has chief executives, but two of them. So double the employment there are in California. In any event, good job on Waymo. I assume that there's going to be many more as they expand to other markets that are open for business. Many more airports that we're going to see, more cars that are going to hit the road. The scaling, like Waymo is just kind of in the zone right now, right, in terms of their expansion. With that said, Grayson, like at some point, let's keep this in mind. The Jags are getting used up. The Zeekrs have questionable, you know, long-term use given that it's made by Geely, but also like you're still upfitting cars, right? So you're not like installing the technology. It can't be truly integrated, um, as far as I know. Um, you know, you got Hyundai coming. All good things, right? All, you know, we're getting to tens, we have visibility in the tens of thousands of cars. We still need another OEM, guys. Something, you know, perhaps even on the lower end side, especially after your and mine trip, if that's the right English, um, out to see the Cybercab line and see how cheap they're going to make it. Um, like Hyundai is a great car. It's not going to be as cheap as, you know, what Tesla can get to with the Cybercab. So, um, where do you like, what is your timeline in general? Like you would have to think that by the end of the year we'll get another OEM announcement from Waymo. No. And then I'd layer on top of that a second question, Grayson, if I'm a little diatribe here. But, um, I think, um, Dmitri was talking about like a future where there's private ownership where they would license it for private ownership of cars. So give us your up-to-date timeline on when you see, you know, each of those things happening at Waymo with an announcement and then when it actually gets delivered.
The days of personally owned go back to the Craft check days at Waymo, and there was even discussions going back to the Google self-driving car project. So it's been an ongoing public conversation that's happened around personally owned autonomous vehicles powered by Waymo. And if you want to go way back, and there's a really great reporting, I believe it was New York Times or there might have been the Wall Street Journal that did it on the Mark Fields negotiations with Waymo when Mark Fields was running Ford on what they wanted to do and eventually do a path to personally owned autonomous vehicles with the Waymo driver integrated Ford, and they actually did a mockup exhibit at the LA Auto Show years ago in that. A lot of evidence there on personally owned. The thing that the most recent announcement that we have, two sentences, I believe it might have been three sentences around an announcement with Toyota to develop or explore, I don't remember the exact language in the press release, in that little two to three sentence press release with Toyota. So obviously we know that Toyota and Waymo are exploring some sort of relationship. We have hints in the press release that it could be personally owned. We do not have any confirmation from either the Toyota Motor Corporation or Waymo on that front. So I'm going to say the next OEM to potentially emerge in a deal is going to be Toyota. What brand of Toyota vehicles? Uncertain. I will say with certain confidence that it will be all electric. Perhaps they bring back the Lexus SUVs that they ran in the early days. Unsure on that. That's a possibility. I'll say we will have an announcement with another OEM by December 31st. I'm going to say that that announcement will be more concrete details on Waymo's relationship with Toyota. And I think that those vehicles could potentially end up in the Tokyo market before they end up in the US market. And for the US market, I believe that we will see an additional announcement from Hyundai and Waymo and a joint announcement announcing an increase in the Ioniq 5, and those vehicles will primarily be the vehicles in the United States to supplement the existing Jaguar vehicles that are currently in service today.
That was a very comprehensive answer. I'm not going to ask you two questions ever again because I'm not sure you answered the first question. You did the second one quite well on the private, right? I also like the extra little teaser you threw in there. Getting more cars, a bigger order out of Hyundai. That's not what I talked asked about at all, but I love that because that's a new prediction. Put that on the prediction wall from Grayson. Certainly very plausible, although let's see some Hyundai start to crank out on the road before we expand to the next wave. But getting back to the first part of the question, which I think you answered, which is forget about the privately owned, just another OEM to source the demand for a, you know, a rideshare market that, you know, that could be the massive opportunity for them, is that you're still in this kind of end by the end of the year. Can you, you want to make that more precise? Like what's, don't you think, like because if you announce something like that at the end of the year, by December 30, like whenever someone gives a prediction say by December 31st, and then if it happens next week, you're going to take the victory lap and saying like, 'Oh, I said by this year,' but like that's not really a victory lap because it's like when you say by the end of the year, that's kind of implying the fourth quarter. To me, like I think they need it sooner because if you're announcing something towards the end of the year, whether it's Toyota or someone else, the deliverable on those products, especially we're not talking about upfit of the existing vehicles, we're talking about full integration, then ends up being not until a 2028 event. So if we wanted to have any hope, and even if we announced something tomorrow, announced something tomorrow, I still think '27 would be probably too tight of a timeline. So, um, to me your answer, if it's true in the way I've interpreted at least, is it is disappointing that I would want something out of Waymo, um, really within the next four months is what I'm going to give them in terms of a deadline.
But the pushback: we don't need another announcement for Waymo to scale. Waymo has publicly stated that they have a partnership with Hyundai. We have filings from Hyundai, from South Korea, and we have public statements from Waymo saying that they are going to ramp up production of the robo taxi. What we need is hard numbers from either Hyundai or Waymo of how many vehicles they are receiving per quarter. That's what we need. We need that hard data.
That's fair. But there has been kind of leaked data and they're in the tens of thousands of vehicles. And I want tens of thousands of vehicles like every month, you know, not over a period of, you know, a year or two. And like great, Hyundai, but like you, I think you want to add another one. And you know, this is a global company, right? You know, we're only talking about getting up to a couple hundred thousand in the United States, but Waymo is going to need to ship globally as they expand more and more markets. Uh, in my mind, you know, you add another OEM. Look, maybe that's not the case. Maybe you just fully get in bed with Hyundai, uh, Hyundai, Hyundai, however you pronounce it, and that becomes your platform. I don't know. That car to me, getting back to my very first point, um, you know, I know there's doubters of Tesla out there, but if you believe Tesla's going to flip the switch at some point, that car is not going to compete on price with what Tesla's delivering with Cybercab. It just isn't. So there has to be another, in my view, another OEM with a true scale product for those one or two riders at a low, very low-cost vehicle.
You are right on cost. But then we go back to what we learned at Giga, and Tesla has been very public with this around the inductive charging for Cybercab. And if you look at technical engineering documents that are widely available, the general electric vehicle market is moving to an 800-volt architecture. And what does that mean? That means vehicles could charge in a fourth of the time as they can with a 240 or 400-volt architecture. So if Waymo is going to add a new OEM, which I do believe at some point they will, is it going to be 800-volt architecture to allow these vehicles to charge faster? And if it is, this is hypothetical, you can operate that market with less vehicles. But if they are going to run 800-volt architecture, which we know for a fact that the Zeekr is, all of the charging infrastructure and all the field work that you and I have done around depots, all of that physical infrastructure, whether it's Siemens hardware, ABB hardware, Hitachi hardware, that's all going to have to be ripped out and upgraded. So that's going to be a build out there. Well, that's going to cost time. Do you know who already has that? Tesla. And I think one of Tesla's greatest advantages besides cost is their global charging network becomes a huge advantage as they really truly scale robo taxi.
I mean that was obviously a tangential topic to what we were just talking about. The root question again is, you know, a do we debate of whether Waymo needs an OEM because I think you were at one point in this conversation arguing that maybe they don't, they just scale with Hyundai, and I was saying like no, end of year ain't good enough, get something announced in the next four months. Um, so let's get back to that. Are you sticking with your end of the year, and how does that, what does that have anything to do with the 800, 400, all that charging stuff you were just telling us about?
I'm sticking firmly: announcement by the end of the year for another OEM, and I will hedge that, and I have no prediction or insight if it's going to be personally owned or fleet.
No, no, I, and I appreciate that prediction. I'm just saying like if it is that again, that prediction implies it's at the end of the, when someone says I predict by the end of the year, it really just implies like, oh, you're saying fourth quarter. Yes. And because I get it, you'll take a victory lap if it's like tomorrow. And my point is like if your prediction is accurate, which it very well may be, I think that's too, that's kind of too late. Like I think, you know, who needs and why because it takes, you announce something at end of the year and then your deliverable ends up being definitively I think in '28. I think it's, I think it's, maybe you disagree, it's hard to announce something in the fourth quarter and then deliver a product in '27. So like, you know, you're going to be scaling the Hyundais, but by the time we hit, you know, '27, who knows what, you know, what Tesla's doing to scale, who knows what Nuro is doing to scale, as Nuro is certainly not going to sit there and not add additional OEMs. Wayve hopefully is not going to sit there and not add OEMs assuming their technology ends up working. So like if you're Waymo and you're clearly the leader, you want to stay in the leader. So when other guys are talking about like thousands a month, you're at tens of thousands a month just to fulfill what at that point I think should be global demand for the product.
From this, I'll give you the US answer. So I am saying when I say end of the year, I'm saying post-Halloween. So yes, we are in the back half of the year when we get an announcement because you're right that the tooling takes time to bring the factory in line online. What Tesla already has is you and I when we walked Cybercab, we saw that. But if you go to an 800-volt architecture, hypothetically, you can do 3x the amount of vehicles through a depot than you could with a 240-volt architecture just based purely on charging time. Purely based on charging time, you can 3x the usage of that fleet. And if my math is right and that is indeed true, let's say you have hypothetically you have 500 vehicles in a market, all suddenly based on the increased charging that goes to 1500.
No, I get that, but why can't, but why can't, I understand that and I understand that explanation, but why can't you announce an OEM relationship of someone doing an 800-volt architecture within the next four months? Why does the 800-volt architecture delay a potential OEM announcement that Waymo has with an OEM until the fourth quarter?
It doesn't delay anything. I think it'd be positive. But here's why I'm hedging. Who did, I can't sit here and give you a, into the audience, give you a straight answer of who they do a deal with. I don't know. Nvidia and Uber are doing a deal with, speculating. I don't, I have no speculation of who outside of Toyota who that potential, you want to call dance partner could or eventually will be.
I get it. Okay. So, I don't know. Let's hope that you're wrong on the short end of that. Meaning that let's hope that Waymo gets something on the tape. By the way, in the meantime, the other company large out there that I would guess will be announcing another OEM within the next four months, three months, whatever, is Nvidia, right? Who knows what that technology actually delivers, you know, whether it's level two or truly can get to level four, but they're not going to be slow in announcing OEMs. And I obviously told, you know, we mentioned Nuro and some of the other ones that are in the market adding to their OEM list. So we'll see. Um, we're optimistic obviously for Waymo, but that's always been a sticking point for me. Um, you know, it's nice, but it could be great. Like really just go out there and crush the market with as many cars as you can. Your technology works. Just go out and crush it. Speaking of technology working and not working, I mean, oftentimes I get people come up to me and, oh, you need to go to China. China is so far ahead on this that, and the other thing whether it's 5G or, and yet this week, you know, you saw, you know, some of the challenges that Baidu is going through when their Apollo Go failed and all the cars stopped. This is similar, I guess, to what Waymo experienced in California when the power went out, although I think those Waymo cars didn't cause like these crashes and I think in some cases trapping passengers for up to two hours. Um, interestingly, this happened in Wuhan. So those cars, I guess, had some issues in Wuhan. Um, renowned Wuhan. Um, you know, and the other thing is like let's put this in perspective like Waymo has more fully autonomous cars on the road than Apollo Go. They do. The miles are more, the trips per week are more. Like Waymo is the leader, not Baidu Apollo Go. And then when you talk about, well, oh, level two this, level two that in terms of the Apollo Go and all these different cars, okay, we, that's Tesla. Like you can't fault Tesla that other people haven't been able to advance their level two, you know, FSD at level two plus plus to that level. But the end goal here is like where are we in terms of fully autonomous Waymo. We, you know, anyone can go to San Francisco or any of these other handful of markets where Waymo is and hop in a car quite easily and see what autonomy feels like. And there's more of those cars available in the United States than there are from any of these competitors. Period. End of story.
Waymo is the global leader. Any way you slice it, the inbound that you get around Chinese AV companies, I get as well. I have not been to the mainland. I have not been to the UAE to test this technology. However, you and I have read comprehensive reports, we probably read every piece of media coverage on these, and the more media coverage that I read on the Chinese autonomous vehicles, especially on the mainland, the more questions I have. And there was an article in the media that talked about it. A couple of American individuals went to China to ride in these. The vehicles only operated in certain sections of the city. You had to have a mainland Chinese phone with a Chinese phone number in order to operate it. They were only in Chinese. During periods, this is the reporting in the media, during periods of heavy traffic, the services would shut down. During heavy periods of traffic on the 101 in San Francisco, does Waymo shut down? No. Waymo operates. What's happening in China in terms of the true advance of technology to me remains a mystery hidden behind the great firewall. There's no other way to describe it. We do not have independently verified data that is transparent that we can compare to Waymo and Benchmark.
So let's go back to then the other aspect of it, which is obviously they're generating low-cost cars. You know, in the case of the level two plus plus, the Tesla type situations, very low cost. The assumption is that they can take that technology up to level four. Although there's a lot of debate about that. I think, you know, there's some comments that, you know, that certain executives believe that, oh, if you're going to do level four, you have to start with level four. You can't just like go to level two and make it better. Like I don't know, there's a lot of debate around that. I'm not sure why that is true or not true. We will find out soon enough. But like if you're taking shots at one company, then you're also taking shots at others like Apollo and frankly Wayve, who has a level two system that effectively is getting, I don't think they have a separate development for level four. I could be wrong, but guess someone can correct me on that. But so I'm not really bought in on that. But I guess the issue though again is the cheapness of these things. Always the issue, right? How does that play in Europe in terms of these cars? Like because again getting back to my point, if Waymo can get an OEM in the next four months to give them a low-cost car that they can deliver globally, meaning Europe and other places, get there quick, China hasn't necessarily fully invaded there yet. Just look at the cars on the road. This is an open market opportunity. What are the politics, Grayson, around, you know, this Chinese...
tech in the European markets, relative to some of our American companies in Waymo and Tesla, getting there first with greater volume.
