Well, we're back from our hiatus. Our hiatus was one week. Fish's hiatus was multiple weeks. And while we're back from hiatus, New York says no autonomy for you. Mobileye says, "Wait a second. Actually, we kind of want to own a robo taxi service." And then Uber continues to march into Europe. But the most interesting thing since we came back from hiatus, it's Walt. Walt, baby. I mean, what's up with the look? What's going on?
Well, Grayson, as I mentioned before, if someone sends me merch, I'm more than happy to wear it. So, I got my Mobileye X cap, which I'm not sure I'm going to be able to wear the entire time. I'm not really a cap guy. This is my Qualcomm shirt from Investor Day. I'm a little backed up. Uber AV Labs, I apologize. I won't be wearing your merch on this podcast, but on the next podcast, I plan to wear it. So, anyone else out there wants to send me merch, I am a free billboard. There will be some discretion. I won't wear anything that you send me. But friends of the Autonomy Markets podcast, here you are. These are not paid advertisements.
I got to say for the audience, you're a big dude. That's a big billboard. You're a big dude. It was a big billboard.
When I was coming out of the Qualcomm meeting, they're like, "Are you extra large or double X?" So the dude's like, "XL." And the woman there's like, "I don't know. Double XXL." I'm like, "Come on. I mean, I've been working out. Unless she was just saying that I was so buff, but I doubt it."
You know, they got Grok for that. We can make you buff.
Exactly. Can we apply some AI to this thing? See, at least if when I record on Zoom, they can airbrush some of my wrinkles with your recording thing. It doesn't really work that well. You see me in all my glory. Anyway, shall we move on to the news of the week? New York. Oh my god, so much news in New York this past week. So many deleted tweets that I didn't send. But, you know, part and parcel to the wave that's occurring in New York is this ban. So can you run us through like what the latest update is because it sounds like New York once again is preventing progress and safety on their roads.
Yeah, there's incumbents that perhaps they want to steal trash cans and get busted for it. I don't know. But there are incumbents in the legislative body that want to see that fully autonomous vehicles are banned in the state of New York. A bill to move to legalize autonomous vehicles in New York unfortunately, but no surprise failed. And now you have to wait till the next legislative session to see if he inch forward. But the elections that just occurred in New York, it seems like it's going the opposite way of autonomy.
Yeah. And well, that's for sure. I mean, again, I'll restate something that the longtime listeners have heard me say before. It's inevitable, right? Other states will get it. You'll see the stats and kind of how it saved people's lives and how it, you know, creates convenience. And you know, the people will want it. And I think ultimately, you know, these politicians will cave. We've, you know, we've been through this before with Uber and so many other things. It's a shame. You know, the governor claimed they're open for business. We clearly aren't. I thought there was some news this week, Grayson, though, on a federal level in terms of removing the requirement to have certain driving things like pedals or steering wheels or so. I know that doesn't necessarily apply in this case, but is that like a step in the right direction? Is there a way that the feds can kind of preempt the nonsense that's occurring in New York and Massachusetts and some of these other states?
And don't forget New Jersey and DC, even though it's not a state, it's a district. But yes, NHTSA, we're recording early today, Thursday, put out a memorandum that they are going to remove the physical brake requirement. The steering wheel requirement is not removed yet, but the brake requirement is removed. Overall that is a huge positive step forward to enabling bespoke autonomous vehicles. And when I say bespoke vehicles, those are vehicles with no pedals, no wheel, custom vehicles, the Zoox vehicle, Mobileye, and the Cybercab. So very positive step there. And yes, on the legislative side, we are starting to see movement in Congress on a national framework. The good news is there's a movement on the Build America 250 Act, which will essentially legalize autonomous trucking. And then there is movement now on autonomous vehicles. If and when these bills are passed and signed into law by President Trump, it would preempt New York and their hostile policies to autonomy. And no pun intended, Trump could say, "I trumped you."
Well, let's hope that happens. But again, if it doesn't, there's enough states that I think are forward looking, open for business, and want their citizens to be safe. So, I think as we gain more momentum, not only in the US, but in Europe and Asia, that logic will ultimately hopefully take over. But what are you going to do? Let's move on to Uber, which had a lot of things happening on June 17th, you know, which I guess was last week, but you know, they had three announcements in one day. This is basically what you had: WeRide and Uber in Zurich. So that's the fifth of 15 cities that are in that WeRide agreement. So that's good for them. European market obviously great for WeRide, right, in terms of Europe. You had Nuro and Uber in Houston announcing Houston as a separate market. Again, remember for Nuro, our big milestone is in the California market, launching maybe driver out by the end of the year and getting to hopefully 100, 200 cars in the middle of 27. And then lastly, you had Stellantis, Wayve, and Uber with a level four. So that's, you know, again, progress for Wayve specifically, Stellantis, you know, in terms of some progress there. So, three good positive movements. I don't know. We'll get to Qualcomm later, but do you think that Wayve-Stellantis deal is a Nvidia-based deal or is that going to be a Qualcomm-based product? Because I thought Qualcomm was only level two, not to preempt what we're going to get into later.
From the conversations that I've had with Alex and the Wayve folks, that they're platform agnostic. And when I say platform agnostic, it can go on different vehicles, use different sensors, and it is my belief that they can use different compute architectures. Have to verify that, but it's my belief they use different architectures. We do not know what the compute architecture will be, nor do we know what the sensor architecture will be. But we do know one thing, and boy oh boy, I've been harping on people and keep the phone calls coming because I'm going to keep harping on this: non-binding. Well, non-binding, that's the key. That's the one thing we know.
So why do they bother doing this? Are they in the process of raising some more money? I know they just had raised some capital not too long ago. What's the point of these things, do you think? I mean, the most momentous was the Waymo Toyota, although that was like an announcement of an announcement. I'm not sure that was an announcement. What's the point of this? Should we not even be profiling these things, you know, on our weekly pod?
Well, the Toyota one was a sentence of an announcement because it was one sentence on an official Waymo blog. You, Rich, and Brandon do an incredible job on the LightShed podcast. I would encourage the audience, if you're interested in media and telco, to listen to LightShed. I'm really sorry you have to listen to Brandon's long musical intros that sometimes go all over the map. But besides that aspect of it, you do a column on there called Disgrace of the Week. So maybe we should start that here. Non-binding, and we'll start a section and we'll keep it ongoing and we'll keep a tally and maybe we'll even build a chart and put it up and call it Disgrace of the Week. Non-binding has no teeth. It means nothing.
I mean, I'm kind of torn on this one because I'm so thirsty, hungry for more information, new relationships and progress, but yeah, I hear you. In terms of us, it's kind of like just wait till you get to the definitive agreement and announce it then. I mean, how many things would you really have to work out in terms of that deal? But on the other front, what's not an announcement is, you know, WeRide's progress in Zurich. You know, Madrid, I think, was just four weeks ago. So, two European markets in two weeks. You know, this is for a company that again might have been historically perceived as like, oh, the Chinese market, blah, blah, blah. And like, we've talked about this. I think we've been kind of, you know, vocal about this over the past two or three months, especially since spending some time with them out in California about this kind of focus on expanding to these markets, which are going to be, you know, much better revenue opportunities and profit opportunities for them. So, these guys are just cranking out, you know, execution in terms of these new markets.
What I would like to see in all these deals, and I'm going to give Uber credit, Uber, I'm giving you credit on this one. When Uber announced the Lucid engagement for Houston, I literally fell out of my chair. I'm like, I have enough coffee. They announced the size of the depot. So, Uber, very thank you for the big positive there. So we understand we could kind of get the fleet as these companies expand into domestic markets and foreign markets. I would like to see an ongoing tally of vehicle counts, miles driven, odds and ends, to give us the data because realistically, Walt, we've seen it and historically, company goes into a market, they open an office, they deploy two cars, we're deployed in that market. I like to start getting car counts per market would be a really great metric along with the depot and the infrastructure because the size of the infrastructure, I'll give you an example here, the average Waymo depot is around 90,000 square feet. So, and then Uber say we're doing 50,000. So it gives us something to measure. So really positive, we just like to get more details along with these announcements and ongoing details.
Yeah, I think basically, you know, using Omega on your side of the fence and fieldwork on both of our sides of the fence, maybe it's better they don't announce and we'll just do the hard work to get that information and bring it to our listeners in a timely fashion. Speaking of which, you know, Waymo, you know, Nashville market that, you know, we've talked about many times before. I did go, I know you have Omega, which is very powerful in terms of AI, but I also have, I feed all of our transcripts into our own LightShed AI and I went back to figure out what our predictions were. No clappy hat for you on this one because at one point I think you thought that Nashville was going to go live in April and it is now June. But you know, congrats to Waymo for moving forward with Nashville and opening it up. But you know, in your defense, people could ride it, I think, in April, but it's just, you know, really open to the public June 11th. Obviously, an important market, you know, for Waymo. It's one of the fastest growing cities in the United States. And you could clearly tell that Waymo committed to that market because there was a regulatory filing, permitting filing, where Waymo is looking to open a 100,000 foot depot roughly 3 miles from the BNA Nashville airport. So that's a clear sign. So we know that they have a micro depot in the city and there's a major depot. It's this trend of continuing for airport. So, it's an overall very, very positive for Waymo. And what I'd like to see and I'm looking for future markets: does FlexDrive and or Lyft go into future markets with Waymo? Especially as Waymo ramps up their overseas operations. What we got some news on this week?
Yeah, I think we're going to wait on that. Just as a reminder, this initial launch is a Waymo service depot. At some point will, you know, convert over to the new FlexDrive thing probably by end of the year. But I agree, like I think there is an opportunity for them to expand that relationship. Meanwhile, Grayson, like I don't know the exact dates on this. So there has been increasing number of reports about, you know, markets that get paused during rainstorms. Now I know I've been to Dallas in the rain, when it comes down it comes down pretty hard and it's difficult to drive. Then, you know, is this an issue that we should start being worried about in terms of, you know, having broad proliferation in the product? Is this just, you know, a step along the way and they'll get over the hump? Like, what's the relevance to you of Waymo maybe pausing operations during these heavy rain starts? Better safe than sorry or a cause for concern?
It is my belief, and this is how I interpreted the NHTSA recall. The documents are public. They're online. You can read them. This is just my assumption based on the publicly available NHTSA recall documents is that Waymo is facing a sensor issue. I believe that it is a sensor issue. I don't know what sensor it is, so I'm not going to speculate what sensor it is, but I do believe that Waymo is having a sensor issue within climate weather. Furthermore, you're starting to see large events, and I'll have to admit to the audience, I've fallen in love with FIFA. I am loving watching the games. They're absolutely phenomenal watching the World Cup. I have a friend, Robert Brown, who was at the game in the match in Houston two weeks ago, and the Waymo was shut down around the stadium. So, I was like, "Okay, this is weird. You're having issues in rain. You're not operating near a stadium where you have a lot of people." And after reading the NHTSA recall documents, it appears to me that there is some sort of sensor issue that we do not know about yet. And so they're being proactive based on what I believe to be a sensor issue that expands more than just rain. We also see the incidents on highways as well.
Well, let's hope that this is something that is fixable because rain is not a remote use case. And it's something that these cars are going to have to deal with. And rain can happen, you know, in many markets quite suddenly. You don't want to be, you know, in a car and again, I get the heavy, heavy rainfalls. I've been in some crazy weather in Dallas where everyone kind of pulls off the side of the road, but you should be able to operate in some rain, whatever, with whatever sensor that it requires. Now, my Tesla has operated in pretty heavy rainfall and hasn't shut down. There are some warnings. It slows the car down. It, you know, behaves differently. I know there was reports for the robo taxi market that sometimes they shut down. Obviously maybe being more cautious. Speaking of robo taxi, happy birthday to Tesla. You're hit one year where robo taxi launched. Not so happy of a birthday though given that they're still not up at the autonomy markets milestone target of 100 cars in that market one year after launching. So, it's clearly a maybe not even a sweet, just a bitter milestone. A year in and still not at 100 cars in Austin.
I'll ask this. What do they know that we don't know? That to me is the very big question. What do they know that we don't know of why it's not starting to increase in scale? You and I walked Giga. We clearly know it's not a manufacturing issue. What truly is it? That's the question.
I don't know. And but all we can deal with is the facts that are in front of us. And the facts are that there's just not, it's not a real market in terms of again hitting our designation of what matters, which is 100 cars. That's, you know, that's an autonomy markets proprietary and completely arbitrary number. But until they get there, you know, it's, I think it's a bit of a disappointment. Shifting over to Mobileye. They, you know, it's a company that, you know, it's, I guess they're trying to go full stack. It's mostly kind of ADAS with a path, I guess, to level four depending on who the partners are. But I think now you have someone else that wants to own and run a fleet. And to me this feels like what Uber's doing, right? You have to be the guy writing checks to own the cars to make sure that that ecosystem exists beyond what Waymo and potentially Tesla will deliver. But on top of that, it's like BlackBerry. I have to go telco, right? You couldn't, you know, find a deal to get someone to make the product. So, you just basically made your own product to take it to the market. And I think that's effectively what this, no company I think wants the capital intensity of owning and operating their fleet. But if they believe in their technology, you know, this is the way to push that forward. And I think that's what you're seeing here with Mobileye.
BlackBerry. Well, I mean, it was RIM, Research In Motion. The BlackBerry was the device. You're Mr. Telco. I had to go there for you. But perhaps they, you know, they want to go to Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. That's where Research In Motion was founded. To me, it was a press release of trying to move the market. And most importantly in that release, there were no details, no city permits, no SEC trail, as we covered on the Road to Autonomy, zero, zilch, nada. Again, this could go in that corner that we're talking about because I'm ramping up. We got two incidents here and we're only 18 minutes into the show.
We have intent. We have a company that has OEM relationships. We have Intel, which is, you know, doing quite well recently. So you have all of these semiconductor guys that have, like, and we'll get to this next with Qualcomm, the data center aspirations. And then, you know, also what they're doing, you know, in autonomy, Nvidia included, and all of them have to a certain extent aspirations of being full stack. I don't know if for any of them that will extend beyond ADAS level two plus plus, basically a version of what you and I already experience in our Teslas today. That could be, you know, going back to the conversation we've had with Ride in the past, this could be a massive market that helps to fund the ultimate evolution to level four. However, that just ignores the reality that Waymo's there already is at level four. Now they're slower than we have hoped in terms of scaling the cars and getting thousands of cars cranked out every month. But that seems like an easier hurdle than, you know, being like a chip guy going full stack and hoping that you're going to take your level two to level four. What do you do? You agree, disagree, thoughts?
It's going to be extremely difficult. The capital costs to, if you wanted to say, I call it a pivot. If you want to do that pivot, the capital costs are astronomically high. The infrastructure costs are astronomically high. And furthermore, I've said this on Road to Autonomy, I do not know one single person that has been in a Mobileye drive route vehicle. If it exists, perhaps you and I should go to Jerusalem to go for a ride and experience it because I haven't experienced it yet. I think it is going to be a very costly endeavor and I still think that Mobileye is trying to figure out what they want to be because let's not forget they acquired a humanoid company as well. So you have a driver assistance program, you have a humanoid program and now you have a robo taxi program. Well, if I was saying that to you not knowing who I was saying, it smells a lot, looks a lot like Tesla. Perhaps Mobileye wants to be Tesla.
All of these guys are giving the same narrative, which is, you know, we have this level two, you know, we're, there's similarities with robots. I had the same conversation with Nicole D'All at Qualcomm literally yesterday, same thing, oh, there's, you know, the same engineers that are working on the same project. I'm like, I think you need to focus. Mobileye's saying it, Tesla's saying it, Nvidia's saying it, you know, as well in terms of this kind of shared R&D. One would think that the kind of making a hand work is a bit different than driving a car and the aspects there. Again, not an expert on the tech side of things. You know, those seem like those should be two separate and very sizable, you know, very sizable buckets. And so, you know, are you going to do both or should one of these companies, you know, focus on one and just try and win one?
Well, let's call a spade a spade. Nvidia's got the balance sheet and they want to sell GPUs. So to Jensen and the team, that makes a lot of sense. That's why they're open sourcing that data set. Tesla, Elon has said it, analysts have said it, a lot of people have said it. They want to become a robotics and AI company. So that makes sense. Mobileye, we don't know what type of company they want to become because the messaging is all convoluted. And furthermore, they do not have the balance sheet to fund all this indefinitely.
Intel's been successful, right? So their ability to raise capital today versus, you know, not long ago is quite different. And that's not that different than the kind of, well, it is different. And I don't want, it's not quite the Elon ability to raise capital, but it's a similar concept where, you know, if you create enough interest in the equity, maybe not necessarily for Mobileye, but from an Intel standpoint, then that becomes the funding mechanism, which is why you go out and have to, you know, basically make your own cars to try and validate it and get interest in that narrative. Which is a good shift to Qualcomm because Qualcomm is, you know, at the investor day, they have the same thing. Like they're, you know, I've covered this thing forever, as you know. Their issue is obviously Apple is designing them out. Apple, you know, another Apple had to increase their price today, I'm sure as everyone saw. And now Micron is like snapping back at them and saying, "Will you ground us into the dirt when things were low so we couldn't invest?" Like that's how Apple deals with their vendors. Qualcomm's had to deal with this for the past 30 years, 20 years, 25, whatever it is. And Apple's going to be out of the Qualcomm business within a couple of years. Android will still be there and grow single digits, but you have this data center opportunity. So here's another classic example of a company with free cash flow pivoting. You know, they're going to go out there, primary thing, address this massive market for data centers. So that's the primary thing. Let's not overplay autonomy or automotive. But look, automotive for Qualcomm was like a nothing business five years ago. And you know, now they have 25 OEMs today that are potential ADAS customers and they're in these 500 million vehicles that are going to be produced over the next seven years with AI cockpits. They're in the systems there. Their whole pitch is like, we're going to be lower cost than Nvidia. We can integrate with, you know, the chips that are already in there doing your cockpit applications. It's probably mostly an ADAS play, but again, it's one of these companies that's like doing this pivot and looking at this opportunity. So, while this business right now is a $6 billion business for fiscal 26 automotive, again, mostly running the cockpit applications, you know, your Apple CarPlay, whatever it is. By fiscal 29, they now think that's going to be a $10 billion business up from the prior guidance of eight. Why? In part because of this ADAS. Now, who are the existing partners? You have BMW and there's some people that they're like working and I think kind of take over. You have, I think, this Wayve relationship. It's not clear who the OEM is with Wayve. I'm assuming that it's Stellantis. I think you probably have a third OEM that's kind of in the works. But I think their narrative is similar to what Nvidia is pitching, which is, hey, we're the big chip guys. We're already there. We're, in Qualcomm's case, we do well with low power. We're cheaper than Nvidia. And that's how they want to kind of gain share.
The Snapdragon architecture, which is on your vanilla ice shirt, is more than just a cockpit. It's a whole vehicle architecture. If you think about it from a level, you can plug ADAS into it. You could plug infotainment into it. You can plug eventually over time level four into it. And the team at Qualcomm from an engineering perspective has done a fantastic job engineering that Qualcomm platform. Engineers that I know like to build on the Qualcomm platform. And I'll say the dirty part out loud. They don't like dealing with the sales team, but they like building on the platform. So if and when Qualcomm continues to build those relationships with the developer community and changes the sales process, it could become a growing platform. I mean, you gave the numbers and the architecture, the engineers love building on it. So there's something there.
Well, they've acquired a couple companies that I think will help on the developer side of things. Again, it's new management over the past five or six years that is kind of executing on this pivot. So they're saying the right things. The market opportunities are obviously large. You know, but we'll see. You still have to execute. And they talk a little bit about full stack. Again, I'm a bit skeptical about that. It depends how these OEMs go. Like, are the OEMs, like if an OEM, let's say GM, like Stellantis wants to do his own thing, like maybe he's dealing and partnering with Qualcomm, but like is Stellantis going to use his own software for GM? Is he going to jointly develop it with Qualcomm or Mobileye or whoever, or is it going to go to a third party like Wayve or Nuro or someone like that? And like what's the ultimate, like, and that decision has to happen at every OEM.
This is me purely reading the tea leaves and making an assumption based on the velocity of press releases and announcements. I am under the assumption and belief that Qualcomm has started to eat into Mobileye's historical L2 business. And if that's indeed correct, and I'm correct on that, that would explain the pivot into robo taxi. I think from a pure chip perspective, Qualcomm has a ways to go to get to L4. And then on the outside, you also have ARM that has L4 ambitions as well.
I mean, I think that makes sense. And Qualcomm's share again over the last five years is crazy. And I had a great discussion with Nicole after the main presentations. He's talking about this like baseline stack where if all else fails and you're about to hit the wall, there has to be like the basic car safety features to stop the car, right? And Qualcomm is, you know, can be there and then you have that. So they effectively have these relationships and now you're just extending it again for, you know, level two applications where there's still going to be a driver effectively supervising and in control. I don't know. I think they're positioned well. I obviously have had a long positive bias towards Qualcomm and the people there, great American company, you know, great engineers that are there, longtimers. I've, you know, there's men and women there that I spoke with that have been there 20, 30 years, right, that have been working and developing these products and it's been, they've been very successful. One thing I'd also note is like as of now, mark it down, things can change. They're not going to own the cars. They're not going to pull the Mobileye. They're not going to do an Uber. Like they will not own the cars. They will be there as the solutions provider. You know, and they want to extend this to other products as well.
Yeah. If you're going to go back to the pre-data center hype, because I've known this team for a long time. Micron for a while had a very small automotive business that grew over time. So perhaps it follows that similar trajectory what Micron's automotive business did.
We'll see. I'm glad I've made those or reignited some of those connections at Qualcomm. I love this new direction. It fits with my dude new. I love it when like a telco guy goes to autonomy. Like that is a perfectly, that is a good, good match for us going forward. So looking forward to re-engage on the Qualcomm front. So May Mobility, again, longtime listeners know we've been following this one closely. They had some news. They're partnering with, how do you pronounce this? CowCow, to build, to bring an autonomous ride hail to Europe. It's going to be CowCow's fleet operations. I think CowCow is actually owned by Geely with their autonomy to help to get to this 100,000 robo taxis that they're planning for by 2030.
