Walt, the drumbeat of controversy between Uber and Waymo as it relates to their relationship has shifted into high gear here. While that relationship has shifted into high gear, Waymo announced a massive expansion in service area to gear up for the World Cup. Hopefully the ticket prices come down, but that's another topic for another podcast. And Nuro's expanded to Germany without a partner. I put on the inspector hat and read the fine print in the press release, which we'll get into. But let's start with Waymo's big expansion. Another week, another Waymo expansion. What do you make of it?
I haven't looked at what this implies in terms of the maps. I think what Ethan McCane has talked about, a new product that more easily shows this. But I think you're familiar with the Miami area. Can you give us some context on what an additional 1,400 square miles means? I know that's not all in Miami, obviously. You mentioned a couple of other markets there, but what does that mean?
From a Miami perspective, it goes all the way up to Miami Gardens. And why is that important? That's home of Joe Robbie Stadium, now known as the Hard Rock Stadium. Sorry, I grew up in the Marino-Shula days, so I'll always call it Joe Robbie. The interesting point on the ODD where it ends now is 4.5 miles away from Joe Robbie. Why is that important? June 15th, the World Cup goes to the stadium. So I'm expecting to see an expansion there because in Waymo's official blog release, they said the following about this: 'Whether you're heading to the pitch for kickoff in Miami.' Well, the pitch is the stadium. So I'm going to go on the record and make a prediction here. By June 15th, you will be able to go from Brickell, Miami Beach to Hard Rock and back. And if I am correct in that, we will be going to the World Cup filming a field report. So that's what we know about Miami.
That was very funny. You sounded very American there to say the pitch is the same as the stadium. That was great. Look, the other takeaway here is this really dates back to the end of 2024, I want to call it, when that initial white paper came out from Waymo talking about generalization, and there was even discussions of a system that did not require lidar, which we've talked about before. But this again, this is how AI has changed things. And I think a lot of this is enabled by the power of AI and how you can expand the markets, which is great. Now look, what comes with that though is, you know, there's always going to be some video you'll see, and I think in this case there was one in Atlanta where there was a couple of Waymos circling around some neighborhood there. I mean, that's going to happen. And I think it's great that the critics of AI in the hardware form are pointing at this as opposed to actual accidents where people are hurt as the problem with AI. These things will be resolved not only in software, but also in the thing that, again, to beat the drum here, when you have the infrastructure in place to send these cars somewhere and get them off the road, that takes away, I think, a lot of these situations that happen in the market. But again, the primary takeaway here is like Waymo is just in the zone now in terms of generalization, and we got to get back to getting more cars on the road. And I think that the meetings in China appear to go well between the president. I don't know what that means for maybe getting more Chinese EVs in there, but it didn't seem like there is risk for what you have previously called an unforced error in getting these Ohi, which are Geely vehicles, starting there to add to the volumes that Waymo provides in the United States of America.
I'll stand by this despite the pomp and circumstances. The Geely, aka the Zeekr, is Chinese-made, and yes, it is an unforced error. End of discussion. I don't care what happened. No big deals came out of it. It was an unforced error. But what we do know, there's 3,791 vehicles that Waymo currently has in the fleet. So thanks to Bloomberg for that insight.
I need to get my own hat, like the stubborn hat. Who is the ponytail from The Waltons where she's like crossing her hands and like, it's not an unforced error. [laughter] If they're able to populate this country with these automobiles, so you can cross your arms and be persistent there. But I agree with you though. Like they probably shouldn't have taken the risk, but it looks like they're not going to pay the price. At least now, again, things as we know with our president can change based on the last person he's talked to or the day of the week. So we'll see, but the initial thing seems to be pretty positive between us and China.
Waymo is one truth post away from having the Zeekr, aka the Ohi, being an unforced error. That's one truth post away.
Well, that is fair. I mean, the bigger news, I guess the bigger news to the broader market, and maybe not necessarily to us, is the ongoing controversy that exists. For any of our long-time listeners, I think we may stitch together some of these things. It goes back to early '24, early '25. I was actually on the side of trying to temper the issues that you were seeing between Waymo and Uber. So I was wrong on that for a while. I think at one point you had titled one of our YouTube clips something about they're headed for divorce, and I was like freaking out, like you shouldn't use that type of aggressive language in the title. And now that's literally the word that I'm hearing people talk about. So props to you, but we've been talking about this a while, but it's definitely getting more mainstream. I think it was in Business Insider this week as well.
Clappy hat for you and thank you. We were fortunately right, and I thank you for giving credit where credit is due. I was stubborn and I dug my heels in. Nope, not changing. Nope, not changing. So thank you for giving credit where credit is due. It's very much appreciated, and the clappy hat also says thank you. So thank you. I mean, I think the other person that deserves a clappy hat is again Ethan McKenna, who, there was this, I guess one of the regulatory people at Uber was saying Waymo is not going into certain markets. And I guess I don't know whether it was Ethan himself or someone showed that in fact Waymo had applied to be in that market. They just hadn't been approved by California. So it was kind of a false allegation by someone at Uber, and that I think dialed up the record on top of the stuff that we've been highlighting for literally over a year now.
Yeah, and if you really want to look at, I'll use the term pouring gasoline on the fire, Rob Grant and I broke it down yesterday on Autonomy Signals, was Uber's policy paper. Rob put on his policy hat and went through it line by line, and if you read all of the technical policy language, they were all, I'll use the term, shots across the bow against Waymo. And to me, in my opinion, that was the final straw of that relationship. Partners do not attack partners. Those that are not getting divorced do not talk ill will about one another. So this thing seems like it's heading for a, I'll say, a crash landing of a divorce. I'm going to call in that, sorry mom, in that. I think you talked about the last straw being far before this. And I think that to me the bigger issue here is not just that we've been talking about this for a year, but within the investor base, as you look at Uber stock being in the low 70s, really the peak of the expectation between that relationship was going back to that Zipit data when Austin was first launched and everyone's like, 'Oh, this is going so well, you know, relative to how things ramped in California that Waymo and Uber are going to be partnered for everything.' And we both took the opposite stance on that, which proved to be right. But now, it's been a while since then, right? And now I think if you talk to most investors, there's been enough signal, as you'd like to call it, that this relationship has its issues. And so I think it's largely, this is not really new news, although again, some people are hyping this up like, 'Oh my god, I just noticed this from two weeks ago.' Like, no, anyone with half a brain saw this occurring for the past year. So I think it's largely in the stock and it's almost expected. Now look, if Austin flipped and said, 'Okay, we're literally just kicking you out,' which I think both of us have talked about before, sure, that would have some incremental impact on Uber, but I think it's largely, no one at least in the near term believes. Now look, bulls of Uber, our good friend Jason Calacanis would say, 'Yeah, that may be the case now, but at the end of the day when they kind of run out of the amount of demand that they can generate, they'll end up coming back to Uber for that incremental volume when the entire market is much larger.' That may be the case. That definitely may be the case. But as I've always said in response to that, it's going to be bumpy in the near term, and I think in the near term there's enough demand, regardless of some of the data that some people are pushing out there. There is enough demand, I think, to continue to ramp this autonomy in any market, whether it's California or any new markets that they're in now and expanding to.
I want to highlight, I put my inspector hat on last time we were in Austin and I looked at the insurance registration, which is available in the vehicles. The vehicles are registered to an owner, Waymo LLC, not to Uber. So this is hypothetical. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not an insurance expert. It seems to me that the asset could simply move off the Uber app to the Waymo app just based on the asset ownership structure. That would be very interesting to see if it happened. At some point, all of a sudden you can only get Waymo on the Waymo app in Austin.
Well, that's a great segue to the next topic, which is Lyft and Nashville, which we're very focused on the progress of Flexdrive, which is their supporting cleaning, charging service that they're building there for Waymo. We got some new information in that Flexdrive is right now, I think Waymo is operational. My daughter took it there. The wait times were good. She had a positive experience. That's getting serviced by a Waymo-owned service center. So what's happening, the first thing that happened is they will turn that over to Flexdrive this summer. So that's earlier than we expected. However, I was getting excited like, okay, great. I'm going to go to Nashville. I think the Eagles play in October. I'll go to Nashville, watch the Eagles beat the crap out of the Titans, and then check out the Flexdrive. But this is really just them, and this is not the bigger investment, I think, that Flexdrive is making in Nashville. That will be, I think, still in this kind of end-of-the-year time frame when Lyft will launch with Waymo cars again, shared fleet, not separate fleets, using the true Flexdrive thing. So I think our trip to Nashville, Grayson, is still probably going to be delayed until later in the year, but it's a good segue and it kind of supports your view of like, 'Look, Waymo owns and operates their own service center right now in Nashville. They will transfer that to Flexdrive.' So these things can be transferred and ownership and who runs them can change. And I think again, to restate what Lyft has said, we'll have to see if it's true or not. They think Flexdrive is just going to be one of the better performing service centers out there and that will be a differentiation and that's maybe what they need long-term.
The one thing that I think a lot about, I've not been able to get an answer on, Alphabet has a real estate division that operates in multiple countries around the world. Why doesn't Waymo ramp up an infrastructure division underneath Alphabet Real Estate? If they're already starting to do this, it seems to me that obviously they have the capital to do it, they have the expertise to do it. It seems that they could bring it all in-house potentially.
I mean, that's true. I think maybe there's a lot of things on the plate, right? Maybe Flexdrive is, they look at Flexdrive in the future and say, 'Okay, that's a good asset to own,' and then build upon that. Or maybe it's whatever they're doing at Hertz or Avis or Move. I think that there's tremendous opportunity, still a fragmented market. And you're right, they may own it and do it on their own. But I don't know if they would build that from scratch. They might wait till someone has enough critical mass, buy it, and then expand it from there. Or do the opposite, start their own, get a bunch of markets, and then sell it off. It could go either way.
That's a valid point as the market fragments and obviously Hertz is entering it and we're going to have Gil West of Hertz on The Road to Autonomy. There's a name that you do not hear anymore, Avomo. What happened to Avomo?
That's a good question. I'll never forget one of our early field work trips and we were in Austin and we're going down, I think we were in a Waymo at that point and all of a sudden we just see that Avomo logo and you hear Grayson say, 'We found you.' It still makes me laugh to this day to remember that was the early days of discovering. Now, some of the ones we've discovered since then have been phenomenal. We get chased now by security. I wonder if some of these security teams have our pictures up. We're always on public property by the way, never violating any laws, but I think you and I both combined have seen more service centers for autonomy than probably anyone.
That's correct. My wife thinks that they do have our photos on the wall because in Las Vegas I went to visit one depot and I was on a public road, on a public sidewalk, and all of a sudden the minute my foot hit that sidewalk, out comes security. I said, 'Holy cannolis, they know I'm here.' So we respect the law, we always stay on public property. We never cross that line.
And we don't even use a drone. I feel like we should get a mini drone and really get some better photos of this. For our listeners, this is probably not apparent because I'm always sitting down. I am about 6'5", so there's not many fences that I can't see over. And believe me, Grayson does a really good job of taking photos to help us count cars because of his height. So thank you for that. Drone footage would be cool, but I don't know the legalities around that, so we're going to stay away from that gray area.
Now it's not all bad news for Uber because one of their partners, Nuro, continues to expand and I think there's positive things happening there with them and Lucid. In fact, I think the Lucid CEO was talking about expanding to Europe and I think Nuro opened an office in Munich, Germany specifically to focus on engineering, operations, and partner engagement. And I think there was some discussion of like, hey, this is not just Nuro-Lucid in California for Uber, but also in the European markets.
If you read the fine print, which we do, we're very good at that, in the press release, the name Lucid wasn't mentioned. And why is that important? Because they're opening an engineering office focused on partnerships in Munich, Germany. Munich, Germany is home to BMW. Pure speculation or perhaps it's coincidence. I'm beginning to wonder perhaps there's a Nuro-BMW partnership in the works. And I say that because BMW recently killed their SAE level three program. So there's a very clear door because they do not really have a sophisticated L4 program. They have an L2 plus program. But there's not an L4 program because furthermore in the press release Nuro talked about personally owned autonomous vehicles. Well, the world's ultimate driving machine could become the world's ultimate riding machine if this deal comes to fruition.
That's some pretty good detective work. I didn't see that personal ownership. Obviously it makes sense. This is always the question I want to ask people, like during the WeRide earnings call which we'll get to later. I didn't get a chance to get a question there but we'll be spending time with them shortly. I wanted to ask, okay, what is the long term here? Is it this kind of, hey, ride share is 30% of the market or is it ultimately five, ten years from now, is it private ownership? It's really kind of a more fundamental question that I think no one knows. It's very debatable but certainly has big implications for like, hey, we're battling, who cares about Uber if ultimately everyone privately owns an autonomous car. But I want to go back to Lucid because the Financial Times, Grayson, did report that Marc Winterhoff, who's the interim CEO at Lucid, said that their partnership with Uber and Nuro will go beyond the United States into European markets. Now I hear you. Maybe that's not the case in Germany. Maybe there's indications that Nuro is going to have another partner. And look, there is no exclusivity between them and Lucid. And these guys at Nuro are smart. Like, no offense to Lucid, but you'd rather partner with more, especially someone that has higher volume, maybe more long-term stability. So I don't deny or knock down your allegation, but I think at the end of the day it sounds like Nuro and Lucid will be doing European cars for Uber.
