Walt, this week Lucid hit some turbulence. They hit turbulence and my fiber decided to go down. It's a lot of turbulence all around. While we face turbulence, Waymo and Uber are battling out in DC. Why can't we be friends? Who knows? And then, lo and behold, it looks like, as we reported in our field reporting, we're getting more photos that Tesla is preparing to ramp up Cybercab. So, let's dive into it. A lot happened in this week.
There is a lot happening and you're doing this over your cell phone because your fiber was cut in your area. That's never pleasant. Hopefully they have tools that can connect those strands, but given the amount of people that are out, you might be in for it for a little bit.
It's not nice is what I will say. It is not nice not having fiber. There's no other way for me to describe that to you.
You know, in New York they have signs everywhere that say call before you dig. Do they not have that in Florida?
No. The only signs they have in Florida are watch out for alligators. Where I live, there are no alligators, fortunately, but maybe an alligator got in there. Who knows?
Well, let's get to the news of the week, I guess, with Tesla. We did cover Cybercab 2 weeks ago. So, by now and going to this week, you should have had employees starting riding in the Giga Texas campus. I think we've seen some evidence of that. But I think more interestingly, Grayson, I've seen reports in the last couple of days of the inventory of robotaxis available in Texas rising. It says I think there was a July 15th report that came out from the Texas DMV that Tesla had 175 robotaxis registered in Texas. That's up from 42 on June 1st. That's a quadrupling in 6 weeks. Quadrupling. And I think according to some state I saw out there, there's 58 were added really in like the last 2 days. So, have we hit this kind of pivot point? We've been kind of thinking that we might have gotten there, you know, based on what you saw in Miami. Are we at the pivot point here? Are we going to finally see Tesla start scaling up?
I don't know if we're at the pivot point, but I think if you want to use the baseball term because we just had a really great All-Star weekend, is that we are at inning one. And I would say when we're at inning one, we're at the bottom of the first. I was in Miami for Robo-Taxi launch day. Counted roughly a dozen or a couple dozen Cybercabs. Counted, I would say under 10, give me an estimate under 10 Robo-Taxis. And lo and behold, I go back 5 days later, well, there's over 30 to 40 of them there. So, we're seeing it in Texas, we're seeing it in Florida. So, I say Tesla is at the bottom of the first inning as they get ready to ramp up and scale. Another thing I noticed from doing another field report in Miami on day five, my wait times, I don't know if this was no pun intended, were 5 minutes. And the greatest thing happened. One Robo-Taxi said 1 minute wait, arrival time 4:20. I said, 'Elon, is this a sign? Is this a sign? 4:20 arrival time.' And then I put a photo on X of my finger in the middle and it said star ride. And a great commentator on X said, 'See, it's another sign.' No response of Elon on X, but I decided it was kind of cute and catchy.
I mean, the bottom line though is I think the demarcation number that you and I have provided is 100 cars in a market. So, given some of these numbers that I've seen the last couple of weeks, it's possible that next week we can truly kind of check off Austin as launched if we can get some evidence that there's 100 cars out there on the road. Now, let's put some context around this. You know, AV ride technically has 317 cars according to the Texas DMV. You and I both know there are not 317 active commercially available AV ride cars on the market. There's a lot of test cars. So, I think, you know, we have to kind of caveat that. But I don't think you put this many cars in the market. I don't know. It seems like we're kind of hitting an inflection point. It's kind of surprising that it hasn't been covered a little bit more, you know, by the mass market. It seems like a pretty pivotal point given it's been like a year since they launched this thing and they've been forgotten about because they hadn't done any type of scaling up.
Well, today, I'm not making excuses for the mass market. SpaceX has the rocket launch. A lot of attention is looking down at South Texas for the rocket launch. Perhaps that's why, but I think it is a bigger inflection point than the market is really truly grasping at this point.
Okay, well, we'll see. We covered it here, hopefully. I don't want to say first, but once again, early. Why don't we shift over to one of your expertise topics and not because of Omega, because of your interest is what's going on in Washington, D.C. Not at the federal level, I don't think, right? This is at the D.C. level. There's a D.C. bill to allow commercial driverless ops. And it was introduced by a council member, this guy Charles Allen, back in May. And this updates the district's AV Act of 2012 to allow driverless testing and commercial driverless operations. So, just to be clear, today Waymo and Zoox can only operate in D.C. with a safety operator aboard. Does this change things? And what are some of the requirements that are getting proposed here?
I think I'm going to be very polite, but maybe I won't be polite. I'll just be matter of fact. Change things is an understatement. This puts a rule of books and says okay you have to do all of this in order to get a permit to operate commercially that's where you can charge first. You have to drive in the district over 250,000 miles. I'm not naming names but there's only one company right now that's capable of doing that not naming names. And you have all these other regulations that go around with it. You have the ability for class action lawsuits that can occur out of this not at me or you as the writers but as the autonomous driving system there. There is a lot of language in that bill, a lot of regulatory capture in that bill that benefits a particular company and a particular set of individuals that do something for a living which we won't get into because I don't want to get one of those fancy letters but there is a lot of hubris and it is a big hot stinking mess and I know DC is a swamp and so it does smell swampy.
So some of the requirements are $5 million minimum liability insurance, crash data reporting within 8 hours for a commercial fleet that seems like reasonable enough. You should know what the data is. 72 hours if it's a privately owned AV so they're already looking to the future. I think there was some banter about a million dollar application fee. I don't know if that's true or not and then there's another tax 15 cents a mile which for those that know the unit economics it's not a small tax 15 cents a mile to go to the district I guess where they're going to allocate the public transit a number of other things. So you're right it's a pile there's a lot of piled up things but I think let me just zero in on the one that you talked about this 250,000 miles you know this gets back to what I've said before on why Waymo is not adding all of their cars to California to get to what I would call true scale and they're doing 300 300 300 because as you go to every new market and you're the first guy in, you can effectively establish the rules. So, if the rules are, 'Hey, I've got 250,000 mi in that market.' That can close out competitors from quickly following you in that market. Am I saying that wrong?
Walt said the quiet part out loud. I got to emphasize this. Establish the rules in that market. You said the quiet part out loud. No wonder you're so darn good at what you do.
So, and I think the flip side of this is exactly why and some of the feedback we got from Uber after past episodes when we talked about, you know, kind of what they're doing because they don't want, you know, effectively Waymo to write all the rules. But, this once again kind of underscores and I think brings to the forefront once again the current relationship between Uber and Waymo. Uber says this bill would effectively ban hybrid networks and it's fighting for the opposite. One platform where a rider gets matched to an AV or a human. So, you can see Uber's colors really showing in this kind of little local skirmish that's occurring in DC. I think there's a head of policy. I don't know how do you pronounce this person's name? Maybe you do. Where in this person Curioso, I think is claiming that one AV displaces four drivers. So, obviously fanning those flames of populist concerns in order to try and get some hurdles put in the way of these autonomous companies.
Javier is a nice gentleman. I mean, I've known Javier going back to his Miami days and Javier is a wonderful operator, but I just got to sit here and look at this from the outside because I've never been on the inside of Uber and saying, 'Okay, Uber went from trying to disrupt the taxi cab industry, which it collectively did, to sitting there and saying, "Okay, now we're the 10,000 lb gorilla. We don't want to be disrupted. This is how we were disrupted. Let's try and put a playbook to ensure that autonomy doesn't disrupt us."' It's coming if you want to say full circle. The strategy here.
Yes, it's classic NIMBY. Where is someone when they move to an area, then they want to keep everyone else out. And that's a good call out, Clappy hat to you. For a decade, you know, Uber fought to keep drivers cheap and on contract. I mean, let's go back to kind of the AB5, which was a California law that would have made Uber's drivers employees and broken the contractor model. Uber fought that tooth and nail. And then you had Prop 22, which was this ballot fight, which I think they spent a couple hundred million dollars on to keep them as contractors, and they won. And it was upheld in '24. And by the way, I support that, but it's just ironic, you know, kind of how this has flipped now that they're in, they're secured via Prop 22 and whatever exists in these other codes and markets, that they're going to try and use the same type of tactics that were used against them to keep the new entrants out.
I'll summarize this way. Uber has a really great policy memory. I mean, that's really kind of the way to say it, which raises a lot of questions around you and I've talked about this. I think actually going back to episode one is their fragmentation strategy. It seems to me it's just slow everything down until one of their fragmented partners can eventually catch up. That's how I'm reading this.
So, the bottom line, Grayson and DC, is how do you think this ultimately plays out in terms of this bill and the ability for autonomous companies to operate in the District of Columbia?
I think this is pure speculation. I think the bill dies. The bill doesn't get passed. And I do not think that you will be able to assign the bill not passing to Uber or to Waymo. At the end of the day, I believe that Uber, Waymo, and the rest of the AV industry, despite their infightings over the bill, will come together for the betterment of the Washingtonians and autonomy in general, and kill the bill to stop a foothold with the trial lawyers that want a lot of egregious clauses in there that would overall have a very large negative impact on scaling autonomy in the United States. And I think that they will come to that realization of what this could do. It could open Pandora's Box.
Interesting, and I would amend that view and say just another indication that Austin and Atlanta, the two markets that Uber and Waymo are paired, are probably going to go the same way as Phoenix did. Clearly a relationship that does not look like it's headed in the right direction, which is probably why, you know, Uber you saw recently just this week this is another podcast post on Saturday. Had a major deal to buy Delivery Hero, more scale, more logos, you know, really pushing into, you know, the food delivery side, and obviously other goods and services. You know, Dara has done a good job at diversifying that business. You know, Uber earmarked about 2 billion euro, I think it was, in Germany through 2031, explicitly including AV initiatives. So, AV's, you know, a little bit of part of this, but really it's kind of diversification in foods as they're kind of managing this. Now, on the call that they did with the analysts, you know, they highlighted that look, even though this was a large deal, use of capital and priorities, number one priority is still investing in autonomy. Obviously, if there's acquisitions, like Delivery Hero and others, they'll do those, and then obviously you have capital return. Which they still believe they can issue a lot of capital return. So I think, you know, I don't know if I've heard them specifically say autonomy was at the top of the list. It's certainly been clear based on their actions. I'd have to do a little AI analysis of past transcripts to determine whether that's new. But certainly this whole narrative of free cash flow where if for a long time listeners, you know, in the past we pointed out when they talked about it. Don't worry, we're going to keep buying stock back. While investing in these autonomy companies, I kept highlighting this as more dollars went elsewhere. What was your take on the delivery here?
I watched the interview that Dara did on CNBC. I thought that was very well done. I'll say very well orchestrated from how he expressed it. To me it just seems that Uber is building on the strength of Uber Eats wanting to expand that business and grow it into Europe. I love how you said it more logos because there was a lot of assets there. The interesting thing that you highlighted is, you know, the allocation for autonomy. If you listen to past earnings calls or if you read past transcripts, you would always see the terms or hear the terms priority or strategic. And now you're actually getting the real allocation terms and then Germany specifically. So that raises the question there that I look at. Uber has a very public partnership with Momenta. Momenta is ramping up operations in Germany. Could some of that money be potentially allocated towards the Momenta operations in Germany because the German markets of Berlin and Munich, or as we both know and Omega has uncovered, are becoming hot markets for autonomy in general as Waymo looks to potentially expand to Germany as their corporate filings have disclosed.
Well, Uber's going to maintain Delivery Hero's Berlin headquarters and German workforce through 29 at least. So yeah, Germany is, you know, maybe we'll have to do some field work in Germany. It's obviously a lot going on there. As an aside, you know, one of their autonomous delivery partners, AV Ride, who, you know, they do have these street robots, which we've posted videos about, launched real operations in Miami, again with Uber Eats. So, like, you know, this relationship that Uber has in the food delivery with these robot companies, 60,000 Uber trips for AV Ride, 200-plus cars, 1.3 million miles. Like, this is different than the challenges that they face with Waymo and Tesla and some of these other autonomous companies. There is a real opportunity for them to really leverage autonomy on the Eats side of the business. So, perhaps they should start leaning into that more. I think I saw Coco as well launched in an East Coast market this week. So, good opportunity there for Uber on the autonomy side.
