Walt, here on Autonomy Markets, predictions are starting to look like road maps. We've called some things pretty good. You could say we're lucky or we're just good. I don't know. Let the audience decide there. We correctly called Waymo would unlock highways by the end of the year. And drum roll please, prediction correct. Waymo unlocked highways this week. Then there's Uber. They're trying to turn your ski experience into a full walled garden experience, channeling Apple if you ask me. And then there's Kodiak. They publicly announced that they're producing real driverless miles with the key here: no driver in the cab. And then on the foreign autonomy desk, it's Abu Dhabi to Singapore. Get your passports ready. We've got stamps. Let's start with the great highway unlock. They did it, Walt. They did it.
Yeah. And I'm glad it was done before the end of the year because at the start of every calendar year at LightShed, we do a bunch of TMT predictions. And prediction seven was the following: Waymo expands service to highways and airports, announces plans to enter New York, and partners with Lyft. So I actually had three items in there. I wasn't too worried because I felt like highways were getting... I guess I was getting a little worried. It was extending and extending and extending. So, thank you, Waymo. I can't wait to do our end of year review, which is coming up in not too long of a time. And obviously, Grayson, you and I have talked about this at length over the past year or so, and early on. And I think one of the key things here, one of the key benefits that they're looking for is they think the highway service is going to reduce times by 50%, which makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, when I was in LA and I was taking rides, there was clearly moments when if they hopped on the highway based on what Google Maps was telling me or was telling it to do, it would have been there twice as fast as opposed to taking back roads. So, this is a huge unlock.
It's a huge unlock. Before we break that down, I have to ask for LightShed: do you get to have three candles on your birthday cake this year? Because you got three predictions correct.
Well, there was many other predictions. I'm sure we got many of the other ones wrong. Last year was terrible. We got a lot wrong. This year, I think we did okay.
You did okay. Well, we want to see for our audience here a picture of that cake of how many predictions you successfully got right. But let's get back to highways. So, the highways were unlocked, and I like hats. Last week, the KPMG hat on, and other times I have the Inspector Clouseau hat on, and next week, who knows what I'll have on next time. But I read the fine print: select riders only for quote-unquote select rides. Do you think that is because of the hardware potentially perhaps it's changing, or is it vehicle supply, or is it do you have to be a nice person, aka a trusted traveler or rider, to be able to use it?
The bottom line is like there's never just a big announcement, right? It's always like the announcement, but then it starts with early users, first employees, and then test drivers. And yes, that was very perceptive of you to notice that it's not really opening up more broadly. My guess is, A, it's because of an element that we've talked about here a lot, which is just supply. There's just not enough supply at Waymo to service this. So I think they're just trying to show people that they can do something. But at the end of the day, and by the way, this new service area is now 260 square miles, which is very impressive size-wise. Great, your technology works. This is great. But now what you have to do as Waymo is ramp the supply because basically other technology developers, whether it's Tesla, Nvidia, others, are hot on your tail to come after you.
You're right about being hot on their tail. We've discussed this many times on this podcast. Not necessarily being the first, it's having the best wait times. And this goes back to the issue that you and I have continued to debate and we're going to debate today around vehicle supply. And we know vehicles for Waymo, they're supply constrained. And we got a report from Bloomberg this week, which I was able to independently verify, around fleet numbers for Waymo. And I want to read those numbers here. According to Bloomberg data from Waymo, they have 1,000 vehicles in the Bay Area. They have 700 vehicles in LA, 500 in Phoenix, 200 in Austin, 100 in Atlanta. The service areas are getting bigger and bigger, and the vehicle numbers don't seem to be growing very quickly to keep up with that. I mean, all due respect to Bloomberg, and I'm sure that they got this directly from Waymo, but I've also seen videos, I think, of someone from whether it's Waymo or Uber just within the past week saying over 100, implying that it was like not even at 200. So, these numbers just feel low. 2,500 total. Like, we've seen aerial photography of, you know, the Jaguars getting processed. You know, there's new products on the market. But look, at the end of the day, like I'm not going to sweat them for a hundred or 200, you know, one way or another. Maybe it's 2,500 in service and there's, you know, sensor issues that they constantly need to upgrade. The bigger issue here is, you know, 2,500 is not enough. And to put it very bluntly, like I realize that there are many people that just assume that Tesla will never get there, but you know, let's just say for sake of argument you're wrong, and that Tesla does somehow get there, then you know, with their existing cars and the existing at least the new hardware, the amount of cars that they have coming off the manufacturing line, like they will get to that 2,500 in a matter of like what, days, weeks, months, like in no time. So the question I guess really needs to start being asked of Waymo. Like it's great to announce a bunch of markets. It's great to talk about highways, but when are you going to start talking about when you're going to add thousands of cars because that's really what's going to make a difference in terms of building a business model?
You're right about Tesla. To give some numbers here: year to date, Tesla sold over 451,000 vehicles in the United States alone. That's roughly 50% of the EV market share. So Tesla clearly has the ability to sell cars. I've said this and you've said this many times. I believe that they will crack full self-driving unsupervised. This is a matter of time. But Waymo, where's that Toyota relationship? Yes, we have the Hyundai relationship. We've seen the vehicles popping up in San Francisco, but how fast can those ramp? Because Tesla seemingly overnight can just start turning out thousands of vehicles.
Well, not fast is the answer because you referenced the pictures that we've started to see of some of the Waymo Hyundai Ioniq 5s that are hitting the road. They're upfitted. That's not coming off the manufacturing line. It may be coming from the plant, but this is not the car that we saw at CES. This is not manufacturing level. This is like the start of testing. And if you look at, like, look, we've seen Zeekrs. Zeekrs were starting to test in 2024. We've been seeing pictures, random pictures of Zeekrs throughout, I think, 2025. And I may have my exact dates wrong, but you get it, for months. So like it no longer impresses me that, you know, the car itself is on the road. And it sounds to me like it's going to take like six to nine months to test out this new hardware, you know, on these Hyundais before they get to the point where they're going to production. So it's, you know, end of '26, you're starting maybe to get what, a couple hundred, 500 maybe, and then you have to go into '27 when it ramps. So what does this mean? It means that when, like, Waymo announced that they hit highways, which we've talked about as this huge unlock, Uber stock didn't move. And why? Because I think investors get now that, like, great, you unlock the highways, but you've got no cars to actually run on those highways. So I think this needs to be the primary focus. This should be the question that they get on earnings calls, to the extent that their CEOs ever appear, you know, and talk to the media, that is the question that should be asked of them, you know, why, you know, how long is it going to take, you know, to ramp these volumes because that's what it's like. If you don't have the volumes, you don't have the EBITDA. And if you don't have the EBITDA, then, you know, maybe this aspiration to have an IPO or raise additional funds is going to be more challenging going forward.
Well, I agree, but then I'm going to push back and ask the question: where's the supply come from? Hyundai is only one manufacturer. You had a two-sentence press release from Toyota, nothing else. Do they go to Ford? Where do they go? Because they need vehicles and they need them now.
I don't know. I mean, it's going to be a lot of upfitting. I'm going to shift gears here. Let's look at Kodiak, you know, who was kind of, you know, for upfitting their trucks versus like working through these integrated partnerships with Paccar or whoever, Volvo, to have them come off the line. They have almost as much revenue as Aurora does, you know, in this given quarter. Like this market is about upfitting. Upfitting is not like the process that you can use long-term for robotaxis for it to be a profitable business. It just isn't, or a largely successful business. We are still effectively in science project mode where you're buying a car and then you're buying sensors and your own technology and you're screwing this stuff on. This leaves the door open for competition, you know, from a technology standpoint. And look, you could argue that other than Tesla, you know, if you are, you know, let's call it Wayve or, you know, Nuro who's partnering with these OEMs, you know, that, you know, if they get their technology to work, they're going to be that many years behind Waymo. I'm not so sure that's the case. If they partner more closely with a good OEM, maybe their OEMs are going to work faster than Hyundai or faster than Zeekr, or certainly better than what they had to deal with in terms of Jaguar in giving limited supply. We don't know that it's going to take necessarily. I know that is the traditional thinking of investors. Oh, you don't know autos, blah blah blah. I get it. I get it. I also know that Sterling Anderson is now at GM and that, you know, this is a new paradigm where EV hasn't worked. AV is the future and, you know, it's going to get a higher priority, I think, going forward.
It is going to get a higher priority and the global OEMs are going to have to adjust. And this happens all the time in automotive, and we don't know this is not happening today, but I'm going to ask you: why has Waymo not sent 30, 40, 50 people, embedded them into an OEM to accelerate this?
I don't know that they haven't. We don't know what Waymo's relationship is with Hyundai. We have not been to the Hyundai plant. Obviously would love to go there, you know, so we don't know what the situation is. And, you know, I've talked about this before in terms of the management. Like, sometimes management gets you to a point where they're the engineers that got the technology to work, and it might take a different skill set in terms of management to scale. Like you look at Tim Cook and his value to Apple, it was his, you know, his ability to scale the product, right? It wasn't his ability to innovate. They haven't innovated for a decade, right? So it's his ability to scale, and that is going to be an important next element. I don't know if they've hired that person, right? They've hired a CFO, but have they hired someone that can help them scale the product that knows how to work those OEM relationships?
With the CFO announcement this week, could potentially that be the first of many things to change in leadership inside of Waymo as they look to potentially take that next step? Could we see a chief supply chain officer or some really high-end supply chain executive come on board? I mean, he is a CFO with public market experience. He knows what it takes. He knows this language that I am speaking right now and what investors are going to want to see, whether it's the private markets or the public markets. So he would, I'm sure, provide that valuable advice to the senior management in terms of these positions needing to be filled, or, you know, maybe these positions are already filled, like delivering more results or giving the market more clarity. Right now, like, you know, I guess people are still impressed by these press releases. We were obviously thrilled to see Highway, but like the way it works, Grayson, as you know, is what have you done for me lately? So we're at that point now, and that is the next question: when are you going to get me a ton of cars? Because right now it doesn't seem like it's enough to move the needle in terms of getting you to profitability and having an impact on the existing rideshare guys that are in the market.
And staying on the theme, you know what we haven't seen lately? We haven't seen any interesting drone footage from the Magna Waymo factory in Arizona. Been awfully quiet on the drone footage front there.
Well, we can't fault, you know, I think it's a young kid that actually does that. So, I don't know if that's like, that's a signpost other than maybe he had to go to class. I don't know what the situation is there. Look, we do have other long-term views. Nvidia has talked about doing 100,000 cars across multiple OEMs through 2032. Again, these are not Waymo cars, right? These are all the others that I think still have an opportunity. And when you have a partner like Nvidia, you have OEMs that maybe are awakened. Maybe you have new management at OEMs. Like we've talked about Sterling Anderson at GM. I think I saw some more news out of GM today that I kind of sense that Sterling was behind. I don't know. To me, it just makes what we're doing exciting. Yeah, Waymo's in the lead, we get it. But like, your lead is 2,500 cars. So for those of you that are like super bullish on Waymo, you've got 2,500 cars in the market. Like, you got a long way to go and there's no path that's clear to me that you're going to deliver thousands and thousands of cars every month into this market in the US, let alone it being a global opportunity.
So, then how does the market react? Say the Nuro Lucid vehicle delivers 5,000 vehicles to the market, or another company with a developer, an OEM or an upfitter delivers a larger number of vehicles. Does the market start to ask the questions that you and I are asking of Waymo?
I mean, look, the first thing I looked at is Hyundai Ioniq. Like, what if Uber with AV Ride gets, let's call it, 500 cars into Dallas in the second half of next year? How is that going to compare to the number of cars that Waymo has? Let's say it's similar. Let's say they both have 500 cars. Then the question is, like, if Waymo is so far out ahead, why do they have the same number of Hyundais as AV Ride, which is effectively a startup, right? I mean, think about that. And maybe I'm wrong, you know, maybe Waymo is going to get 2,000, 3,000 cars by the end of next year. Doesn't sound like it. Doesn't look like it. Based on the pictures that we've seen, that doesn't look like a production-type vehicle that's coming off the line. I could be wrong. Happy to go visit that, you know, that plant. I think, Grayson, you and I have talked about this before. You think it might be production? I think it's upfitted. We'll see. I doubt it. I really doubt it. Anyway, it just underscores, I think, that guys like AV Ride, Nuro, great technology with Lucid with a solid high-end product, Wayve, you know, probably even on the better side of multiple OEM-type partnerships for sure. Those are all, I think, in the game. And obviously the one that can kind of blow all these guys up a bit is if Tesla gets it, because just the manufacturing capability is unmatched, assuming you don't think that they're going to ultimately require to add additional hardware like lidar or whatever it is.
Tesla's the big X factor in this. The question is, in my opinion, it's just a matter of time. Individuals, we're going to get comments saying, oh, they're never going to do it, but I truly believe they're going to do it. And this is all hypothetical. Let's say Tesla has 10,000 robotaxis on the road. Waymo has, say, 4,000 to 5,000. Does Sundar or Ruth or somebody at Alphabet say, whoa, we've got to attack and we've got to change strategy here because it just seems they're floating along?
How do you do that? You're Google, right? We've seen how long it's been taking to build the Zeekr relationship. We've seen how long it's been taking to build the Hyundai cars. Like, that is the process. So, if Tesla starts lighting it up, like, what? Like, what's your... there's no like quick band-aid response. And then if you go rush to someone, to an OEM, they're like, you're Google. Like, it gets back to the thing that we've talked about before, which is, well, I'm a little worried at partnering with a company that has effectively disintermediated so many other companies in market segments that they've entered. Do I really want to enable this and ultimately reduce the number of cars that I can sell? I mean, those are real issues that these big tech companies deal with. I don't know what the answer is.
Well, that's the supply constraint debate that we'll continue to watch. The other big news is the mayor of San Jose was the first person ever to pick up at the San Jose airport and go for a ride in a Waymo. So, the California airport unlock started, but where's SFO?
