Walt, I'm not going to sing the Charlie Daniels song about the devil going down to Georgia, but I am going to say that Waymo went down to Wall Street. As Waymo goes down to Wall Street, they went fully autonomous in Motown. Let's cue up some Stevie Wonder there. Keeping with the musical theme as they do that, Pony AI announced they're getting ready to launch commercial service with Uber in London. And what does that mean for hockey fans? That's a hat trick. Why is that a hat trick? You've got Wave, you've got Baidu, and now you have Pony. Three competitors, one platform in London. Be very interesting to watch. And oh, as the audience knows, we've been on the road a lot. Shall we start with field reports today or where do you want to go?
We should always start with field reports unless there's some type of groundbreaking news, which I don't think there's any major groundbreaking news. But I think I wanted to come back to the breaking news that we had here last week, where you discovered the Adams car and put some pictures up, but then, you know, you dropped this video which gave a little bit more details. There were some great, you know, circles around the cars or whatever that you have. I know you blurred out some pictures, but how was the feedback on the video? In terms of Adams, did you get any pushback? I mean, I'm just — I'm still fascinated that, given Travis's reputation, given Anony's reputation, and the lack of really any information about what Adams is doing, that this didn't create more buzz.
The feedback was good. In private we did get confirmation, and I will say this, which was a very interesting sign or a signal: Dara liked the post on X. What that means, I don't know. I just find it very, very interesting. But really good feedback. And to the individuals that asked, yes, we're going to have a lot more field reports coming. And yes, we'll continue to cover Adams. So overall, really good feedback. Dara clicking the like button is super interesting.
I think that might have been an accident. I'm not going to read too much into that. That might have been accidentally swiping through like, oh no, got to get this guy off my screen, and he accidentally hit the — I'm kidding obviously. Who knows what that means, but you can refer back to our podcast with Jason Calacanis about our views on, you know, the future for Travis. Anyway, we also had some additional fieldwork. I know David Moss is part of the Road to Autonomy family and I saw some interesting videos of Zoox where, I mean, I think I've been pretty consistent with some of my questions around Zoox and my own personal experiences in Las Vegas. Did David experience anything differently or better in terms of Zoox's progress in Las Vegas?
Unfortunately, no. And I have to say that unfortunately because we're rooting for Zoox to do well. David was taken to go to the Golden Knights for hockey, and an hour before he tried to order Zoox due to high demand. Couldn't get a ride. And then he finally gets a ride after waiting at Resorts World. And then lo and behold, I don't know what happened. Well, if the Zoox wanted to go jousting and it thought it was from the Excalibur days, but the Zoox was doing loops in the Excalibur parking lot. It took him a while to get there. Not to mention, there was a $20 drop fee to get dropped at the game. So, long time to get there, high drop fee, not an overall great experience.
I mean, anyone that's been to Vegas realizes getting through those parking lots in and out of the casinos is a major challenge. I mean, we think about, you know, different weather, you know, autonomous cars working at night, but being able to navigate to get from point A to point B in Vegas is certainly a challenge. I'm going to give them a slight pass on that. And the drop fee, that is again, you know, a nature of the beast and the cost of doing business in Vegas. I'm not sure how you break through those type of things, but I don't know, maybe we should drop some Zoox in some additional markets rather than Vegas. But, you know, I'm looking forward to trying it again at CES. And you know what else I'm going to be getting when I'm waiting for my Zoox, Grayson? That Topgolf chicken Caesar that you know I like.
That I know you like. And I'll give some numbers here for the audience that we released in the field report. The Zoox ride cost $42.26. That's compared to the Waymo Ioniq 5 ride that cost $18.68. Ride took 28 minutes in the Zoox, 11 minutes in a rideshare traditional vehicle. So there's still some things to do, while some things still to be fixed. And that is a big swing in price and both services are autonomous.
Speaking of CES, let us know if you're going. We've got some interesting things planned for this year's CES. It's kind of a funky couple of days, whether it's, you know, it starts a little like a day later. So not sure exactly when we're going to plan this stuff out. I know the Lightspeed party is Wednesday, that's already set, but we're building some other stuff. So, you know, let us know if you're going to be in town and what days and we'll figure some stuff out. What else did David Moss, our good friend, experience in Vegas? Because I think, you know, Uber this week, specifically the CFO was talking about, like, you know, under the radar Motional vehicle. I'm like, hold on for a second. Motional is not under the radar on Autonomy Markets or Road to Autonomy. This is stuff we've talked about for a while. And then even more specifically, David, I think, was trying to get paired with some Motional vehicles. So, you know, I guess this is under the radar, but, you know, for someone that's not a listener of Autonomy Markets, what did he have to say?
I guess what certain people do in Vegas, and I'm not one of them, you gamble. And so David didn't go to the craps tables or the roulette table and gamble. No, he opened the Uber app and played, as we coined it, autonomy roulette. Not one spin, two spins, but 10 spins of the Uber autonomy roulette wheel until he finally got paired with Motional. I know people like to gamble in Vegas, Walt, but that is one heck of a gamble, and depending if you're going high roller or Michael Jordan style, that's going to get very expensive.
Well, I have a more direct answer then, Grayson. Directed directly to our Uber listeners: if you don't want them to be under the radar, then give us an extra tier where we can specifically pick autonomy and pick Motional so we don't have to hit the roulette wheel. Maybe that's why it's under the radar, because you've limited the ability to pick that on the autonomy tier. What am I missing here?
No, you're right. It is missing on the tier. I have written to Andrew McDonald on X and he's publicly stated that an autonomy tier is coming. We do not have a date on that. This is not a great experience. And then if you look at it, what are you going to get in London? You got three choices. And we know that at some point Zoox is going to go live in Vegas, Motional. So how do I know what I'm going to get paired with? What if I get motion sickness? That is a real issue with the Zoox vehicles. There is no consistency in the platform. And let's not forget, here's the other one: there is a very high potential Nuro could deploy in Vegas. And why do I say that? Because Nuro has a test track facility at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. So there we go. Then you got a hat trick, or if you want to say a jackpot triple sevens in Vegas here. I don't know, Walt, but I'll tell you one thing: we will continue to produce field reports, going in the field. We're expanding, we're hiring, and we are ramping up field reports.
I mean, just because they have a test track in Vegas doesn't mean they're going to actually show up in Vegas. But, you know, I've doubted you in the past and then it comes through and you text me and I told you and I told you, and we have to go and give you the clappy hat. But we'll see if Nuro shows up in Vegas. I'm just one of the ones I'd like to see show up anywhere, whether it's California, Houston — H-town, as I like to call it — or Vegas. Let's get Nuro on the road. They're, you know, one of the ones that we're a little bit more optimistic about.
But let's move to the beast, the giant, the leader, the winner in the space: Waymo, majority and controlled by Google, just raised $5 billion of debt. This is its first loan ever. A very diverse group of lenders, very high-quality names as you would expect. This is on top of the $16 billion equity that they did back in February, that was at a $126 billion valuation. By the way, you play around with some of these robo-taxi models, especially if you put a Calacanis-type assumption in there in terms of the share of ride-share in total miles, you can get much higher numbers than a $126 billion valuation, depending on how this industry plays out. But it's fun to pull the levers in the model to see how value can build here. But good news obviously for Waymo to get some cash and start to accelerate growth because competition's coming.
5 billion's a lot. I've run some of the numbers, it's like, that's a lot of cars and a lot of depots. To me, just reading the headlines, looking at this, it signals growth, growth, growth. I mean, that's how I'm reading this.
Yeah. It's also, you know, you like to get credit guys in there in terms of raising money. They have a different approach than maybe a venture or late-stage growth investor. So, you know, it's nice to have that term loan there, but capital — we've talked about this obviously continuously, especially for the smaller companies — the ability to fund growth is a strategic advantage. And obviously, you know, aside from being owned by a company that generates a lot of cash, which that company is obviously using to invest in AI at the moment, the ability to access the capital markets, not always easy. So that's obviously a positive. And $5 billion is a nice chunk of change.
It is. Does this signal anything besides my opinion of growth? Would we read anything into this?
I think money means growth. That's obviously what it means. When you ask, you know, when a company's asking for money, where are you going to spend it? It's obviously for ways to generate greater revenue, getting to EBITDA positive and free cash-flow positive sooner. And that's those expectations. There could be some assets underlying it, you know, but whatever. Getting capital on the balance sheet, as we've said many times before — this is Captain Obvious here — is obviously essential for any of these companies in the space regardless of their size. But let's move on to their operations, because this Ioniq 5, this Zeekr, the classic from episode one, the unforced error, the error is getting modified. Grayson, there's been some new colors, some new interiors, some wireless charging. I mean, we've seen in the past things that got added to the Jaguars in terms of the user interface. I mean, I think while Waymo is still kind of building new markets, they're making these tweaks to the existing product to make their consumers happier.
To me, it seems that Waymo is listening to the rider feedback that's been very vocally shared on X. And the Ioniq 5 is not a luxury product. It's not nearly as nice as the Jaguar, and it seems like that Waymo is really taking that to heart and modifying it. And you'll notice a lot of changes. The steering wheel no longer says Zeekr Geely, it says Ioniq 5. So branding there. And it's funny as Waymo changed the branding throughout the entire vehicle to Ioniq 5. And guess what? Guess what? Geely announced they're going to Canada today. So very interesting times for Geely.
Yeah, so that's good. Again, you know, so early, just get the cars out on the road. I'm less concerned about their pleather seats and their wireless charging than I am just getting more of those cars on the road at an affordable price to fulfill the demand. So we can stop hearing Uber saying that their share is stable in these markets. Let's dump 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 or 10,000 cars in those markets and see how that share sustains. Meanwhile, Waymo has moved on and has fully autonomous testing now in Detroit, Motown. So what do you think here in terms of when we go fully commercial in Detroit?
Motown? Fully commercial operations before New Year's Eve is what I'll put out there as a marker. That's where I think they're going. What do you think?
I don't know. I mean, I shouldn't say that. It's already October 9th, man. This year is going fast. I was going to say the pace is faster, but, you know, end of year is right around the corner. I'm going to say however... um, well, end of year is — I'm just going to go aggressive here. Let's go by Thanksgiving. I think Detroit still hosts a Thanksgiving Day game. It would be great to have something launched commercially for the Thanksgiving Day football games. And how great would it be if you could take an Ioniq 5 to Ford Stadium and not have to pay a drop fee? Now, how great would that be?
I don't think Detroit is going to have a $20 drop fee, or they won't have much business there. Vegas maybe. But you mentioned taking market share and we have a field report coming out on Monday about this. Spencer, another special field correspondent for Road to Autonomy, went and visited Waymo's Avis depot. Wait till you see that video. You want to talk about flooding a market with vehicles? What we're releasing in that video, it appears that Waymo is getting ready to massively expand in the Dallas market based on what we're going to show in that video on Monday.
I mean, Dallas feels like this hotbed. Like on one hand, you've got this: get a new city, get your three, 400 cars in there, move on, get the footprint going. But then there's like certain markets, obviously San Francisco, California, and Texas, Dallas, where you've got multiple competitors, or Austin even, where Cybercab is first launching, that, you know, it maybe makes sense to dump more in there, just, you know, because they know that Road to Autonomy is going to be down there doing field work. So they want to see that, you know, as you're trying to film that AV ride for Uber, that you have 15 freaking Waymos driving by. And look, Tesla, I think you've done some good field work there and seen some of the lots and the number of Cybercabs that I would sense are probably soon going to be flooding the streets of Dallas as well. So Dallas, you know, should be a good autonomy city for us. So looking forward to seeing more of that.
It's funny you mentioned Road to Autonomy and myself and our field correspondents David and Spencer getting out of there. I got to say something about Tesla. If this is Elon, I commend you, sir, or whoever is doing this. Tesla in Austin is testing Cybercab, nobody in the cab, and they're all testing robo taxi doing loops around Zoox's under-construction Austin depot. You can't make this up, Walt. I sat there, you're just watching. I mean, do you want to talk about epic trolling? This is Trump-style trolling. I mean, it's well, well done.
Well, hopefully they don't get complaints from the neighbors because they're circling around too much. But speaking of Tesla, what is the latest there? I mean, we still have a curfew on these cars, 10:00, 11:00. Elon's talking about like he's worried about gray kittens versus black kittens versus white kittens. Like, is there anything new here? Are we just basically still in this holding pattern until we kind of have that all-systems-go clearance from our good friends at NHTSA?
I would say we're still in the early stages. I don't want to necessarily call it a holding pattern. You talked about this many episodes ago and we saw it when we were at Giga. Tesla truly cares about safety and they have a culture of safety, and it is my opinion that Tesla is doing this rollout the right way. They're not rushing it. So I think they're doing it right and they're being cautious about it. Moss went for a ride after 10 p.m. and so successful there. So to me it's a positive step in the right direction, and I don't necessarily feel they're in a holding pattern. I just feel they're taking safety very, very seriously.
I hear that, but I think there was some tweet, you know, by at least someone from Tesla, not Elon, talking about 24-hour driverless being around next month. We're kind of getting close to that because I think this was like late September that this tweet was out there. So I don't know, like, let's get into the prediction tank again. I would think maybe by Halloween we'll be 24 hours. So when that, you know, when the, what do they call it, the Headless Horseman is running down the streets of Make It Weird Austin on Halloween, hopefully you can run to your Cybercab and hop in there at 12:00 when the Headless Horseman is running through, or even 1:00 when you're coming out of one of those great, great bars in Austin. What do you think? Can we get there 24 hours, you know, in Austin by Halloween?
I'm confident the technology can handle it. I just think that potentially Halloween could be a major... Here we go. Three, two... I think pushing it to Halloween is a little bit of risk perhaps because there could be some interesting edge cases that could pop up with the goblins and all the children out, if children are out in different parts of Austin. So I'm going to say post-Halloween for Tesla to err on the side of safety.
All right. You're going long on all your predictions. I'm going short there and saying we're coming in by the end of the month, 24 hours. We'll see who's right. Mark it down. We don't need to bet more stakes, but we can just mark this one down. Yes, I think end of the month, 24 hours.
You're getting aggressive. I'll be in Austin next week. So if it is 24/7, I'll get up at 3:00 in the morning and go for a ride and film a field report.
You better, you better. But don't get that one. Don't go to that. Yeah, let's not go there. Anyway, so let's move on to Uber bringing a Chinese robo taxi to London. What is going on with this? I mean, this is not the first robo taxi. This is not new, right? But this is because I think you had the Baidu thing already, right? As a partner. So now you had Uber and Pony, you know, talking about a London robo taxi service. This is on the Gen 7 vehicle. This is just an announcement, right? Road testing is probably going to start in a couple of weeks. So if you're Uber, I guess they've got Wave in London, right? They've got Pony there. And don't they also have Baidu? So isn't this a three-horse race for them?
It's a hat trick. Said in the opening, it's a hat trick. And what we know, because the way that TfL and the regulators are rolling this out, this is not all of London. You cannot go to the pub and then go see Buckingham Palace, then go to the portrait gallery. Not allowed. They're operating in limited areas in Brent. We do not have a public service map for what Wave is operating, but Wave is operating under Uber's permit and those are supervised. So is my assumption, and we do not have any data, it's an assumption, that they're able to operate in a vast majority of London, but it's only 15 vehicles that Wave is doing.
And I will say something for the audience, and I've been harping on this and I am not going to stop harping on this until I get an on-the-record public clarification from the following companies. I'd like to get public clarification from Uber and Wave for one simple question: who is going to own the permit? The permit in London is control. Who's going to control the relationship? Is Uber going to get it and then everybody's going to run under Uber so they can never leave Uber, or the company's going to get it so they can have their flexibility and freedom? That to me is the most important thing to watch in the London market. And then also watch as companies start to begin the type certification process which is required to deploy — I'll use government language — an automated vehicle on the streets of London.
I don't know, that was a lot of words. This to me sounds like a bit of a hodgepodge. Like you got a handful of cars, you have a safety driver in the driver's seat, you have small service areas. Is any of these things even close to being, even if you said there was a safety driver, close to being something that would be a real service in London anytime soon?
For every company not named Waymo, no. And I will say by Q1 of next year, Waymo will be operating fully autonomous, unsupervised service in London while Uber races to play catch-up with their partners.
Catch up with what? They have three partners, which sounds impressive, but if they're like, again, five or 10 cars, driver in, in small service areas, like, what does that even mean? Like, how would you even match with one of those cars?
It's going to go back to, if you want to call it, London roulette. So I'll give you an example. It's going to be like Jekyll and Hyde perhaps. One is driver out operating in one area and one is driver. We do not have enough clarity from Uber of how this is going to work. We do not have enough clarity from the partners along timelines of when they're going to work to achieve unsupervised there. I harp on this: there's a lot of press releases with a lot of grandiose headlines and not a lot of details.
Okay. So I'm going to, you know, I've criticized you for being a little bit too negative, but I'm going to put on my Grayson grumpy hat and just point out that, like, this is another one of these cities. And when, you know, Uber talks about these, oh, 15 cities globally by year end, like what that means is, you know, there's a safety driver there and with varying, you know, service areas. Like that is, that's what 15 cities. So if this is like meant as like some type of — again, that's a positive. Certainly it's better to have 15 things in process. But it's 2026, man. This industry, we've been doing this podcast for a while now, over 100 episodes, whatever it is, 120. We're not at the point where it's like, okay, enough with this and let's start talking about the numbers that matter, which is fully unsupervised, driver out. That's what's going to drive the economics. That's what's going to allow you to borrow $5 billion from, you know, from credit guys to build a business. Like, that's the whole point of all this, is driver out. Sorry for that digression, but this was a little frustrating, honestly, in this London update. I'm not even sure — I still don't really understand what all that means. It doesn't seem like much of much. The 15 cities is like, okay, you're driver in. We've been in those cars. We know how they are. I don't know. It's 2027. We're endeavoring now to give only numbers on driver out. I think that should be a new Autonomy Markets policy and just ignore these other things until they hit real commercial driver-out service.
Sorry, I had to have that little digression there. How does the Chinese AV play in London work? If you know, in terms of how Washington, the US, sees or perceives Uber, or how they examine their own — I know the US is a leader, these are, you know, whatever, they're not going to just because London's doing it or the UK is doing it, you know, do the same. But, you know, for our friends in the US, whether it's NHTSA or in the administration, like, how are they viewing this, if at all? Are they paying attention to what's going on with some of these US companies and...
And what they're doing in foreign markets.
It's my belief and my assumption that, yes, they're monitoring all companies and their foreign activities as it relates to how closely. I would say, you know, the ambassador to London with the Court of St. James would probably have a better explanation of that. But I don't know. I keep looking at what happened under the Cameron administration, under the Johnson administration in the UK when China tried to come in with all the telecoms, and we saw what happened there. And you know, maybe I have a case of PTSD, but with Huawei, what happened could potentially happen again. We don't have any clear indications from the current Prime Minister of the UK for his feelings on this. But we do know that his staff has made public statements that they are not fans of autonomy. So that's going to get very, very interesting to see how that evolves.
So let's move on to Wayve. So last week, Grayson, you gave like a long-term expectation for Wayve, 36 months. I don't know if you got feedback from the company or not, but you got feedback from our good friend Jason Kanis. He's like, 'What?' And now you sucked me into this because, you know, I kind of rely on you, especially as it relates to Wayve. So KCanis is like, by the end of next year, I think, or in a year — but did he say year end? I can't remember, but it was tight. No, end of next year, that Wayve would have unsupervised and commercial by the end of 2027. Now I'm on the hook for one of his expensive steaks because I said mid-2028, and that's — but I'm a lot shorter than you. I thought I was being aggressive because you were saying it's going to take Wayve three years to deliver unsupervised commercial. So, and by the way, after I got roped into this stake bet with Jason, you like disappeared. You ghosted me on Twitter. So, are you pulling back on your three years, or are you still saying three years unsupervised and commercial in a ride-share market?
You know, Walt, there's a little thing I like — technical little minute details. I asked Jason which market, and then I would give a more defined which market in his commercial. Jason, you ghosted me on that. If we can get a definition on that, then I will throw out a timeline on that, because markets make a very big difference for commercial unsupervised operation.
Well, let's just say anywhere. How long do you think it takes Wayve to deliver unsupervised commercial anywhere?
Well, you can't really define anywhere because that's a quagmire. It could be anything to anybody. We have to narrow into the specifics of where it is.
