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Rob, the road goes on forever and the signals keep on trucking. That's how we work here. This week, you and I were on the road. I was in Nashville. We met in Dallas and met with the leadership team of a client giving us some really in-depth happenings on what's happening in the depot markets. A lot of stuff happening there. And a huge, huge thank you to KPMG. The hat is back. Last week I didn't have it on the road. Sorry about that. But the hat is back. And for the audience, a little teaser: Rob's got a hoodie. Yes, he does. He's got the KPMG sweatshirt on. And so, Rob, this week we got some good signals here. This one I thought you were going back to the 90s with the first signal here. Mo money, mo cars, mo places. Waymo scales up. I was like, yep, here we go. You're back to Bad Boy with Mace. Same old company. Two monsoons and mega rounds. Neelix goes global and oh boy, oh boy, GM bets big on 2028. I'm going to give a little teaser and a little hint: it's not the presidential election. Rob, let's start with the 10,000lb gorilla. Yep, that's Waymo. Well, they're raising debt and they're raising up and they're scaling because they got mo money and mo cars coming.
Yeah, I got 99 problems but Waymo ain't one of them right now. So in the last couple of days, Waymo has announced three big, big advances. So supported by a recent capital raise including a $5 billion loan and earlier this year $16 billion in equity, Waymo plans to grow its global robo taxi fleet nearly fivefold, scaling from roughly 4,000 vehicles today to 20,000 by the end of 2027.
Waymo is shifting as well from its legacy discontinued Jaguar I-PACE fleet to more Chinese-built Zeekr vehicles to navigate these high tariffs and regulatory restrictions. Waymo imports hardware-only vehicles and installs them, as many of you know, at its facility in Mesa, Arizona. Where are they going to put those vehicles? Waymo is adding Madrid to its European rollout alongside London and Munich, with plans to begin manual mapping in Spain immediately and carry its first commercial passengers in Madrid in 2027 as well. And then, as we also called here, similar to Madrid, very early, Waymo has announced a target for commercial driverless rides in Toronto, one of my favorite global cities in the whole world, right along Lake Ontario, marking its first entry into Canada in partnership with Element Fleet Management for local operations, charging, and vehicle maintenance.
And so, you know, this is a strategic global push by Waymo. It's facing strict regulatory frameworks in Europe and challenging winter driving conditions in Canada, but it's saying, 'We've got this. We can take it. Our technology has advanced. Our understanding of markets has advanced. Our understanding of how to launch into markets has advanced, and we're ready to really take this aggressive expansion across the US into major global capitals.' Mind you, we didn't even mention Tokyo, where they were already starting with their vehicles. And so they aim to secure market share and regulatory relationships ahead of autonomous competitors like Tesla and many of the Chinese AV developers as well.
The one thing is clear: Waymo firing on all cylinders. Yes, I know, what's an electric vehicle, but they are clearly firing on all cylinders and they're scaling globally. And it's super impressive how they're scaling. And individuals might be wondering, where are the vehicles coming from? Well, there was an article in SE4 this week where they talked about all the vehicles they're getting. What were those numbers that were shared in that article? They were in that article talking about growing their vehicles from about 4,000 now, though you and I know it's a little bit more than that given the number of I-PACEs that have been continually moving into the fleet over the last three or four months. So they project 8,000 by the end of this year and 20,000 by the end of 2027, with roughly 5,100 I-PACE imports going through the Mesa integration plant by year end.
And that's a real big shift and a real big test for two reasons. One, from what we can see, Mesa is ramping up how quickly they can integrate the vehicles at their plant, right? And two, how heavily the deployed fleet is being used. What we're seeing is higher throughput on both of those metrics: how fast vehicles can be integrated and then how fast those integrated vehicles can be deployed in the fleet. And we've talked about this going back to June, is that's going to be the real question for this year in order for Waymo to hit its stated goal of a million riders per week. It would really rely on that throughput at the Mesa facility and then the throughput from the facility to deployment. Right now, Waymo is hitting all of its paces. And that's a really good sign, especially given their new goal of 20,000 vehicles by the end of next year.
Waymo is not just hitting their paces or hitting their stride. They're scaling up rapidly in markets that they're already in. We were in Nashville this week. Well, I was like, 'Oh, Nashville's a new market.' The general chatter from the chattering class saying, 'Oh, it's a limited number of vehicles.' Rob, no. You look north, you look south, you look east, you look west. Waymos were everywhere. I was in a caravan of four Waymos in one part of Nashville. They were everywhere. Individuals in honky-tonk on Broadway using Waymos. Look at how cool that is, taking photos. I'm going to go on the record here and I'm going to state that I think that there are over 100 vehicles in the Nashville market, more than most individuals suspect, and Waymo has more vehicles in markets than in general other markets reporting. And that also goes for Dallas, where you and I were there and Waymos were everywhere. I used the term there: there are way more Waymos in these markets than the market is currently pricing in.
I agree, and I can see it even in my home market here in the Bay Area, right? The Bay Area is spread from San Francisco all the way down to San Jose, and that's about 40 miles of territory to cover. And the wait times everywhere are fantastic. They're super competitive with the Ubers and Lyfts down here. And as we all know, wait time is key for both consumer stickiness as well as for utilization in terms of getting as many rides as possible in those vehicles while they're out. It has become so convenient to call a Waymo given the wait time and given the pricing, which I also think is becoming more consistent. Now, the great thing is you add that to what has been a consistently good experience. I think the I-PACEs have improved in their experience. I know for a while at the beginning there was some feedback, both anecdotal and I think admitted in certain press releases, that it needed to improve a little bit. It has improved. So you add consistency, competitive pricing, and low wait times, and you have a service that is super competitive. And I think all of that is a little bit of a function of more vehicles on the road. It's kind of these scaling laws that you see in many other areas. The more vehicles you have, the more competitive you get on various other metrics, and the more consistency in those other metrics leads to more reliability in terms of meeting the goals that you set, whether they be measured in rides, measured in revenue.
Still, all of this also is a little bit of a function of an improving kind of infrastructure as well. We, the folks who listen to us, watch our field reports, know we're hitting basically every depot that we can. I believe you and I, we've estimated we've hit about 80 to maybe 85% of depots in the United States of all the major carriers. And what we're seeing is improved performance and throughput there. All of which is why I say, you know, Waymo's ambition here is, I think, backed by a confidence that all of the aspects of their operations, from vehicle supply all the way through depot as a service, so to speak, have improved.
They have, and we've noticed a growing trend in Waymo depots in particular. And now we're starting to see it with Tesla depots. They're getting bigger. They initially started 60,000 square feet, 70,000 square feet. Then you had the Austin depot, which was an outlier, which we would estimate about 80 to 90,000 square feet. And then we were just in San Antonio two weeks ago. We visited the Waymo depot there, 110,000 square feet. So what does that mean? That means more cars. Mo cars. Waymo cars for Waymo. I'm saying that with that Waymo trend here. So you're starting to see that ramp up, and the trend from the early days is holding. These depots are strategically placed near international airports. And that's going to get very, very interesting because Waymo has the ability to send large amounts of vehicles to international airports with little wait times. Put that into perspective. My wait time at the Nashville International Airport this week: six minutes to get a Waymo. Why? The depot literally touches the property line. So that's something to watch too.
For sure. And look, clearly Waymo is developing an advantage in repeatable local operations combined with what was already a high-quality kind of regulatory execution. Right? As we've talked about, the open liability around Waymo has been around vehicle supply and financing exposure for that vehicle supply. Well, they've answered that second question this week with the $5 billion that they have access to now to pay for more of these vehicles. Now, there are still things to watch for, particularly on the international side, right? Rollouts are going to be different and differently timed for lots of local reasons. So things to watch for include Ontario operating permissions, a named Madrid fleet partner, debt financing terms, right, and dated disclosures of deployed fleet and paid rides that separate their growing capacity, right, growing capacity in terms of vehicle supply from productive service, which all goes back to it's now about throughput in some of these international markets, from regulatory approval to increasing your vehicle supply in that market. And I think we're going to see, and I would expect to see, given my understanding of the regulatory markets, having worked in many of them, it's just going to be a little bit of a longer timeline than in the United States from when you get that first approval permit to when you can actually have a robustly deployed fleet that has wait times that we see in many of the places that you and I have just been to. I think that will be the challenge going forward for Waymo: is how do you pull that time in? How do you make that time less so that you can make that market more productive sooner?
It's tough to watch, and I'm going to sound like a broken record here because seemingly every week, or you and I talk every day, is we talk about the APS permits in London. That's going to be something for the audience to watch and watch the London market for competition because BYD with Free Now has started testing vehicles in London. They put reporters in. So that market's heating up. So watch that. But then here's another interesting market: Kazakhstan. Baidu is getting ready to deploy there. We've talked on past episodes around the manufacturing that happens in Kazakhstan. This week, Nvidia announced they are investing in Kazakhstan. And I'm going to give a little insight of a secret here that you and I know, but the audience doesn't know: special field reporter Spencer, who's on the team, he's visited Kazakhstan. So perhaps we have to send Spencer back to Kazakhstan to get a ground-truth report on what's happening with all these press releases coming out of Kazakhstan.
100%. I think what our folks and our clients can expect from us is we get on the ground and we find information that is valuable for whatever purpose they need, right? Is it how much is it costing for the infrastructure there? Who are they partnered with? What are the financing terms? How many vehicles are there? What are the supply chain risks in every area? What are the regulatory risks? And so we're out there hustling for you and for anybody who's interested in modeling costs and understanding where the next market's going to be, where we might be strategically valued to get ahead of a growing robo taxi market. Give us a shout, you know, look us up on LinkedIn. We're out there as Rob and Grayson on LinkedIn, or give us an email at
[email protected].
Yeah, send us a note. As we discussed this week with a client in the Dallas area, is that the press releases aren't necessarily telling you the full story. And as we shared with this client, the details of actually what's happening on the ground, and that's what we make a big deal about, of going around and doing the fieldwork and putting the data into Omega and also sharing it with clients. So, as Rob said, if you're interested, reach out because we have the largest database of real ground-truth intelligence on the autonomy economy. Which brings us to Omega's risks, because these risks are real, and when you do fieldwork, you uncover the risks. Omega has surfaced the following risks. Rob, partner-dependent operations through Element and Magna slow depot and maintenance scaling. That is an issue because as we've seen, Tesla says, 'Nope, we're going to vertically integrate.' Waymo's taking the partnership route. So two different models, but there is inherent risk there for a variety of reasons.
For sure. Right. Particularly if you look at the Element and fleet managers, fleet-as-a-service providers going to these foreign markets. There is a host of issues that we're aware of, that they're very aware of, that maybe, maybe not a lot of our listeners are aware of. You have everything from zoning issues to space issues to design dynamic issues in terms of dealing with older cities and older grids. You have not only the power issue, but you have fire protection issue, water issue. What are you going to do with maintenance of the vehicles, and where can you do those types of things? So understanding where in these more heavily regulated, more locally dominated markets, particularly in like London and Madrid and Munich, where you can set up your bigger, what we call colloquially here, mother-ship depots, where you can do a host of activities, and then where you're going to find kind of more of your staging charging hub, not hub but spoke-type depots, that's a real issue. And how quickly you can do that, how big they are, how many vehicles they can accommodate, what's their throughput and their uptime and things like that, that's really going to determine a lot about how quickly you can scale and how quickly you can get to those desirable metrics of wait time and price and reliability that we talked about earlier.
And then on the Magna side, they're seemingly doing a really great job of maintaining the pace of integrating the I-PACE vehicles and upfitting them at the Mesa plant and then getting back out into the field, but that pace needs to quicken. At its current pace, they're not going to meet 20,000 vehicles. So that pace has to get even faster. Otherwise, you know, we would estimate them maybe hitting 14,000 vehicles or so. So unless that pace picks up, that scaling is going to be a little bit deterred because they won't get to the vehicle supply numbers that they stated for the end of next year.
There's a lot of, you say, moving parts, and when you go internationally, the regulations are different. The environmental laws in some countries are different. As we've learned, we discussed with our client this week, fire retardants in some countries play a big role in depots. So there's a lot of moving parts that we're looking at, if you want to call the nitty-gritty details that we look at here at Autonomy AI. And that's one of the things that separates us from the market, in my opinion, which brings us to risk number two: international markets remain in testing, mapping, or entity-only phases, extending pre-revenue capital deployment. We've seen early hints of this risk in Sydney, Australia with Waymo. This is a very good risk that Omega uncovered.
100%. And we're seeing some of that potential risk play out in London as well, I think, with the government changes that have occurred in the UK in the last, you know, 12 to 18 months. We've seen sort of a hurry-up-and-then-slow-down type of pace from the government there. Not that they've, you know, turned against robo taxis fully. It's just the pace is now more measured given where the government values the rollout of robo taxi fleets. And I think this is very much a different risk than we see in the United States, because in the US we have less likelihood of snap elections and things like that where governments change, reform, new leaders come in on these kind of non-standard periods of time, at least non-standard from the US perspective, right? Obviously, if you live in the UK or the EU, you're like, 'Hey, this is just a part of life, this is the standard way of doing things.' So I understand I'm taking a Western US perspective on that. But for many of our listeners, those type of swift changes can really lead to a little bit of whiplash on the pace of moving from perhaps testing and pilot phase to moving to commercial phase. And so there is always a little bit more of a risk, particularly in the UK and Europe, less so, you know, when you're looking at some of the Asian countries, they tend to be a little bit less dynamic in their re-evaluation of current governments, not to say that they couldn't, many of them have the similar forms of government structure, but they tend to invoke those type of changes less so, there's a little bit less of a whiplash likely there. But yeah, this is something to watch in terms of you may have formed an entity, you may have gotten the official okay to start testing with a driver in, maybe even been assigned a small pilot area to go driverless, but by the time you do all that, there may be a new government in place that says, you know what, we're just not comfortable with you going to commercial driverless. And so that's what this risk is, is that it's a risk that it keeps you in these pre-revenue stages, which Waymo goes through of its own volition, right? This is the kind of traditional Waymo path. This is not so much the Tesla path, but the Waymo path. So it's not necessarily a risk that is felt right now as they begin to enter these markets. What it is is a risk that these periods of time extend beyond what Waymo would normally use to test, develop, and feel confident that they're ready to move to the next stage.
Simply said, time is money, money is time. It's something to watch, and we pay attention to the regulatory environment very closely. We pay attention to the international political environment because we want to say there's a lot of cooks in the kitchen and a lot of moving parts. This brings us to Omega's take: Madrid and Toronto extend Waymo's geographic option set on supervised validation-first timelines, while London and Munich remain pre-commercial towards the end of 2027, and Toronto targets 2028. Alphabet has assembled funding for a fleet above 20,000 vehicles, but import and fit-out evidence does not yet show the throughput to deliver that fleet by the end of 2027, making vehicle supply, not capital or engineering capacity, the binding constraint. That is a very good take by Omega. And perhaps we could see a Waymo factory somewhere in the EU because, drum roll please, EU type certification would come with those vehicles, would speed up the timeline, and reduce the potential regulatory hurdles.
Yes, I think that's quite a possibility. Waymo's ambition is not going to stop at 20,000 vehicles, right? We know that figure will have to be 10x that within a few years, and then 10x that figure in a few years, to the point where you have millions of vehicles that are in the Waymo fleet, you know, within the next 10 years. They are going to need more vehicles built on their behalf. And can the Hyundai Motor Group deliver all of those? We shall see. Will it be some other partner, or will Waymo look to go into the car-making business itself? Those are questions on a much longer horizon. We love to pontificate about them. That's a word that I used on my son last night when I got home, and he was like, 'Stop using big words. It's 11 o'clock.' But we will think deeply on these issues. They're not near-term, but as you look out, the ambitions are huge, and the vehicle supply has to be huge to meet those ambitions.
They do, because Waymo's ambitions are only growing. Their competitor's ambitions are only growing, and autonomy is going global, which brings us to Signal 2: monsoons and mega rounds, Neelix goes global. See, the global trend continues here on Signal 2. What do we know about this, Rob?
Yeah, Neelix, great company. They're doing autonomous delivery robots. They raised nearly 400 million in a Series E funding round, making this the largest single fundraising deal in China's autonomous driving sector so far in 2026, and bringing its total cumulative funding past 10 billion RMB. 10 billion. That's a big number. Talking about big numbers. Neelix also signed a memorandum of understanding with Malaysian conglomerate Sunway Group to distribute its L4 autonomous delivery vehicles across Sunway's property, healthcare, retail, and hospitality ecosystems in Malaysia. Proceeds from the new funding round will be used to build fulfillment service hubs in key global markets and further train its vision-based end-to-end AI large language model to boost vehicle safety while reducing maintenance costs. Neelix is further nearing completion of its three-month autonomous vehicle sandbox testing in Malaysia and is advancing toward vehicle type approval stage alongside local partners like SF Express and Tiong Nam Logistics. Big, big names in Malaysia for those who aren't familiar with those names. So supported by favorable Chinese central government policies for unmanned logistics, Neelix currently operates a global fleet of over 30,000 robo vans, robot delivery vans, and robot delivery services across 320-plus cities in 20-plus countries, spanning Europe, East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Australia, with over 260 million autonomous kilometers driven.
So for those that aren't familiar with Neelix, get familiar. This is a very powerful up-and-coming player in the delivery space, particularly autonomous delivery space, who, by the way, has deliberately avoided a US entry. And this is all backed by our Road to Autonomy index, where Neelix currently ranks number one on our delivery bot index.
The proof is in the pudding, or the data is in the index, any term you want to use there, which highlights that our global reach is that you and I fundamentally both believe autonomy is becoming an economy called the autonomy economy, and it's going to become global. It's not just going to be US-based, and the Southeast Asian market is a very, very important market. You highlighted Malaysia, which is great. You have Grab there. You have Singapore there. You have a lot of moving parts, and the Sunway partnership that Neelix has is pretty impressive. Why does that partnership matter? What does that partnership unlock for Neelix?
Yeah, so a township partner like Sunway can aggregate delivery demand and offer repeatable deployment settings for Neelix, as well as its local support makes the vehicle more usable for buyers. The risk is an export business where after-sales obligations grow faster than the gross profit on each vehicle. However, Sunway allows for a kind of maximal utilization within its properties and is really supportive of having Neelix test in these very difficult conditions that arise in Malaysia. And so, Sunway is just a really perfect partner for Neelix in this sense because it allows them to get on the ground. It gives them kind of a regional template as to how to work, right? You can find maybe a campus or a kind of full-in facility that Sunway provides in terms of live, work, play type of scenario, and it gives you an automatic kind of distribution channel within those facilities, as well as kind of local support with their relationships with local government. So Sunway is a very strategic partner for Neelix.
