Transcript: Driver-Out with Avride, Nuro’s Uber Lucid Deal, Waymo’s Austin Depot

Executive Summary

This week’s episode of Autonomy Markets we take you on the ground in Austin for an exclusive driver-out ride with AV Ride, exploring their impressive technology and sidewalk delivery bots. We also conduct some sleuth work to uncover the scale and operations of Waymo’s massive new “Avomo” depot, discovering who really owns the vehicles in their Uber partnership. Capping off a huge week, we break down the blockbuster announcement of Nuro’s licensing deal with Lucid Motors and their plan to deploy 20,000 vehicles exclusively on the Uber network.

Key Topics & Timestamps

[00:00] Waymo’s Austin Expansion & Avomo Depot Discovery 

Walt and Grayson confirm Waymo’s service area in Austin has expanded from 37 to 90 square miles and locate the massive “Avomo” depot, partly owned by Uber, where vehicles are charged and serviced.

[05:55] Inside the Waymo Depot: Calibration and Scale 

The depot is revealed to be as large as a Costco, approximately 80,000 square feet, built to handle significant scale. They observe vehicles potentially undergoing a unique calibration process by driving slowly around the massive facility after servicing.

[07:35] The Real Estate & Power Challenge for AV Fleets 

The hosts discuss the critical challenge of securing adequate real estate and power for large AV fleets, a multi-year process that becomes exponentially harder in dense cities like New York.

[10:45] Who Owns the Cars? Waymo, Avomo, or Uber? 

Through some detective work with the vehicle’s insurance card, the hosts confirm that the assets are legally owned by “Waymo, LLC,” settling the debate about whether Uber or Avomo owns the fleet.

[15:45] Driver-Out Ride Experience with Avride 

The team takes a completely driver-out ride in an AV Ride Hyundai Ioniq 5, finding the experience smooth and comfortable. They praise the company’s transparency and well-engineered vehicle integration.

[18:50] AV Ride’s Sidewalk Delivery Bots & Business Growth 

Originally part of Yandex, Avride is now a US company poised to launch on Uber’s network in Dallas. Beyond robo-taxis, they operate a rapidly growing sidewalk delivery bot business with major partners like Uber Eats and GrubHub.

[23:45] Nuro’s Major Licensing Deal with Lucid and Uber 

A breakdown of the week’s biggest news: Nuro’s landmark licensing deal with Lucid Motors to deploy 20,000+ autonomous vehicles exclusively on the Uber network over a six-year period.

[29:00] Uber’s Strategy Shift: Owning Fleet Assets 

The Nuro-Lucid press release confirms a major strategic shift:Uber will own and operate AV assets. The hosts explore why this is critical and why Uber should build an in-house logistics division to control its autonomous future.

[36:55] Tesla Expands its Austin Robotaxi Service 

Tesla signals confidence by expanding its Austin service area to 42 square miles. The hosts recount their flawless ride and confirm the vehicle used standard hardware, highlighting Tesla’s ability to calibrate cameras for FSD simply by driving.

Watch the Full Episode of Autonomy Markets

Full Episode Transcript

Investigating Waymo’s Massive Austin Operations Hub

Grayson Brulte: Walter Piecyk, we had a great week in Austin, ride around in robo taxis, but we weren’t just there to ride around in robo taxis. We were there to learn about the autonomy economy. We’ve met with several companies and we’ve got a really great episode for our listeners coming today. Thanks for the great feedback. Yes, we are gonna show more video footage of our Austin trip, and that’s coming today. But Walter Piecyk, we gotta pat ourselves on the back. We made another right prediction. We predicted last week that Waymo was going to expand. Their operational design domain commonly known for your listeners, the service area Waymo has gone from 37 square miles to 90 square miles. It’s getting bigger in Austin. Things are moving.

Walter Piecyk: That, that was a big expansion in an already large, uh, ODD, which is this geographic service area. And as we mentioned last week, we just saw tons of Waymo’s, and it really just wasn’t a surprise. , Based on the number of Waymo’s we saw, and I think what you’re about to see in this next video, the AVomo Service Center and AVomo, as a reminder, is partly owned by Uber. Um, it used to be called move. They actually, you know, partly own two different moves. Uh, in this case, , it’s now called a vmo. But let’s roll the tape for our discovery of the AVomo Uber Waymo Service Center.

Grayson Brulte & Walter Piecyk (GoPro): And there it is. All we had to do is search. Oh, we got you AVomo. We got you. Daddy’s home, Walter Piecyk, the sleuth work worked. Dad, daddy is home. I mean, they’re not really hiding it when they have the words. A vmo. On there. Did we potentially, do you think a FOMO stands for Fear of missing out a fomo? as you can see, we had made it to the a Vmo Depot where the Waymo cars and Uber cars are getting charged. Yep. There are How many Chargers here? 18. 18 chargers they seen to drive themselves in. There’s a guy driving a car. He is probably doing a service. We’re gonna walk on the other side of the building. This is a lot like what I saw in, I think it was LA, where you had charging in one location with these massive superchargers and then servicing for recalibrations on the other side. Basically, we noticed that the vehicles are coming in and charging on their own and then connected with, look what appears to be. Waymo version of a supercharger. Well, they’re not charging on their own. There’s a, there’s a human plugging them in. Yes. But they’re backing into the spot fully autonom this parking into, into the spot. And then obviously you’ve got a couple technicians there, and you can see that the trunks are open. So there’s probably some level of cleaning that’s being done as well.

Grayson Brulte: Always a good laugh. We got you indeed. We counted 36 charging ports and dozens of vehicles of depot was a very, very active depot.

Walter Piecyk: It was very active. , You know, we were just tons of, of those Waymo’s coming in and out aside from the ones that we strong that we saw on the street. But on this next clip we went to that the other side of that massive complex where we checked out what they were doing on the service and calibration side. [00:03:00] This is similar to an experience that I had in LA when I, when I, you know, was able to find that service center in terms of what they were doing. I want to just caution the listeners, you might have seen this last week, I apologize for the sweats. It was 107 degrees and in this case, I think we just came back from, uh, a delicious lunch at Terry Block. So we might have had some meat sweats going on during this video clip, but, um, let’s play our next video.

Grayson Brulte & Walter Piecyk (GoPro): So what you’re looking at here is the, the back of this massive Avomo complex, which, you know, they have serviced, they’re charging the cars up there. If you look at these ramps, that’s clearly where I think the cars are going in getting sensors fixed, maybe some calibrations . we’ve talked about having. Service Depots like this scatter around the cities and real estate being important, but. Given the size of this, this, this could, I mean, how many cars could this handle? This could probably handle all of Austin. You’re probably looking at thousand to 1500 cars handled the size of this facility. You’re maybe 50 to a hundred thousand square feet and a massive, massive facility. Although they need more charging ’cause we, again, they only had 18 chargers, so they probably had to add, and there’s space to add more charging facilities here. So they’d probably add more charging here and then maybe just add more charging throughout the city if they wanted to. They could probably add 300. Chargers on this facility who’s done the parking lot, the property that they currently have, and Austin might be different than LA in that Austin, you can get large chunks of land like this that aren’t really that far from the ODD where LA maybe it needs to be more scattered. So it could be like a market by market, uh, situation. And let’s not forget Walter Piecyk 2.1 miles that way. Austin Bergham Airport. So perfect facility. When they eventually expand to airports, that’s definitely true. Close to the airports where a lot of the rides are gonna come from. So I, I would think that they’d have to add more chargers. There doesn’t seem like there’s any construction to add more superchargers on the other side. You know, it really looks, I mean, it’s a lot of space. Are they possibly charging inside? We don’t see activity going in and out of there, but I guess it’s always possible that they could go into the building and charge in there. The question is what’s going in on site? That’s the million dollar question. AVomo, you’re on The Road to Autonomy Newsletter, perhaps right to Walter Piecyk and I and let us know what’s going on inside and welcome us in for a sneak peek.

Walter Piecyk: So just a couple footnotes on, on that video. As, as you know, we continued to do some additional research and investigation. I don’t believe that there was any charging going on inside that large facility, which is probably more in the, in the range of 70 or 80,000 square feet. All the charging was outdoors. They had 18 different actual chargers split into two. So 36. Cars total could charge at a time. So inside that facilities is clearly where they were getting serviced. And I’m, I’m suspecting that it’s gonna be similar to what I saw in LA in terms of, you know, different problems, identify with different tags, and you had a lot of engineers in there. We heard a lot of noises going on. You know, we suspected there might be some calibration. Our, our knowledge, and we were sitting there waiting. But our, our knowledge of calibration was more of like a car. Sitting there while you had a bunch of QR codes around it, and the sensors calibrated to that. But I’m not sure that that’s the case here. But that’s not what we saw there. What we saw was, and I wanna put this into perspective for the listeners and viewers. The depot was the size of a Costco. It was massive. It just, it was truly the size of, of a Costco. What we saw and what we noticed. We noticed when the vehicles would come out down the ramp, they would drive around the building and anywhere from I say five to 10 miles an hour perhaps that’s calibrating it. We don’t know, but let’s roll the clip and you come to your own opinion.

Grayson Brulte: As you can see from the video, it, it is Costco size. It, it is a very big facility, as Walter Piecyk said, probably around 80,000 square feet or so. It’s, it’s built to scale, but now that we have the announcement, the ODD has expanded 90 square miles. While I’m beginning to think there’s traffic in Austin, are they gonna have to put a, say a micro depot in the, the north part of the ODD or, or charging throughout there to ensure that the service can continue to work as they add more vehicles to the fleet? 

Walter Piecyk: I think we alone have addressed this over many, many of our podcasts in terms of the importance of, you know, the service and the charging of, of these vehicles and the locations of that. So even in Austin, where a large depot like this will. You know, we’ll help this expansion and probably even add more than the, what we think are 200 cars, um, that are on the roads. And I think our numbers are pretty good there. If you really want to get up to 500, 700,000, you’re gonna need to add additional locations and it becomes a real estate play. And then the challenge of the real estate play, as many of us know, is the challenge of getting power to those locations. Which makes me wonder when you think about Waymo, as you know, being a, you know, doing some of these rides in New York or some of these cities. And how our grid works in New York, but more importantly, real estate locations. How? How is that gonna work? Grayson.

Grayson Brulte: I don’t know. Right now we have a lot of public photos and we. Has admitted this and pro and verified it that they are currently storing the vi uh, the vehicles in Jersey City. Well, I grew up in the tri-state area. You live there, there’s a lot of traffic and that’s a long distance to go. So does, does Waymo have to sublease real estate somewhere? And if they do, how are they gonna get all the energies can required to charge these vehicles? That’s a question that I have.

Walter Piecyk: I don’t know. It could be like the, the sleuth work we need to do now would be like the sleuth work of, you know, tracking where Comcast is buying land for its next Universal Studios, because you know, you’re gonna require, again, real estate and where they’re applying for power, which in many cases can be a multi-year process. It’s obviously gonna be easier to make it more segmented. And to your point, getting something large in Jersey, long Island, Westchester, Connecticut, whatever, you still have the challenge of like, okay, now all the cars are up there getting serviced or charged. How do you move them from there? Given the traffic that exists in, in this area into the city where they’re needed at the most in the scale that’s gonna be required. I’m sure Uber is like licking their chops as they listen to this segment and saying, yes, yes. That’s what we’re talking about all along, because their supply is obviously distributed in driveways throughout the tri-state area. This is clearly a real, real issue and one that we, you know, carefully consider when we see these mega 80,000 foot depots that Waymo’s running.

Grayson Brulte: The only place that I could realistically see is she put out in Queen, she put out in Long Island City. But then there’s a political climate that’s changing in New York. The VMT, the vehicles mile travel debate is gonna come up. So. I, at some point, I know I’m beating a dead bush here, but they’re gonna have to put micro depots inside of Manhattan in order for this to truly scale.

Walter Piecyk: You don’t beat a dead bush, you beat a dead horse. I think I Grayson. Um, but yeah, I agree. And it’s, look, it’s, it, it speaks to how quickly Waymo can and Uber or whoever, if, if they even partner with Uber in New York, how quickly they can really get that market. It’s, it’s obviously a super important market. So putting up five cars or 10 cars to get people excited, part of the kind of the PR campaign, but getting to scale is, is gonna be a multi-year project.

Grayson Brulte: That, that’s where the operational expertise comes in, around logistics, and that’s something that we’re gonna continue to talk about here in autonomy markets. And when we were in Austin, we also made another discovery. I know we get a lot of pushback on this, but we were able to verify that the vehicles in Austin are owned by Waymo, LLC. Let, let’s roll that video.

Grayson Brulte & Walter Piecyk (GoPro): Grayson, what’s in that Ziploc that’s in the, uh, right above your head there? Yeah, right there. Should Sherlock Grayson come out to play? Check out, see what’s in there? What’s in med zip lock? The insurance liability cards. Oh, interesting. So who is listed as the liable party in the insurance card? Who’s insured? Limo. LLC. So the limo. So we’ve had some debate recently about who owns water and who takes a liability. Oh, if Avomo owns it, Uber owns it. But obviously if the insurance is on Waymo, then. But this vehicle that we are traveling in on Uber is owned by Waymo, LLC. Not, not Avomo. Not Avomo Not Uber. Not Uber. Waymo. Waymo. Uh, well, there you have it. The things you learn when you play detective.

Grayson Brulte: There you have it. Waymo owns the asset. It’s there. You saw it in the video, and to the listeners and viewers in the community, thanks for the feedback that you got. But clearly the video shows that Waymo is indeed owning the assets. Is this a trend that’s gonna continue? Walter Piecyk,

Walter Piecyk: I mean, just to defend some of our listeners here, you know, they are definitely on the title, but that was clearly seen in in that video clip. But the question then is like, where does the financial ownership li lie? I mean, I’m sure that they’ve kind of. Off, lay that to someone else. And when you, I guess if you speculate, if you look at the Uber relationship is a, is Uber effectively financing it and paying for that car based on, you know, how those deals are structured, which no one knows. No one knows how those deals are structured, but it’s, it’s clear that that could be a major incentive for why Waymo would partner with Uber in a market if they’re effectively helping to finance that, even if the title ownership in fact just stays with Waymo. Um, and then ultimately, as we’ve said many times before, that we think that there will be a market that will develop with, um, for this, with third parties, whether it’s the service and fleet owners, or more likely private equity as the return on these goes up. Now, here’s the issue. What happens when the price of that car goes down and Waymo doesn’t need to finance it as much? Like in one way that makes it more attractive. For Uber to be that partner. ’cause it’s a lower cost, but in another way it reduces maybe the value that Uber brings to the table with Waymo. ’cause you know, obviously everyone thinks that, you know, Uber brings this demand. I’m a little skeptical in the long term whether that has value. There’s obviously the financial relationship, which is, you know, tied into the demand, I think somewhat. And then there’s also just kind of this, this service functionality, which, you know, Uber has elected to. To outsource. In many cases, they own minority stakes, but this is not them providing these, these service locations. These are partners that they have.

Grayson Brulte: It’s a slippery slope here at, at the end of the day, who really needs who? 

Walter Piecyk: We’ll, we’ll see. It’s, and it’s, it’s an exciting market. Obviously Uber is gonna do what they do. You know, as Dara has talked about, these are short term relationships. If I were them, maybe I do longer term relationships with Waymo. If I was Uber, maybe I would, you know, take ownership of some of these, you know, real estate locations, these places where they have power, where they have service. ’cause then you are maintaining some additional value to Waymo over the longer term. So there’s certain things I might do differently. And, and look, Uber’s obviously willing to throw around cash. We’ll talk later about, you know, their, their latest investment in, in technology, which in this case was with Nuro, but. I don’t know. It’ll be, there’s a many different paths that this can take. Um, so we’ll continue to watch it and look for the, for the, for the tea leaves. I will say this though, like initial deals aren’t necessarily, you know, determined of what’s gonna happen in the future. Meaning that, like if Uber and Waymo announce a market together, that’s positive for sure for Uber. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that at some point Waymo doesn’t find a way to not use Uber. And conversely. It also doesn’t mean that Uber is screwed because like Uber might ultimately be the buyer of that Waymo network of cars. ’cause if Waymo ultimately just wants to license to privately owned cars, then they, they’re gonna, they, they might wanna offload that network to somewhere else. And then the third leg of this, Grayson, I know as some people are concerned, like, well, what if Waymo licenses the technology to all these OEMs and require it to be on the Waymo One network? Let me be very clear about this. Under any administration, I just don’t think that would fly because they would then be using their monopoly dollars from Google search to again, drive a, you know, what could be a monopoly business in autonomy. So I highly doubt that Waymo can do that fourth path, which might be, you know, the worst for Uber. So that’s, you know, you know, theoretically a positive in that case for Uber.

First Impressions: A Driver-Out Ride with Avride

Grayson Brulte: We weren’t just in Austin, visiting Depots, riding in Tesla, Robax riding in Waymo’s. We were there to explore and to learn new technology. A company that we met with Avride, we went for a ride, completely driver-out around Austin, and let’s roll the video of that ride as we discussed it.

Walter Piecyk: before we talk about Avride, let’s just say outright, as you’re seeing now, we are in a car. Without a driver in it. And by the way, for Tesla, I think do what Avride does and take off the, uh, the headrest so we can get a better sense of what’s going out the front of the window. , They have the attendant in the passenger seat, which apparently that, that they’ve done for a while. What was your impression of the ride itself? The first, first time, I assume for you in an Avride or.

Grayson Brulte: First time in a Navy ride, I found it very smooth and I found the Ionic five a very comfortable vehicle as well.

Walter Piecyk: Definitely IF five and, and I think we need to spend more time on this in future the OEMs that are, you know, kind of at the forefront in partnering. ’cause as our listeners know, a Hyundai with I IQ five is also partnering with Waymo with an integrated vehicle. At least that’s what they showed at CES. We’ll see what the final product look like. Um, but yeah, I think overall a comfortable ride now. I think, you know, as I’ll say later, I, we don’t know if we were on certain track that was highly optimized or things like that. We, both of us have done many, many, um, autonomy rides now. So until we get to the point where we, we can pick locations you won’t know for sure in all different scenarios. Um, like we had a similar thing with MA Mobility that I thought was, was a pretty good ride in their, in their demo. But I think overall, certainly I was shocked that there was yet another company out there. That was seemingly this far along in the development of autonomy.

Grayson Brulte: The vehicle performed at an extremely high level. The technology is getting there and, and you and I were able to, no pun intended, go under the hood. We’re able to see how they’re building it. We got a complete walkthrough of how they’re working with Hyundai to build it. Interesting fact that we learn Walter Piecyk, these vehicles can be built at the meta plant just outside Savannah, Georgia. That is the same plant that Hyundai has. That’s building the Waymo vehicles. That’s a very interesting plant for us to watch in the future.

Walter Piecyk: It was also great to see kind of, it all kind of undone, where the electronics go, where the compute goes, how the integration actually works with a company like Hyundai as opposed to like a main mobility where they have this relationship with, with Toyota. But a lot of that compute is in the passenger seat, right? In this case, you can ride in the passenger seat because A, it’s a, it’s a av, right? So there’s just a lot more room in the front, but we see how they pack. All of the different sensors and compute throughout the car. So it was, you know, our thanks are are go out to, to Avride to get kind of pull back the curtain and, and show us, um, how, how this all kind of comes together.

Grayson Brulte: And you’re right, and thank you to the Avride team. They’re fully transparent with us, which was, which was eye-opening and very, very thankful for that. One of the neatest things I took away from the compute wall when they opened the hood of the trunk. All the compute was in there. That was interesting how they’re optimizing the space of the vehicle. And then in the, in the trunk, it’s obviously hidden as well. And I said, oh, well you passed the golf club test. I could put golf clubs in there. They did a lot of things really, really right. From an engineering perspective, a really great engineering team.

Walter Piecyk: I mean. Just to be clear, it wasn’t in the trunk, it was in like the sub trunk, you know, where I think most people would think that the spare tire should go. So to your point, there was plenty of room in the trunk for additional baggage. But you know, we’ve talked about the ride. Some of our listeners might be like, who the hell is Avride ride? So can you give us a little history about this company and what you know about them and what we learned on this trip? 

Grayson Brulte: So a Avride was originally part of Yandex. Yandex is the Ru Russian version of Google. They had a search engine before Russia’s war with Ukraine. The company was spun out and is now controlled by a company called Nebulus Group, which is an AI infrastructure holding company. Based in Amsterdam. Avride is a subsidiary of that with their headquarters in Austin. So the it, it is a, if you wanna say it’s a US company now.

Walter Piecyk: So Nevius is little. It’s not was, it wasn’t like a separate company. It might have been a shell actually. I don’t even know. But it’s basically, it is the assets, there were all Yandex assets. You just had some assets that stayed, um, in Russia and others that were effectively dropped into. This nebulous group. Um, and I think, you know, hopefully people know them because they already have a partnership with Uber. Uber, and I think what we learned on this trip was that, , the first avs are gonna be entering Uber’s network later this year in Dallas again with these Hyundai Ionic five. So, I mean, is it possible that Avride gets Hyundais on the road before Waymo does? Grayson.

Grayson Brulte: Yes, it’s, it’s gonna happen. Yes. And we, we will be there in Dallas later this year to ride in the Avride vehicles there. Yes. WA Avride will have the Iqonic Fives in commercial service on the Uber network before Waymo has the Ionic fives in commercial service on the Waymo network or perhaps the Uber network. So yes, they will.

Walter Piecyk: So it’s another, it’s another example of another company that Uber is partnering with to continue to try and. Fragment this market and, and place additional bets like they did with Nuro, which we’ll get to next. You know, so there’s not this reliance on Waymo and this risk that clearly, Tesla provi, you know, creates, you know, through their progress with their, with their own, um, ride share business. So, you know, that’s, that’s pretty exciting. And like I said, we’ve been in it, we felt it, it feels good. And we can’t wait to get back in and actually pay and maybe not have that, that attendant that’s in there today, with Avride.

Grayson Brulte: I would say to the listeners and viewers, keep your eye on Avride. ’cause what we experienced, the, the, the tech is real, the engineering chops are there and they’re gonna really grow that business. It’s not just the Roboto taxi business that they’re building. They’re also building a sidewalk delivery business that we experienced in Austin. We’re gonna talk about it. Let’s roll a video as we talk about it. These bots were impressive. We got to see how they’re manufactured. We get to see how they’re built. We got to see them in person. And it’s not just three or four bots at the Ohio State, when class is in, they’re delivering 1200 deliveries a day. That’s impressive. And so what happens with us? Well, we gotta ask questions. Do you deliver in the rain? Yes. Do you deliver in the snow? Yes. No problem. What did you think? We saw those bots out there in Austin in 107 degree heat. I’ll have, I’ll add.

Walter Piecyk: And by the way, can you make two deliveries? Also, yes, it’s been designed for that and yeah, the, the construction of it, I think I was very impressed and it was very thoughtful. Um, it was a lot lower cost than I expected it to be, given that it is truly autonomous, right? Not someone who’s just not driving this thing. To your point, the Ohio State implementation, um, is scale. You can see that it, it, you know what the video you’re watching now, it traverses quite well and. And by the way, hats off to you because you’ve been all over this space on road to autonomy, having the CEO of Serve, having the CEO of Coco, this is a very interesting market in terms of, again, lowering cost on deliveries for, for food. And I think these, by the way, in terms of Instacart, this is not just Uber Eats Instacart pay attention because these bots are definitely big enough to to, you know, to deliver groceries that can get you to your average grocery side, 120 bucks that you’re looking for. Her.

Grayson Brulte: And they’re reliable at the end of the day. And this market, and you’re right, it is scaling, there’s partnerships with Avride has with Uber Eats. They also have partnerships with GrubHub and in Japan with Rakuten. They have a, a partnership there. It’s a very growing business room. They’re in Austin, Dallas, Jersey City, Tokyo, and the Ohio State. So the market is. It continuing to grow and I gotta say it performed very, very well crossing the road, fully autonomous. And I’ll never forget it, when the Uber Eats delivery went to the gentleman, oh my lunch is here. He was happy to see his robots.

Walter Piecyk: I bet he was. Yeah, it was great and it’s maybe you need to have a sub podcast now rather than the road to autonomy. It’s the sidewalk to autonomy.

Grayson Brulte: You never know. Keep tuning into The Road to Autonomy because we will continue to cover the side walk bots.

Breaking Down the Nuro, Lucid, and Uber Partnership

Walter Piecyk: Walter Piecyk, there’s never a sleepy week in autonomy. We can’t pull a rip van Winkle. Go to sleep, wake up and wow. They’re everywhere. Big news this week, Nuro got their first licensing deal. Congratulations, team Nuro on that. Not only did they get a licensing deal, they also got, they’re gonna deploy on the Uber network, the licensing deal. This one, I was like, wow, where’d this come from? Lucid Nuro Cut a licensing deal with Lucid and they’re gonna run exclusively on a six year period on the Uber network for the Lucid Gravity vehicle. What do you think of this deal? 

Walter Piecyk: First of all, I mean we’ve talked about this over the, over the course of these episodes on autonomy markets, and I’m sure with you having interviewed management, , from Nuro and both of us having visited the company and spent time with them, so we’re not. We’re certainly not surprised that they’re able to get these OEM relationships. We talked about the positive pivot that they made kind of away from purpose-driven vehicles. You know, they were kind of in this market that we just talked about, that Avride on the food delivery side of things and move towards this licensing deal with OEMs. And when you have this much of a vote of confidence from Uber primarily, and with Lucid, you know, that’s clearly a positive. I think, you know. We had hoped for larger, a larger OEM or like a Ford or something like that to show up. You can’t, you know, you can bring the horse to water, but you can’t force them to drink. And I think it’s the OEMs make these decisions at their own peril because if Lucid and Nuro and Uber are successful in 2026 and these guys are gonna be driver out in 2026 with Uber. You know, Nuro can only, you know, deal with a certain number of OEMs at a time Wayve. Same issue, certain number of OEMs at a time. I know from an investor standpoint, you’re like, oh yeah, we’re gonna do 10 different OEM deals. I get it. But like it takes a lot of integration and a lot of time there will be a select few that partner early enough that as this business scales, that it’ll be important to have those relationships for the OEM. So. Congrats to Lucid for having the forethought to, to lock this down and now some additional money I think, you know, to, to get it done.

Grayson Brulte: And there’s a common denominator here, Walter Piecyk on the Lucid side and the Uber side, the PIF, the the Saudi Investment Fund, they’re both in Lucid. They’re both in Uber. Perhaps maybe that had something to do with it. I don’t know. I’m purely speculating on there, but they’re both large shareholders in both companies. The thing that we thought about and we talked about this last week, lucid is a luxury product. It is a beautifully vehicle. It is incredibly well engineered. Could this perhaps go on the Uber comfort tier or higher tiers of Uber just because the quality of the Lucid product.

Walter Piecyk: I mean, sure. But as, as we’ve talked about before, we think all autonomy cars need to be on the comfort tier and higher. And the counterargument too. This is a lovely car. Is ’cause that’s kind of a euphemism for it. It’s also an expensive car. So when you think about Rideshares utility and you’re talking about a car that effectively lists for 80,000 as opposed to, you know, the Hyundai that Waymo is, is going to be using going forward, I think to a certain extent as well as Avride, it’s like 40, 45,000. I mean, I think at the end of the day, like these early car things are more about proving out models and I think what Nuro would also argue. Is that their sensor stack is gonna be dramatically lower than the types of numbers that we’ve seen out of Waymo, and you can see it physically based on the type of sensors that they have and how many that they have. By the way, Waymo I think, is on the way to reducing sensors as you see more and more of their cars hit the road when that Hyundai hits the road, in my view, that will have fewer sensors than are on the Jaguar today. And with integration and building to the production line. It drives those costs down, but you know, it, you can’t go without saying that it’s, it is an expensive car in order to partner with right out of the gate.

Grayson Brulte: The sensor aspect, yes, the sensors are gonna get smaller, gonna get less complex because on the backside, the maintenance to, to fix and repair complex sensors is very expensive. And I wanna dial into a little bit here on the Lucid Nuro thing, because in the SEC filing entitled vehicle production agreement, it clearly states that the lucid is going to integrate on the factory line the Nuro hardware that’s fast. And these vehicles are coming off the factory line, fully integrated. That’s really, really impressive. This is not a aftermarket. This is a full-blown factory built lucid Nuro vehicle.

Walter Piecyk: That’s great. And like I said, not only is it a lighter stack, but to integrate it, into the production line, obviously it enables them to drive out additional costs and hopefully. Reduce maintenance. I think that’s a very important point that you brought up, Grayson, and you have to think of cost in terms of total cost of ownership. You can have a less expensive car, but if it’s always in the shop getting, you know, tuned up, then maybe it’s not as expensive. In this case, maybe it’s the opposite, right? Waymo is a very expensive car with a very expensive and lots of sensors and they need 80,000 square feet, you know, to basically continue to tune up these sensors and fix them. At the end of the day, five, 10 years from now, or 10 years from now, when autonomous cars represent, in our view, more than a third of overall vehicles being manufactured in the US or purchased in the us, these sensors, there’s gonna be fewer sensors. [00:29:00] They’re, they’re gonna build greater reliability and, and getting it built in on the line like Nuro is doing right outta the gate with Lucid is that’s the way to get it done.

Grayson Brulte: It’s the way to get it done to, to our friends at Lucid that, listen, Walter Piecyk and I would love to come to a plant tour and perhaps do a podcast live at the Lucid Plant in Arizona. Seeing this come to fruition because it’s something truly special. What you’ve built here. Well, you know, you’re calling me Detective Sherlock Grayson. So I, I’m, you know me, I’m constantly reading the tea leaves and in, in the official press release from Uber announcing this deal, I, I noticed the line, and I’m gonna read this line to you here word for word and quote. Uber aims to deploy 20,000 or more lucid vehicles equipped with the Nuro driver. Over six years, the vehicles will be owned and operated by Uber or its third party fleet partners and made available to riders exclusively via the Uber platform. Walter Piecyk, a lot of people must be listening to autonomy markets, because you called it, sir, you were correct, Uber is going to own assets.

Walter Piecyk: I mean, I don’t think enough people listen to Autonomy Markets, ’cause I constantly get pushback of like, oh, no, no, no. Uber’s not gonna own, you know, gonna own the cars. And, and again, long term, that may be the case or maybe it won’t. Again, if you’re an Uber investor, are you really gonna be upset if. Three or four years from now after Waymo builds up this fabulous fleet that Uber would take ownership of it and then, you know, come in with some financial partnership. Is that really a negative? ’cause I would think that that’s probably, you know, in many ways, a, a, a positive, you know, based on where the technology might be. And by the way, I don’t think this is gonna be the last of it. I think, you know, Wayve has already been announced as a partner with Uber in, you know, the UK and whatever markets that they’re gonna launch. They didn’t put it in the press release, but I suspect that as you see more details there, Uber will own cars that have a Wayve driver in it with whatever OEM partners that, that they, that they have. Same thing with main mobility. This is the playbook. So if you’re an investor or get prepared for Uber to use, its its balance sheet. And by the way, they should, because this is the most important thing for them over the next 10 years, the, the vast majority of miles driven on a ride sharing network. Are gonna be autonomous in 10 years. So you have to make sure that, you know, you have a play in whoever ends up winning or losing. I also, by the way, we’ve got some feedback. Oh, you guys aren’t engineers, whatever. Like, yeah, I’m not engineers, but I’ve talked to the best engineers and we’re trying to evaluate this technology and you know what the best engineers tell us, go out and get in the cars and try it. That is the best thing you do. We’re not gonna sit there and look at code and evaluate ai and I challenge anyone that claims that they think that they can. Get in the cars, talk to the, talk to the engineers, talk to the manufacturers, and talk to the partners like Uber to try and get a sense of who’s gonna win. Even then, you’re not assured just where someone is today, that that company will be the winner or loser five years or 10. 10, you know, five or 10 years from now. That’s why we gotta go out, get out in the market, get in these cars. We were in a. Tesla last week and we were in the Avride, and we’ll continue to get in more and more of these cars as they continue to progress.

Grayson Brulte: We’re gonna get out there and we’re going to do the field work. And you, and you and I emphasize what Walter Piecyk said. We’re not engineers we’re, and me personally, I’m a connect the dot person. If you wanna call me, connect the.engineer, connect the dots. ’cause we’re out there constantly learning. ’cause you have to talk to multiple people to get. Different opinions, and Walter Piecyk and I are gonna continue to dive into all aspects of autonomy, not just the vehicle, but the infrastructure that supports the financing elements that finance this. So. I agree with you. Uber’s gonna own it on their balance sheet. How much do you see them potentially offloading this to move’s balance sheet, which Bloomberg is reporting that they’re raising 1.2 billion for the the Waymo fleet in Miami. Is that gonna be a thing where we will see Uber increase their stake in move, or perhaps fund some debt into them and then some of these vehicles, perhaps the lucid vehicles will be owned on moves balance sheet? 

Walter Piecyk: I mean, how many cars can you really buy for a billion dollars if you also need funds for operations? I mean, again, I don’t know how that market is gonna evolve. I have good ideas. And I think as the price of the, the total cost of ownership, meaning the car cost as well as the sensor stack, and as well as the maintenance, the ongoing maintenance of these things exists. There’s gonna be a business model. When you look at what humans and the associated insurance with humans represent, there is a business model for someone to make money on the asset as well as the service, the technology, uh, in the platform and. It’s not gonna take a, you know, from some of the numbers we’ve already seen that are, that are on the roadmap from a lot of these companies at, at a number that’s well below where Waymo is today. But again, like, just because Waymo’s at a certain number today doesn’t mean they can’t get there, um, in a couple years. So the money will will flow there. Uh, Grayson, and I’m not sure who’s it gonna be. What I’m, what I’m curious about though, Grayson is, you know, is Uber’s decision to not outright own. , Logistics and, and power. I mean, we talked about, , I think in the pa you know, in the, in the earlier segment about the challenges of getting power and, and depots. If Uber relies on third parties, that it owns minority stakes in, like, isn’t there a tremendous value associated with that part of this ecosystem? 

Grayson Brulte: There is, and I can’t stop thinking about this ever since our, our trip is, why does an Uber form a division called Uber Logistics that manages the real estate, manages the operations, secures the energy contracts, does all the service, why don’t they build that up? Because to me, if you’re gonna outsource the partners. Those partners could turn their back on you one day and say, ity, ba bye bye. Why not bring it in house? And as we learned and, and we met with my friend, Dean Foreman, the Chief Economist for Texas Oil and Gas, we learned that the energy demands for these vehicles are, are astronomical. And there’s, and they, certain times, they’re having challenges getting the energy. So why not bring that all in house and secure these contracts? 

Walter Piecyk: first of all, I’m happy that we got our first BBD Bobi Boop in this week’s podcast from Grayson. I always look forward to those. Um, the answer, Grayson, is a logistics business is considered, low margin, but stop the tape because guess what? A ride share business is a low margin business. Like when you think of what a customer pays versus what hits the margin at the end, that’s already a low margin business, but I know it doesn’t, it doesn’t seem sexy and glamorous to be in this logistics business. And the reason to do it is potentially that strategic value that you have in the relationship with Waymo or however this, this, you can always sell it in the future. And look, maybe a lot of these minority contracts that they have. Give them a right of first refusal to own these things. We don’t know. We don’t see these contracts, so it’s possible that they’ve, they’ve protected themselves, but it’s increasingly clear to us that that is gonna be a very important part of the ecosystem.

Grayson Brulte: It’s gonna be a very important part of the ecosystem. Yeah, it could be small margin, but you have a publicly traded salvage company as a $50 billion market cap, and that has very small margins. So it, it could be there and then Uber could tell the market, well, Lyft has Flex Drive. This Uber Logistics is our version of Flex Drive, essentially, but with more bells and whistles.

Walter Piecyk: I don’t think Uber needs to respond to Lyft’s Flex Drive. Uber’s the dominant player in the market. Lyfts, Lyfts around the hoop in the US maybe.

Grayson Brulte: Lyft has challenges. Well, well, Lyft has challenges. Uber’s continuing to grow and, and Tesla as, as when we came back, they put up a, what’s called a drawing is what I’ll say, and yes, it is true that it looks like a certain type of object, which we are a children’s program here, so I will not describe it in depth. They expanded the Austin ODD to 42 square miles. To me, that’s a sign of confidence that Tesla is going all in to scale Robax and they’re comfortable where the current set of technology is. What do you think? 

Walter Piecyk: I think we’d love to pat our backs here on, on the autonomy market. [00:37:00] So, uh, we kind of knew this was happening obviously while we were in Austin. You know, we thought this was gonna happen and Elon actually tweeted that it’s gonna happen. So it’s good to see that it actually followed through. For those of you that said that Elon says stuff that doesn’t happen, here’s a case where it actually did, did happen. This is clearly gonna generate some more videos and I’ve already seen. The, the super positive people posting how great it is. And then those looking at it with a fine tooth comb me like, oh my God, how can you allow this car to be on this road when this little blurp happened? Even though there’s, you know, plenty of similar things with Waymo today, not five years ago today, that you could make the similar, similar challenges from. So, um, it’s good fun. I don’t think it requires us to run back to Austin quite so soon. Uh, Grayson, at least not yet, but, um. Can grasp the team. And just to be clear, , we had zero issues. I said this last week, um, we had zero issues with our car and I know what an issue is, meaning like I know when there’s a sudden hesitation as, as most people who own a Tesla can attest to who have been in a Tesla with FSD as it is. There was none of that. We also, there’s been subsequent questions since this launch about. Whether, you know, Tesla has added sensors to the car. Someone kind of asked us about that before we went and we carefully looked over that car up and down and all around. I could not see one additional sensor in the car. We were in the car, right? We were actually in the car looking around. We went outside the car before we actually got in and, and was looking below. I didn’t see anything. Does that mean I couldn’t have missed something? Sure, I could have, I could have possibly missed something, but like. To allege that there’s additional sensors in there that, that an existing y just can’t be flipped on and added to this network. I guess we’ll soon find out, you know, as they, you know, as they, you know, expand further in Austin.

Grayson Brulte: you’re right. We walked around. We didn’t see any additional sensors. It looked just like a new Model Y. And this week you took possession of a new model Y. How does it feel to have the new Model Y in your possession? 

Walter Piecyk: first of all, it’s great. It’s a, as I said before, the suspension is so much better than the existing y. It wasn’t autonomously delivered to my home, um, from the dealer. And in fact I wanted to actually do the press the button and drive me home, but it wasn’t, I think it only had like, I don’t know, like a single digit miles on the car, maybe 12. So it hadn’t been calibrated. So it said it wouldn’t do my full self-driving until it was calibrated. So this gets back to what we were saying before about it doesn’t need some fancy calibration. They’re literally sending these Teslas uncalibrated, and by the time I got home, the cameras had been calibrated. To do a full self-driving. So it was a great experience, Grayson, it still does not go up my driveway, even with the newest software, so hopefully I’m looking forward to the episode. I can come back on here and report that. Yes, the Tesla drove me all the way up my driveway as opposed to just to the front of my driveway.

Grayson Brulte: It’ll be the funny episode, Walter Piecyk’s Tesla driveway. Now, will you put a big T on your driveway when it does that? 

Walter Piecyk: I don’t have a circle thing, but this just kind of reminds me of last week with the hotel where it kept. Dropping us off, off on the sidewalk or like a block away, and then by the end of the trip there, it took us into the little circle. Take me into the little circle in my hotel or my house in, in this case.

Grayson Brulte: Tesla Walter Piecyk needs to get up his driveway and I’m Wal, I have a. Sneaking suspicion based on the way that FSD is advancing, that it’s just a matter of time before it goes up your driveway. And then hopefully that’s next week or the, the week after, unsure. But I’m very confident to say that it’s gonna happen at at some point for next week. What do we need to look for in the autonomy markets? ’cause boy, oh boy, we had a very big week this week. What do we need to look for next week? 

Walter Piecyk: I mean, the last two weeks have been exhausting between our time in, in, in, in Austin and then everything that went on this week. And then next week it really gets even worse for me earning season for the analyst and, and in this case put my telco hat back on Grayson. And I got a lot of Telco earnings in terms of our world, in the auto world of autonomy markets. We do have MobileEye reporting on Thursday, so we’ll, we’ll see what they have to say, but I’m, I’m not, I’m not, um, worried that the, this industry and its ecosystem won’t generate some more headlines for us to comment on next week.

Grayson Brulte: You know, it’s just a, it’s just a tweet away. The future is bright. Should autonomous, the future is partnerships, Walter Piecyk, until next week.

Key Autonomy Markets Episode Questions Answered