Transcript: Waymo’s Moove Away from Fleet Ownership, Ford Makes Wayve’s on LiDAR

Executive Summary

This episode of Autonomy Markets dives into a major strategic shift in the autonomous vehicle industry as Uber-backed Moove raises $1.2 billion to purchase Waymo vehicles, signaling Waymo’s move away from capital-intensive fleet ownership towards a licensing model. Grayson and Walt also dissect Ford CEO Jim Farley’s statement requiring licensed AV technology to have LiDAR, a position seemingly contradicted by a successful, mapless, LiDAR-less test of a Wayve-equipped Ford Mach-E in New York City. The discussion explores the future of ride-sharing, the complex web of Uber’s fleet management partnerships,

Key Topics & Timestamps

[00:00] Moove, backed by Uber, is raising $1.2 billion to buy Waymo vehicles

The episode begins with the major news that Moove, a company with investment from Uber, is raising $1.2 billion in debt to purchase Waymo vehicles for its network.

[01:00] Is Waymo shifting from owning its robotaxi fleet to a licensing model?

Grayson and Walt interpret Moove’s purchase as a clear sign that Waymo intends to move away from the capital-intensive business of owning and operating its own fleet, focusing instead on licensing its autonomous driving technology to partners.

[04:00] Two future scenarios: Will private AV ownership or ridesharing dominate?

A debate unfolds around two possible futures for mobility in 20 years. One scenario sees high private ownership of autonomous cars, which would likely decrease rideshare usage. The second scenario envisions rideshare becoming cheaper per mile than car ownership, leading to a dramatic increase in rideshare use and a decline in personal car ownership.

[12:00] The “plumbing” of autonomy: Clarifying the roles of fleet managers Avomo and Moove

Grayson and Walt clarify the confusion between two similarly named companies Uber has invested in: Avomo is a European-based fleet management company, while Moove.io owns and finances vehicles.

[18:00] Why Uber may own autonomous vehicles out of necessity to ensure market fragmentation

Walt argues that Uber doesn’t necessarily want to own fleets, but does so out of necessity. This strategy helps ensure market fragmentation and prevents any single AV provider, like Waymo or Tesla, from gaining too much power.

[20:00] Ford CEO Jim Farley says the company will only license AV tech that includes LiDAR

Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, stated that the company would only license autonomous technology that includes LiDAR. The hosts speculate this is not a technical requirement but a “passive aggressive slam” against Tesla, which does not use LiDAR.

[25:00] A Wayve-powered Ford Mach-E successfully drives autonomously in New York without LiDAR or maps

The same week as Farley’s comments, a Wayve vehicle, specifically a Ford Mach-E was shown driving autonomously in New York City completely mapless and without using LiDAR.

[28:00] The AI preemption clause fails in the Senate, impacting the path to a federal AV framework

A proposed AI preemption clause, which could have created a federal framework for autonomous vehicles, was defeated in the Senate by a 99-to-1 vote. This setback was attributed more to general “AI fear” than to specific opposition to autonomous vehicles.

Watch the Full Episode of Autonomy Markets

Full Episode Transcript

Grayson Brulte: Walt, it’s officially been a week since Tesla launched Robotaxi in Austin. 

Well, that’s been a week. Elon got back on X and boy, oh boy, he was tweeting away about the big beautiful bill. Perhaps the Rift with Trump. It’s back again, but we’ll get to the big beautiful Bill later. First, let’s start with the big news of the week Moove, which is backed by Uber, is in the process of raising $1.2 billion in debt to do what? Buy Waymo vehicles and put ’em on the network. Is this another clear indicator that Waymo does not want to be in the Robo taxi business? 

Walter Piecyk: , yes. In fact, it is a sign, and I think it was interesting last week when we talked about how maybe an outcome is Waymo selling its robo fleet to Uber that we got such interesting feedback on on Reddit. I think people may be misunderstood. We’re not saying that Waymo’s getting out of autonomy, just that maybe they don’t wanna operate and have the capital intensity of their own robo fleet and focus on licensing to OEMs and becoming a Waymo driver. So to that end, if you have a deal now with a company, you know it’s one deal. It’s only a billion dollars in the grand scheme of things. But a company that’s willing to spend a billion dollars and you’re willing to have them kind of own that fleet. Yeah, I think that is a notable signpost. Um, as it relates to, you know, where is Waymo’s future? And this is something that we, in the industry, I think constantly debate like, what is the end, the end game for Waymo? Do they own their own fleet? Is it fully partnered or do they just kind of move towards enabling private ownership? 

Grayson Brulte: Do we look to the Miami launch for more potential clues since that will be a move market. 

Walter Piecyk: I mean it’s possible and, and I mean, I think the thing to look for is what is move gonna spend 1,000,000,002 on? Are they gonna spot buy these very expensive, you know, retrofitted fitted Jaguars or Zeekrs? it Hyundai? Or you know, because this is a deal, do they have. Private knowledge to maybe a new OEM relationship that Waymo has in the works. I would doubt that if your move or you’re the investors in move, that you’d really wanna spend 1,000,000,002 on a very expensive retrofitted car. You’d want a fully integrated car. 

Grayson Brulte: Yes. I don’t believe that’s gonna be the Zeekrs. I believe the Zeekrs at some point will be banned in America. It’s the biggest unforced error in the history of Waymo is gonna happen. But I did notice something I’m putting on my Detective Grayson hat here, or if you wanna call it my. My Sherlock Grayson hat here. Not Sherlock Holmes, but Sherlock Grayson here, and I was going through the move site. I noticed something for the first time partners listed Uber Waymo. Could every market go be going forward? Could it be a Moove Uber, Waymo market since it’s publicly listed for the first time ever? 

Walter Piecyk: first of all, we know that Moove has a relationship with Uber, right? That’s not, that’s not new. They, they have a, an equity stake in the company. And, you know, it’s obvious given Uber’s focus on moving forward, , in autonomy and, and that being a primary interest for good reason, um, that Waymo would be one of the ones that they’d want to connect in there. So, um, you know, I, it’s, it’s, I think that’s just a, an update. I, I love how, how you know, your, your eagle eye, which has found many things over our many episodes of this podcast. Um, I wouldn’t read too much into that other than. I guess really just stating the o obvious, but this is a big move for Uber, um, or a huge positive, at least for Uber Grayson, in, in, in the fact that, you know, it is more indication of that Waymo might not want to just sit there and own their own robotaxi fleet, which would be a direct competitor to Uber. 

Grayson Brulte: they don’t want to own the fleet. We know that. We know that Waymo does not wanna own the fleet, does Moove, become the exclusive owner. And then if they do, does Waymo shut down the Waymo one app and perhaps merge it into Uber where Andrew McDonald confirmed to me on X, that a robo taxi tier is coming. Perhaps that could be an exclusive Waymo tier, and then Waymo’s gets that licensing fee that investors and Alphabet would like a lot more than that. Operating a. Capital intensive robo taxi business, 

Walter Piecyk: I mean, it is certainly possible, but it’s also. It possible that, you know, again, this is only 1,000,000,002 deal. You know, you’re gonna need tens of billions of dollars to fund the fleets required to really handle, , you know, a what Rideshare is trying to accomplish. I mean, it begs the question of like, where is the industry ultimately gonna be in 20 years? And this is something that we’ve been spending more time on in, in trying to determine, you know, kind of what the end game is, what, what role rideshare plays. So let me give you, and, and I run. A variety of scenarios in our model, and we continue to do it. But let me share with you two, two different models and get to your view. 20 years from now, if 25 in the United States, let’s just focus on the United States right now, if 25% of cars owned, privately owned are autonomous, meaning that the majority of people probably have at least one autonomous car and some additional, you know, human driven cars with good ADAS. Takes ’em to the airport and back, takes ’em to their morning commute, and then goes back for the rest of the family to use, picks up groceries for them or the evening meal. In, in that scenario, in that world, is rideshare in general gonna be higher or, or lower than the the type of usage we see today? Um, on existing, uh, ride share. 

Grayson Brulte: It’s really going to come down to are those vehicles put on network? Such as Uber. If they are put on networks such as Uber, it will be higher. If they are not put on a network such as Uber, it will be lower. 

Walter Piecyk: I don’t think the vast majority of people, I, you know, again, this is another layer of the model that that we have built in. I don’t think the vast majority of people that privately own their cars are going to put them into a network. I’m saying that you own a. You own it, right? So you’re now not fully utilizing it. Which brings us to scenario two, because if you’re not really fully utilizing it, even though again, it’s, it’s doing all these tasks for you, maybe reducing the number of cars you need to own. But option two is if now Uber owns a fleet or someone else owns a fleet, and now they’ve driven the cost down for a per mile, that’s lower than what it costs you to own a car. Then like, do you even bother owning any car and just shift to, you know, only using Rideshare, assuming that, that, I’m gonna give you the scenario ’cause this is 20 years from now, you have the vehicle of your choice. If you need a big car, small car, whatever it is that can get to your house in less than 10 minutes, take you on your route, whatever the distance is, and it costs less per mile than it will cost you 20 years from now from owning a car. In that scenario, does the consumer want to still own their car and have that control? Or do you have a massive mix shift in terms of the total miles driven to rideshare, whereas today, like one or 2%, can that shift to 15, 20, 30% of total miles driven? 

Grayson Brulte: In that scenario, ride share is gonna grow dramatically. Car ownership is dramatically gonna decrease. And I believe, and we’ve seen early data from Uber and Lyft on this, that you’ll see the rise of one car. Family ownership. I. If you have four people living in a household, instead of having two or three vehicles, you’re gonna see a shift towards one vehicle, and then the other miles of the needle will be augmented with Rideshare. So there is still, in my opinion, there still is a lot of growth out there for Rideshare based on that scenario. 

Walter Piecyk: it’s something I debate. I think what I’m gonna end up doing is have a couple of basic scenarios. There’s probably something in between, you own your autonomous car, but then you use Rideshare for the that extra third car that you weren’t gonna have. Um, so there’s different scenarios. We have some of the best listeners. I think in terms of technology, podcasts that are out there and have been great feedback. Even the very, Hey, I love Tesla, or I love Waymo feedback is certainly useful. Give us your feedback and, and where 20 years from now where you think there is some basics. Like there’s stuff that like a hundred percent of cars owned are not gonna be autonomous 20 years from now. I mean, it just, the math doesn’t work in terms of cars sold and replacement cycles and things like that. But certainly interested in, in everyone’s views, , for feedback on kind of the scenario that you see in 20 years. And again, assuming you can own a, a privately or own your own autonomous car, whether it’s from Waymo, Tesla, or, or the variety of other technology companies that are continuing to build this technology. 

Grayson Brulte: Lemme throw another scenario out at you if, if scenario two happens. When do you see the rise of personal fleet ownership where perhaps somebody forms an LLC with a couple buddies and they put 20 or 30 avs out there on the network. Where do you see that coming into the scenarios? 

Walter Piecyk: I mean, who ends up owning different components of this, um, ecosystem? You know, there’s a, there’s any, there’s a number of different ways that that can play out. I think at the end of the day, one of the fundamental things I’m trying to, trying to get to is I. How important is that private ownership of a car, , to that person relative to using Rideshare? So on the rideshare side of it, in terms of ownership, maintenance. Insurance, all of those things, we’ll have assumptions for those. I have market share beliefs on those. Those will hash themselves out. We can talk offline at length, uh, on, on kind of our views there. Uh, but I think there’s, you have to have some basic top line assumption in terms of how the market, , will evolve. Or at least say, Hey, there’s a 50% probability it is gonna, this is gonna happen, and 60% probability that’s gonna happen, or whatever the number is. 

Grayson Brulte: Even if you, you did on the vehicle and you didn’t wanna put it out on a public network, you could put it out on, say, a private family network where, okay, so the AV takes me to work and then the it goes, picks the kids up from school, takes the the wife to the beauty poller. That could happen on a private network, which goes back to a general thesis that we’ve talked a lot about on this podcast is the value of a platform. That gets interesting. Could, could we have a, quote unquote, a private Uber network for families that evolve? It’s not hard to take what they’ve already built and make and make a, a Salesforce, a private version of it. 

Walter Piecyk: So what, what you’re referring to then again, is, I know is the scenario two that I talked about where the cost of autonomy is very cheap. ’cause in scenario one, no, I mean you’re gonna have your car, it’s gonna do everything for you. Scenario two where the cost per mile is cheaper than your own ownership because of utilization, you know? Absolutely. And there’s gonna be people that are gonna want to contribute cars into the network ’cause they’ll be able to get a better car. Or, or all of those things. I think that that you mentioned, and it also speaks to the fact that if we’ve got like 2 million cars in the US, 1,000,008, whatever it is, and now I’m saying scenario two means you’re gonna go from 2% of total miles driven to 15% or 20% or whatever the number is that we have in our model. 2 million cars may not do it. It’s not gonna scale the same way that you have Uber today, because Uber is overscaled because of how their drivers work. Now you have autonomous cars that are going to, you know, work 20 hours a day, but it’s gonna be more than two. And then what is the CapEx associated with that? And what’s the return, you know, with return, like so, you know, these are all factors, but you have to again, start at the very top is like, what are consumers? Really gonna want one presented with these opportunities there. You know, there’s gonna be an argument out there where people are gonna say like, look, I just wanna own my own car. Right? So there’s this, this movie, the singles, I think it’s called the singles, where someone was pitching this trans transit system. I think I might even talk about this on a prior podcast. And he goes into the, to the local official and he is like, oh, you know this people mover system or this transit and he is all hyped up to sell this new way to reduce traffic in, I think it was probably la, maybe San Fran. And the, the politician’s response is people love their cars. So there are factors like that, that you have to, um, you know, consider the sports equipment in my, in my, the trunk of my car, that I never take out my basketball, that I is always in my passenger seat, in the car that I take to play hoops every, every Sunday morning. So, you know, we have to kind of think through what our probabilities of these diff di, you know, these distance scenarios when autonomy is. Ultimately be gonna be gonna represent the vast majority, , of Miles driven, whether from a personally owned car or uh, through rideshare. 

Grayson Brulte: They are, and no matter what scenario happens. You’re gonna still need plumbing, and that plumbing is fleet management. Which brings us to the fleet management, which you and I, I think we’re the only podcast out there. Talking about this in depth, and that you have two companies. You have Avomo, and Moove. There’s a lot of confusion in the market for who does what, who owns what. Could you break that down for us? 

Walter Piecyk: Grayson, even that question I think was, was confusing and, and even Uber’s relationships are. Are confusing because they have investments in two companies that are both called moove now. One has, I think, renamed itself, it’s called Avomo. They are European based. Uber has, I think about a 30% stake in this thing. And they do fleet management and uh, it’s a Avomo who they’re partnering with. Austin. But what’s odd about this is, in the case of of Avomo and I’ll get to Moove later, this is not the move that did the billion two deal. Avomo, they’re European, you know, it’s like they’re in the witness protection program in the United States. We can’t find anybody. Obviously they’re, they’re, they have the depot and the fleet in Austin, but I don’t know who’s running it. You’re picking a European operator to try and develop operations in the us. I think on the, on the motivation that, oh, let’s keep that market fragmented. Let’s have, you know, fleet management companies that are different in every market because then that maintains the power with us. I think that’s gonna present problems for Uber and Waymo both. Um, and I think there there to a certain extent, being Pennywise and pound foolish in order to protect, you know, not having a counterparty that has too much negotiating power. You’re gonna need, you know, someone that’s willing to get a return on capital and, and have enough scale and have the capabilities to get these, um, to get these depots up. And if you don’t, again, there’s gonna be other, I think, you know, ride share companies or, you know, uh, robo taxi fleets that can come up as as competitors. So before I move on to Moove of Africa, which is the second relationship. Have you had any success in finding out what the current status is? Of? Is of of Avomo, formerly called Move Cars in, in the US because they’re supposed to be in Austin and then I think Atlanta. 

Grayson Brulte: Crickets, crickets. Crickets. I even went as far as trying to invite somebody from Avomo on The Road to Autonomy podcast to learn and we go, crickets, crickets, crickets. I don’t know what’s there. You go through LinkedIn. Was there six people there? Maybe there’s, it’s, it’s, I don’t know how you’re gonna run this massive depot business with six people unless it’s full of robots. I don’t know. 

Walter Piecyk: these are important questions if you, if you wanna believe in, in which platform can succeed. You can’t just like sign a deal with someone and then like there’s no effectively public credibility to the, this company’s ability to execute. But we’re gonna do more work and we’ll obviously report back here. We got some good leads. The other move that Uber has, which is the one that did the billion two, all they do is not all they do, but they own and finance vehicles. So they’re a car ownership, right? Avomo doesn’t own cars. Moove io. They own cars. So I think that one is completely, it’s a completely different thing. They also, this company moove io, this is a much lower equity stake for Uber. I think it’s about 10% ish. They have other partners like Globo and Cindy, whatever other, there’s a multi-platform fleet support that goes beyond Uber. So I, I think it’s less core, but I’ve probably. In a certain way, maybe more interesting in terms of the, the relationship that Waymo can develop with Uber, just in terms of structure. ’cause given what we know about Uber and their desire for fragmentation, I don’t think they’re gonna give, move probably more than this billion, you know, the billion that they have on, on in this contract. But it could be wrong. 

Grayson Brulte: Okay, so that, so Uber, this seems to me for Uber, this is clearly a way for them to own the fleet without owning the, the, the fleet and, and owning it on their balance sheet. So they make an investment in Move io, they can o own the fleet. And on the backside of that, what happens when the, the real money comes in, the Blackstones, the, the KKRs, the Apollos. And they set up an autonomous vehicle REIT which you’ve talked about, what happens to move them when real money comes in. 

Walter Piecyk: Well, I mean, it’s possible that they’re, they’re a benefactor ’cause they get rolled up. Right? You have. ’cause there is some first to market benefit of having a depot that is close to where the demand is. So, and there’s a lot of companies out there that are doing that. And Uber’s been been, you know, sprinkling checks around the country. To enable that. So maybe there ends up being a roll up and they, and they benefit from, from selling out. And by the way, in the near term, because it takes time and Uber’s doing like effectively like seed checks, I think Uber will own, you know, a decent number of autonomous cars. I mean, we’ll see when we get more details on the Uber Wayve relationship wave being the company in London who has a technology with an unannounced OEM. Like, I’m guessing Uber’s gonna own those cars. Nuro is still yet to announce their deal with whoever the OEM is and whoever the rideshare partner is. My guess is that the structure of that deal is Uber will own those cars. But to your point that over the longer term, you know, there there’ll be financial, uh, partners or companies like, like Moove around the world, that that will play that role. 

Grayson Brulte: Why do you think Uber wants to own the fleet? What does it give it inherited advantages to it. Why do you think they wanna own the fleet? 

Walter Piecyk: I don’t think they want, they want to own the fleet. I just think that they need fragmentation. There’s obviously some concern where the, uh, Waymo relationship will end up, as we’ve talked about at length, there’s some concern about where Tesla. Will proceed forward. We know that Tesla, or we have a strong belief that Tesla does not want to part partner with Uber and frankly any other OEMs regardless of what they say about their ability to license. So there’s, and and you know, again, getting back to my industry model, you look at this thing and you make reasonable assumptions and it’s gonna be a very notable percentage of miles on rideshare that will be autonomous. You know, 10 years from now, notable. So then the question is like, you need to make, make sure that you are incentivizing all of this stuff to happen and that you’re in that central role. So I think they own it almost out of necessity, not because they necessarily have an interest. Someone’s gotta step forward, right. And push it. And they, they’ve been the perfect company to do so. 

Grayson Brulte: Are investors in the public market prepared for Uber to start owning assets. 

Walter Piecyk: That’s a good question. I mean, I think, you know, they’ve made investments when they started making investments, I think six months ago, I was concerned that maybe there would be negative investor, uh, reaction to that. And there has not been. Um, so I think if that, and that, that kind of announce, like let’s say nor announces a deal and Uber’s in it for X dollars or same thing with Wayve. , I think it’s more likely to be perceived as positively that Dara is like positioning the company for long-term success than, than negatively. I think that the overhang on why Uber stock does not trade relative to where its growth rate is, is just concern about, you know, autonomy in the future. Not necessarily, you know, the fact that they’re gonna own some cars in the near term. We do run across investors like, oh, they don’t own anything. And even on Reddit. They’re not gonna own it. They don’t want to own anything. Okay? For those people, you’re gonna be surprised ’cause Uber will own autonomous cars and not just a few. I mean, they’re gonna own a notable amount of autonomous cars in the near term. 

Grayson Brulte: And you heard it here on at Autonomy Markets first ’cause Walt called it and I believe he called it correctly. Well, Uber’s positioning themselves, Walt, for long-term success in Detroit. Ford doesn’t know if they’re a neutral forward or reverse. They can’t seem to make up their minds in anything they want. They shut down Argo ai. And now Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford’s out there saying, we’re gonna license. Well, that he’s sitting the obvious, but there’s a catch. He said It must have lidar. How is Ford making these demands when they haven’t been able to really produce anything in autonomy successfully? 

Walter Piecyk: I can only guess that that statement was like a passive aggressive slam. On Tesla, because Tesla said like, oh yeah, we’ll license it. Here’s the book, and go do it. And they may have even had preliminary discussions or looked at it and realize that, you know, it’s not like Tesla’s gonna be working closely with them to help them implement. They have to go and figure it out on their own. So I think it’s just a shot. At Tesla because Tesla represents an existential threat to, to Ford and the rest of of the OEMs. Again, just model this out. Look at percentage of cars that are gonna be autonomous. Look at the market share of the OEMs. Think about, again, 10, 20 years from now, like how many cars do you really need to own? If autonomy is, is providing you, you know, with a lot of these things that I talked about before, taking to the airport, taking to the train station, picking up your food, whatever. I mean, it’s the existential threat. So I think it’s, it’s just kind of almost bravado like, oh, you have to have lidar. 

Grayson Brulte: You don’t have to have lidar. It’s triggered. Some people, it’s been proven Wayve doesn’t use lidar. Tesla doesn’t use lidar. There’s other models that are coming that don’t use lidar. You don’t need LIDAR anymore. I’m not going as far as saying it’s a crutch. I’m saying you can make a car drive safely without lidar. And the interesting thing, while putting on my sleuth hat here, maybe we should get me a Sherlock Holmes outfit. I could wear here. On the show, it’d be kind of cool. Actually. I’ll get a monogram with the gb. See, it’s how we do things is, well, well do we see potentially Ford rebooting the original talk from 20 15 20 16 with Google that we’re under then CEO Mark Fields, because I asked that if they do that gives Waymo a clear off ramp to dump the Chinese made Zeekr and have an American made Ford product. 

Walter Piecyk: I mean, it’s still early days, right? Waymo itself had like that press release with Toyota that was like a press release effectively about nothing. We haven’t seen any. Follow through yet. So even though Detroit moves slowly in terms of integration of technology into their cars, there’s, there is still time, but like everything, things happen slow and then they happen very fast. And I think just culturally, the bravado that I think it seems like it comes out of, out of Ford seems odd again, on, on the, on the lidar. Like, I don’t know whether you need lidar or not, but certainly to your point, there are solutions that exclude it. And just to be clear. It’s not about price, right? The, the price of a lidar, especially if you’re looking for long range on highways, is just not that expensive. When you talk to Tesla, and we have talked to Tesla on this specific issue, the answer is it can be zero. It’s, it’s not what they want in terms of how they’re building their system. And then I go to Wave, you know, Wayve is, you know, like a representative of the new, what we call Autonomy 2. 0. Where you’re using ai, you’re not building autonomy the way, you know, the DARPA guys have built, uh, you know, autonomy. So, you know, you have to respect, that these guys have done a lot of research and work on. I’m not sure if Jim Farley’s been in the labs understanding every point of, of autonomy to know for a fact that that lidars. Necessary. Similarly, neither have I, so I can’t say without a doubt that it, that it’s not necessary. But to say you’re just not gonna consider a technology solution if it doesn’t have lidar. It just, it sounds like bravado to me more than anything. 

Grayson Brulte: It is bravado and Ford has a messaging problem. They have a communications problem. The Babylon Bee at the satire publication ran the best headline I’ve seen in a very long time about Ford said. Ford debuts world’s first autonomous car to leave factory and drive right to the shop for repairs. I mean, that pretty much sums it up for you. 

Walter Piecyk: which is also an interesting segue ’cause the same week that he was talking about, not. Wanting to use technology that doesn’t use lidar. There was something that we saw on X. And what was that? , Grayson. 

Grayson Brulte: A Wayve vehicle autonomously drove around New York. No Lidar never ready for this ball. Zzz drum roll. A Ford Mach. E Ford. No. Lidar Ford successfully drove around New York and let’s give some more context. And because this is gonna be the next demand from Ford must use maps. Guess what? Completely mapless never driven to New York, successfully completed it. No lidar, no maps in a Ford. I say, Mr. Farley, why do you need Lidar? If Wayve has successfully demonstrated that you do not need lidar? 

Walter Piecyk: it’s just amazing that the same week he says this, there’s a car, one of his cars on Twitter. Without lidar. And to be clear, this is another one of Grayson’s Eagle Eye things of like, he looked at the picture and was like, Hey, wait a minute. Walt. I don’t see, I don’t see the lidar on there. We know that Wayve has talked about, I think, why Lidar and some implementations in the past, but he’s like, I’m looking at that. I’m studying that picture. Just like he was just like, I don’t know if people remember, he studied that, the picture that was in the Waabi Volvo announcement and determined that the truck that they were showing. It was actually an Aurora truck ’cause he identified the, the number Grayson’s out there carefully looking at these, these Fords with the waves. And by the way, I have also confirmed that in fact, that car driving in New York, um, from Wave did not have Lidar. So it’s, I mean, in this case, obviously Ford has no control, right? Wayve is just whatever, you know, packing this technology on, but. It just kind of underscores how these executives might need to think a little bit more shooting off about their, their technology beliefs. 

Grayson Brulte: could this be that Mr. Bill Ford? Was an original investor in Velodyne and has made Lidar investments over the years. So perhaps this is coming from the board level. I’m just following the money here. This is all public data. 

Walter Piecyk: I don’t think that’s, that speaks to the conversation. I, in my heart, I think it was just a, a, a snap at, at Elon, and again, Detroit should be worried, right? If you don’t have an autonomy solution, I. And again, maybe he doesn’t care. Maybe this guy, this guy’s not gonna be around his CEO 20 years from now, but if he cares about the future of his company, he should really be keeping an open mind, I think, and pushing forward where he’s been, I think at least publicly, who knows what’s going on behind, uh, behind closed doors, but pushing forward with embracing, you know, autonomy and really even EVs to a, to a lesser extent, or, but to some extent, as, as you know, their future. 

Grayson Brulte: The one thing that Mr. Farley’s done really well is sounding the alarm bells on the the rise ofhow, me and the Chinese electric vehicles, and how they’re. They out engineering Ford’s been sound, the alarms on that. But at some point you need to get on the autonomy bandwagon. That’s, that truly has to come next. But Walt, what, what, let’s shift gears here to policy because you had a coalition years ago that was trying to mandate lidar, everything, the LIDAR coalition that went away. Everybody’s now is talk about policy is the big beautiful Bill. You and I were interested in the big beautiful bill for a variety of reasons, but there’s one thing specifically that we are interested in. The AI preemption clause. We said, can we do it? Can we do it? Talked to five different well-established lawyers, and they said that it would create preemption for autonomous vehicles. Well, a little fight happened there in politics. Unfortunately, the preemption died in a 99 to one vote in the Senate with Senator Tom Tillis being the only one to vote for it. It died. We’re not getting preemption. We need an AV bill. Do you think we can see it? Once the big beautiful bill is signed, I can see the president on the 4th of July signing it in in typical Trump fashion. It’s a beautiful, beautiful day for our beautiful bill signing. When do we get an AV framework bill? 

Walter Piecyk: in this case this was not anti autonomy. This is, you know, AI fear, and that’s what the preemption was about. So it’s unfortunate that autonomy as the physical manifestation of ai. Could have benefited, from this, but I, I wouldn’t think that this is a, a rebuke by politicians and their constituents for autonomy. And I think it, you know, as, as Waymo continues to expand as hopefully Tesla can expand as Wayve and others enter the market, that it builds up public support for having autonomy so that when you have local politicians that want to put roadblocks. In the way of autonomy that there’s more support for some type of, you know, kind of national mandate and federal, you know, standardization, um, of the technology. ’cause it’s obviously as, as you and I both agree, um, we don’t agree on, on everything and maybe not most stuff, but we definitely agree that a national mandate would be beneficial for this industry. 

Grayson Brulte: It would be very beneficial. And you’re right, I think there’s a lot of AI fear. You had skeptics on the on the right that torpedoed it. You had a lot of outcry from Nashville and the music community over, over ai. Ai, right. I think real, at the end of the day, it’s gonna come down to education. On ai, I’m think, and I believe that the autonomous vehicle industry has to do a better job of educating the public for the, the positive benefits. Because we see a new survey out of the uk, which I don’t believe for the record, that consumers don’t trust avs. Well, we need to, we need to fix that. As an industry, there’s a lot of things that this industry’s doing right, and a lot of things that that need to be fixed. But what I know, Walt, you and I are going on a road trip next week, so that’s gonna be a lot of fun. We’re gonna have a very. Special episode here next week. We are not telling you where we’re going. It’s gonna be a surprise. Well, now that we got the road trip outta the way, what do we need to look for in the autonomy markets next week when you or I are on the road? 

Walter Piecyk: I am very excited about, you know, our trip together, um, and very excited about next week’s, next week’s show. So the big event for next week will be next week’s show. Um, maybe we get an update from Aurora. They, they went driver out and then they kind of have, I don’t know if you call it driver in, but driver. So a human sitting in driver’s seat. , Maybe it’s been, they’ve been so quiet. Maybe it’s time for some update, , from them in terms of the PACCAR relationship or additional, uh, trucks or maybe operating. And bad weather. ’cause I think that was the next milestone, which, which, uh, you know, we didn’t talk about this podcast, but there were, were also Reddit videos, , of Tesla’s operating in, in very firm downpours. You know, it’s amazing. I get a lot of feedback from investors thinking that this is a major issue. I don’t even, I’m not even on the latest version of FSD and my, my Tesla works quite fine, uh, in the heavy rain. So it wasn’t a surprise. To me this, see those, those Reddit videos? ’cause I think there was another video from last week claiming that one of the riders was, her ride was pulled over because they were expecting impending rain. And then this week we already see a Tesla’s robotaxi specifically is operating in what was very heavy rainfall in Austin. So maybe we’ll get an update from Aurora about their trucks operating in, in heavy rain. 

Grayson Brulte: Or maybe we’ll get an update about something else. You have to tune in next week to see what Walt and I are up to. The future is bright. The future is autonomous. The future is autonomy markets Walt. Until next week. 

Key Autonomy Markets Questions Answered