Waymo’s Highway Unlock Is Real. Its Moat Still Isn’t.

This week on Autonomy Markets, Grayson Brulte and Walter Piecyk discuss Waymo’s great highway unlock, their Bay Area expansion to 260 square miles and the launch of commercial service at the San Jose Airport.

Despite the expansion, Waymo remains sharply vehicle-constrained. Bloomberg reported this week that the company is operating roughly 1,000 vehicles in the Bay Area, 700 in Los Angeles, 500 in Phoenix, 200 in Austin, and just 100 in Atlanta, for a total fleet of approximately 2,500 vehicles spread across all markets.

In the autonomous trucking market, Kodiak continues to demonstrate that the economics work. With 10 fully driverless trucks generating revenue in the Permian Basin, the company logged 5,200 paid hours last quarter, up 166% from Q2, a meaningful validation of the model.

Wrapping up the conversation, Grayson and Walt examine why technology leadership means nothing without scalable manufacturing partnerships and now how autonomous trucking is pulling ahead of robotaxis on business model execution, and what global expansion in Abu Dhabi and Singapore signals about the global competitive landscape.

Read the Full Episode Transcript

Episode Chapters

• 0:00 Waymo Expands to Highways
• 3:58 Vehicle Supply
• 16:56 California Airports
• 19:28 Tesla FSD Update
• 21:42 Uber Ski
• 25:21 Kodiak
• 29:40 Foreign Autonomy Desk
• 30:40 Next Week

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