Big Apple Bound: Waymo Eyes Expansion into New York City 🗽🍎
Tesla asked to delay robotaxi launch, Wayve talks about the scalability of their end to end AI approach, and Waymo expands service area in 3 cities.
Hey, it’s Harry! Welcome to the 80 new subscribers who have signed up since our last newsletter. I’m excited to have you join the 1,843 AV enthusiasts, executives, and industry professionals who are already on board. It’s great to have you along for the ride as we explore the intersection of autonomy and rideshare, and the business of AVs.
Top Stories of the Week
Waymo cars are coming to New York, but with a driver behind the wheel (link). New York state law currently prohibits autonomous vehicles from operating without a safety driver so the company will begin with manual driving while pushing for state law changes to allow for testing of AVs without a safety driver in the future.
NYC is the biggest transportation market in the world and as of April 2025, there were 658,465 ridehail trips per day, and the average fare was $33.42 ($22 million of revenue per day). NYC is also more dense than San Francisco, where Waymo has a 20.5% market share, so if we assume that Waymo can eventually capture just 20% of the NYC market, that would translate to 921,851 trips per week1 (remember they’re at 250,000 trips per week in total across all four current markets so NYC alone could be 4x their existing footprint). And since we now know from Obi data that Waymo charges a 30% premium to ridehail, NYC could generate $40 million2 in weekly revenue for Waymo.
NYC is a heavily regulated market though so Waymo will face strong headwinds when it comes to changing state law to allow for autonomous vehicles. And labor support for taxi operators and ridehail drivers is also strong in the city, so I expect to see a lot of pushback there.
In short, NYC will be an uphill battle for Waymo but worth the effort.
Cool Rides
‘During my visit to San Francisco last week, I had a first-hand experience with Waymo's autonomous cab, and it felt nothing short of a sci-fi movie’ (link).
A delightful “11/10” Waymo ride in ATL (link).
‘The future of transportation is already here! My son, my wife, and I recently took an amazing Waymo ride in San Francisco’ (link).
AVs/Human behaving badly
‘I am currently stuck in a Waymo because there is a bush barely adjacent to it and it wouldn't move, took 15 minutes, they had to send a guy’ (link). It sounds like the teleoperator wasn’t able to move the car either for some reason. Maybe Waymo should let the passenger hop into the front seat and move the car? Only half-kidding..
Other Stuff
Platform Aeronaut by
: Waymo + Uber Market Dynamics as Tesla Tests the Robotaxi Waters (link). Thomas brings up an important point about SF and why Waymo has been able to gain so much more market share there (20.5% vs 2.4% in LA for example), “it’s a tech heavy, disruption-friendly market. There’s a reason that Uber and Lyft and Airbnb and other companies focused on the Bay Area first.”He also notes that “70% of consumers say they are not considering or would never consider riding in an Autonomous and/or self-driving taxi”. Waymo has had a ton of success with early adopters but this survey shows that your ‘average rideshare customer’ isn’t nearly as excited. Combine that with higher prices and longer ETAs and I think Waymo’s growth rate in existing markets will be tempered in the future if the experience does not improve. That might be one of the reasons why they’re launching into so many new markets though instead of investing more in existing markets.
Waymo has ~30% customer retention in two years, just short of DoorDash but ahead of Lyft, Uber Eats and Grubhub (link). Sadly, this data doesn’t include Uber but I would argue that Waymo’s retention is actually higher due to ‘Waymo tourism’. I’ve noticed a lot of visitors like to take a Waymo when they’re in town, but once they go back home, there’s no Waymo available, so that hurts retention.
As I noted above though, the ‘average rideshare’ customer doesn’t care about early tech adoption and just wants a reliable ride with a 3-5 minute ETA and the cheapest price possible. So it’s important not to extrapolate metrics like retention to all future cohorts.
“Bloomberg just released the most embarrassing report about Tesla, Waymo, and self-driving” (link). Well, oops. I’m still not sure how anyone at Bloomberg thought that Teslas are closer to vehicle autonomy than Waymos lol - that doesn’t exactly pass the smell test. Waymo has a live robotaxi service doing 250,000 trips per week, and Tesla has a couple vehicles doing testing in Austin with a chase car close behind :)
Our friend
also chimed in on the crash rate comparison:The Tesla/Waymo comparison here isn't remotely apples-to-apples. The Waymo stats includes many crashes (injury-reported and police-reported) that aren't included in the Tesla figure. They are also on different kinds of roads, and the Tesla numbers are with a safety driver.
OH in San Francisco — Child: “What’s an Uber?” Adult: “It’s like a Waymo, but with a driver.” (link).
USDOT wants more self-driving cars without pedals or steering wheels (link).
Waymo Fleet Manager Moove Targets Funding That Would Lift Valuation Past $1 Billion (link). Uber was the lead investor in the company’s previous fundraising round of $100 million and Moove’s main business is actually renting vehicles to Uber drivers around the globe (they haven’t launched in the US yet though). But Moove is also Waymo’s fleet operations partner in Phoenix and Miami (coming soon) which I imagine will help bolster the valuation of this upcoming round.
Waymo’s range is getting closer — but not all the way — to SFO (link).
Couldn’t order a Waymo in LA last weekend, due to “local events” (link). And a bunch of their cars were seen parked idle in a lot in LA (link).
Why Waymo cars became sitting ducks during the L.A. protests (link). Nice quote by
, “There’s been so much effort into making sure they can’t hurt human beings. That’s the problem Waymo has been solving for, rightfully so, but when you have the problem where a human wants to do harm, these cars have no countermeasures.”First look inside Tesla’s Robotaxi development UI. The two large buttons say Pull Over, and Emergency Stop (link). Not exactly mind blowing lol.
‘My Guatemalan Uber driver is telling me America needs to bomb Iran, because we're the only country with a special bunker-busting bomb that can take out their nuclear program. This is why I still usually don't take Waymo’ (link).
Tesla asked to delay robotaxi launch by Democratic Texas lawmakers (link).
All 3 expansions from Waymo today (link). Waymo is expanding its robotaxi service by a combined 80 square miles across Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Silicon Valley. Their SF Bay Area expansion will include the communities of Brisbane, South San Francisco, San Bruno, Millbrae, and Burlingame — along with Palo Alto and Menlo Park in Silicon Valley. For their LA service area, riders in the neighborhoods of Playa del Rey, Ladera Heights, Echo Park, Silver Lake, and the entirety of Sunset Boulevard can now take Waymo rides, and riders can now take trips between Mid-City, Inglewood, and Westchester using routes like La Cienega and La Brea.
Great to see more expansion from Waymo but when will they unlock freeways? (link)
A ride in San Francisco’s adorable new Zoox robotaxi made us slightly sick (link). “Overall, you could describe the ride as a mental (and sometimes physical) roller-coaster.” Lol, not exactly a ringing endorsement.
What else we're listening to
The Road to Autonomy with Grayson Brulte: Wayve Scaling Autonomous Vehicles Without Borders (link). Nice interview here with Kaity Fischer, Wayve’s VP of Commercial. Wayve’s end to end AI model means that they can deploy self-driving technology in a scalable manner across the globe, similar to Tesla. The interview also made it clear that they are a software company and looking to partner with OEMs like Nissan to commercialize their technology. This seems like the best approach for personally owned AVs and I’m excited to interview Wayve’s CEO, Alex Kendall, about this and a whole lot more on the TDD podcast in a couple of weeks. Feel free to reach out if you have questions you’d like me to ask.
Shift Podcast by Pete Bigelow: As Tesla readies for launch, Alex Roy inspects the economics behind the robotaxi business model (link).
Shout-outs
Big thanks to TDD reader John F for referring new subscribers. If there's someone you think would enjoy TDD, just forward this email to them or use the referral button below.
Until next week.
-Harry
Based on 658,465 daily trips × 7 days = 4,609,255 weekly trips in NYC. If Waymo captures 20% of that, it would amount to 921,851 weekly trips for Waymo.
According to Obi, Waymo fares were 31.12% higher than Lyft’s, and 41.48% higher than Uber. Using a conservative figure of 30%, and the average NYC fare of $33.42, projected revenue = 921,851 weekly trips × 1.3 fare multiplier × $33.42 = ~$40 million per week.
Great stuff as always. Somewhat tangentially, in reference to the San Francisco comments, I tend to agree that robotaxis will see very strong initial growth (taking share from ridehail) and then sort of plateau... just as human ridehail has, in a way. Even if one believes SF is "ground zero" for mobility innovation (at least outside China), it is amazing to me how, after many years now of ridehail growth, residents there have not yet given up personal car ownership in any meaningful way. US Census data on "vehicles available per household" in SF-Oakland-Fremont metro shows 1.69 cars in 2005 (pre-ridehail), then 1.73 in 2015 (as ridehail started gaining steam), and then 1.75 in 2022 (latest government data available). It looks like ridehail (and I will guess AV ridehail) just become one more mode of travel available to Americans, rather than one mode displacing all the others. Thus it makes sense for OEMs to want to license AV tech from Waymo or whomever... not necessarily to equip a bigger ridehail fleet, but to provide PERSONALLY-OWNED AVs. I bet when Hertz was founded in 1918 someone said "Well that is the end of personal car ownership: why own a car when I can rent one!" (grin) People just like owning cars. I remain stunned that 1 in 4 households in Manhattan, of all places, still owns a car.