In Austin and Atlanta, the only way to hail a Waymo is through the Uber app, under the product aptly named “Waymo on Uber.” That partnership was a big win for Uber since Waymo was, and still is, the only company in the U.S.
The incentives between Waymo and Uber have never been fully aligned, dating back to when Uber ATG was directly competing with Waymo on robotaxi development. Uber sold off ATG, betting on autonomy becoming commoditized and a competitive marketplace emerging on a timescale commensurate with ATG's own development horizon. (And probably also betting that Uber's new public market shareholders would not have the patience to see it through at the kind of burn rate ATG was enduring.)
It seems like they miscalculated, or at least, were unlucky, because since then, Waymo has dominated in the US--attributable in no small part to the shocking collapse of Cruise.
I view Waymo and Uber as now being in the midst of a series of empirical tests to see who actually has the market power: Uber, the aggregator who owns the overwhelming majority of the customer relationship and can provide liquidity as a ridehail "market maker", or Waymo, who has an objectively superior product. Time will tell, and the dynamics will get exponentially more complex when a true second AV ridehail player enters the market.
I'm not so sure they miscalculated since I think all of the concerns you raised were valid. There's no guarantee that Uber ATG would be in the same place as Waymo is today, just look at what happened to Cruise as you note.
I like the way you are framing it though with Uber vs Waymo in terms of market power, which is why I noted that I could see the roles reversing and Uber / Lyft actually having to provide drivers onto Waymo's platform to fill the gap. Boy would that be a big change for Uber.. I just don't know if Waymo wants to go down that path from a strategy level since they care more about getting their software into every vehicle on the planet and this would be a distraction.
And yes I wasn't sure to how emphasize how strange Praveen's tweet was, I've got a lot of theories but didn't want to speculate much further.. Waymo is Uber's only AV partner that matters so even if they ran over a child in Times Square, I would expect Uber to still support them.
It may have been a lapse in judgement but I would have expected Uber's PR team to just make him delete the tweet. The fact that it's still up tells me maybe there's something more to it.. just strange since he's not a big X user like Balaji Krishnamurthy. Would make more sense coming from someone like him if they were trying to send a message. Drama...lol.
RIP Cruise proving that being first to market isn’t always the winning strategy.
Something to also add which I’m sure will add strain to the Uber/Waymo relationship and perhaps shift the balance of political power.
The same critics that fight tooth and nail against ride sharing outfits, will likely stop lobbying against Uber/Lyft and move to slowing down AV adoption.
in a classic the enemy of my enemy are my friends. A good Uber\Lyft strategy might just be support pro worker and safety policies moving attention away from criticism around driver pay for example.
Nice synopsis. Austin & Atlanta were cities 4&5. It seems obvious now that Waymo's plan to quintuple cities in 2026 from 5 to 25 was already baked in including a car strategy. They largely starved cars in Austin until recently and Atlanta still seems ignored. The attention given to the 2026 cities with service expansions seem to foretell these Uber partnered cities feel doomed. This is a pre-positioned car allocation to an amazing number of cities. Waymo actually gets to 20-25 cities this year without much mention of Uber this feels like a nail in the coffin. I figure Austin's utility for Waymo is to be juxtaposed to Tesla and only a handful of cars operating in a small Hamlet of South Austin from 10a-3p when not raining after 10+ months of effort in the HQ city!!! It makes the lack of progress of a 'competitor' embarrassing I think. For me, I ignore the hype of most players and ONLY CARE about rider only miles available to everyone. Tesla only released an Android application in the last week. This is a worldwide market and Android is ~4B users vs iOS ~1.5B worldwide.
Phoenix was only at 500 vehicles at last count (but may be higher now), so Austin is getting closer to Phoenix's fleet size. And when you look at Waymo's RO miles by city, Austin is growing their city distribution each quarter, but still less than half of Phoenix's miles. Which makes sense considering their fleet is roughly half the size.
I can confirm that central Austin is full of Waymos, doesn't feel like we are being starved. Waymo is outrunning their depot supply lines currently - they have a temporary depot in a parking lot near downtown that's running off of portable natural gas generators.
For sure. They've got 300 vehicles in Austin now but still lagging Phoenix and LA. Atlanta I think is way behind still..
so it does seem like Waymo is limiting the number of vehicles that they are giving to Uber in these two markets relative to if they were doing the markets themselves, which makes sense.
I imagine the lasting partnerships for Waymo, Zoox, and Nuro will be on fleet ops, not the marketplace. In a few years, it'll be nearly impossible for a new robotaxi outfit to scale by trying to own both stacks simultaneously. The early entrants still have that option.
Yes I didn't mention this but Lyft has a much stronger case than Uber when it comes to fleet ops partnerships with companies like Waymo. Lyft owns and operates 15k vehicles via their Flex Drive program while Uber doesn't own a single vehicle and outsources fleet ops in Austin and Atlanta to a company called Avomo.
Although I'm not sure that's a great reason for Waymo to partner with Uber or Lyft on the demand side since I don't think there a ton of synergies between demand generation and fleet ops.
The incentives between Waymo and Uber have never been fully aligned, dating back to when Uber ATG was directly competing with Waymo on robotaxi development. Uber sold off ATG, betting on autonomy becoming commoditized and a competitive marketplace emerging on a timescale commensurate with ATG's own development horizon. (And probably also betting that Uber's new public market shareholders would not have the patience to see it through at the kind of burn rate ATG was enduring.)
It seems like they miscalculated, or at least, were unlucky, because since then, Waymo has dominated in the US--attributable in no small part to the shocking collapse of Cruise.
I view Waymo and Uber as now being in the midst of a series of empirical tests to see who actually has the market power: Uber, the aggregator who owns the overwhelming majority of the customer relationship and can provide liquidity as a ridehail "market maker", or Waymo, who has an objectively superior product. Time will tell, and the dynamics will get exponentially more complex when a true second AV ridehail player enters the market.
Anyway--great writeup, thanks!
Disclosure: I'm long Waymo.
I'm not so sure they miscalculated since I think all of the concerns you raised were valid. There's no guarantee that Uber ATG would be in the same place as Waymo is today, just look at what happened to Cruise as you note.
I like the way you are framing it though with Uber vs Waymo in terms of market power, which is why I noted that I could see the roles reversing and Uber / Lyft actually having to provide drivers onto Waymo's platform to fill the gap. Boy would that be a big change for Uber.. I just don't know if Waymo wants to go down that path from a strategy level since they care more about getting their software into every vehicle on the planet and this would be a distraction.
And yes I wasn't sure to how emphasize how strange Praveen's tweet was, I've got a lot of theories but didn't want to speculate much further.. Waymo is Uber's only AV partner that matters so even if they ran over a child in Times Square, I would expect Uber to still support them.
It may have been a lapse in judgement but I would have expected Uber's PR team to just make him delete the tweet. The fact that it's still up tells me maybe there's something more to it.. just strange since he's not a big X user like Balaji Krishnamurthy. Would make more sense coming from someone like him if they were trying to send a message. Drama...lol.
RIP Cruise proving that being first to market isn’t always the winning strategy.
Something to also add which I’m sure will add strain to the Uber/Waymo relationship and perhaps shift the balance of political power.
The same critics that fight tooth and nail against ride sharing outfits, will likely stop lobbying against Uber/Lyft and move to slowing down AV adoption.
in a classic the enemy of my enemy are my friends. A good Uber\Lyft strategy might just be support pro worker and safety policies moving attention away from criticism around driver pay for example.
Cruise wasn't really first though compared to Waymo :)
really? It seemed like for a while in SF they had flooded the streets and were always around day and night.
Oh I see what you mean, wasn't covering AVs as closely then but I think you may be right.
More broadly though, I think Waymo started as Google's self-driving car project a long time ago before Cruise :)
Nice synopsis. Austin & Atlanta were cities 4&5. It seems obvious now that Waymo's plan to quintuple cities in 2026 from 5 to 25 was already baked in including a car strategy. They largely starved cars in Austin until recently and Atlanta still seems ignored. The attention given to the 2026 cities with service expansions seem to foretell these Uber partnered cities feel doomed. This is a pre-positioned car allocation to an amazing number of cities. Waymo actually gets to 20-25 cities this year without much mention of Uber this feels like a nail in the coffin. I figure Austin's utility for Waymo is to be juxtaposed to Tesla and only a handful of cars operating in a small Hamlet of South Austin from 10a-3p when not raining after 10+ months of effort in the HQ city!!! It makes the lack of progress of a 'competitor' embarrassing I think. For me, I ignore the hype of most players and ONLY CARE about rider only miles available to everyone. Tesla only released an Android application in the last week. This is a worldwide market and Android is ~4B users vs iOS ~1.5B worldwide.
Thanks. It does seem like Austin is not getting a ton of support from Waymo but I did just cite an interesting stat in last week's newsletter that Waymo's fleet is now up to 300 vehicles in Austin - https://www.thedriverlessdigest.com/p/uber-partners-with-hertz-for-robotaxi#:~:text=What%20Waymo%E2%80%99s%20future%20in%20Austin%20may%20look%20like%20(link)%2C%20an%20interview%20with%20Waymo%E2%80%99s%20senior%20director%20of%20product%20management%2C%20Shweta%20Shrivastava.
Phoenix was only at 500 vehicles at last count (but may be higher now), so Austin is getting closer to Phoenix's fleet size. And when you look at Waymo's RO miles by city, Austin is growing their city distribution each quarter, but still less than half of Phoenix's miles. Which makes sense considering their fleet is roughly half the size.
https://www.thedriverlessdigest.com/p/analyzing-waymos-market-share-using
I can confirm that central Austin is full of Waymos, doesn't feel like we are being starved. Waymo is outrunning their depot supply lines currently - they have a temporary depot in a parking lot near downtown that's running off of portable natural gas generators.
For sure. They've got 300 vehicles in Austin now but still lagging Phoenix and LA. Atlanta I think is way behind still..
so it does seem like Waymo is limiting the number of vehicles that they are giving to Uber in these two markets relative to if they were doing the markets themselves, which makes sense.
I imagine the lasting partnerships for Waymo, Zoox, and Nuro will be on fleet ops, not the marketplace. In a few years, it'll be nearly impossible for a new robotaxi outfit to scale by trying to own both stacks simultaneously. The early entrants still have that option.
Yes I didn't mention this but Lyft has a much stronger case than Uber when it comes to fleet ops partnerships with companies like Waymo. Lyft owns and operates 15k vehicles via their Flex Drive program while Uber doesn't own a single vehicle and outsources fleet ops in Austin and Atlanta to a company called Avomo.
Although I'm not sure that's a great reason for Waymo to partner with Uber or Lyft on the demand side since I don't think there a ton of synergies between demand generation and fleet ops.