Lyft and Tensor to Team Up on Private Robotaxis

NYC AV Summit Recap, DoorDash and Serve launch sidewalk robot deliveries, and your Waymo has arrived (with a big mess!)..

Urban Autonomy Summit Presented by Nexar

Our first NYC AV Summit was a big success with over 200 people on site for a series of panels and powerful networking (link). Thank you to everyone who made it out and all of our partners. We’ll be posting the panel recordings to our podcast / Youtube channel over the next few weeks and stay tuned for the SF edition in a few months (already confirmed due to popular demand!).

LA Tech Week is next week and I’ll be hosting two events for those in town, please register ASAP as space is limited and there’s a lot of demand so far:

• Autonomy, and the Future of Delivery Mixer - #LATechWeek (link), Tuesday 10/14, 5-8 pm.

  • I’ll be moderating a panel at Coco’s offices titled “AI, Autonomy, and the Future of Delivery”, featuring George O’Brien - VP Product at Coco, Bolei Zhou - Professor at UCLA Computer Science, and Amit Gupta - Partner at SNR Ventures

• Deeptech After Dark - Future Mobility & Clean Energy Mixer (link). Wednesday 10/15, 5:30 - 8pm.

Top Stories of the Week

Lyft Plans Fleet of Hundreds of Tensor Robocars From 2027 (link, no paywall). Tensor Auto is a self-driving startup developing what it calls the world’s first Level-4 autonomous vehicle built for private ownership — essentially a “robocar” you can buy, use yourself, and even earn money with on ride-hail platforms. As part of the partnership, all Tensor vehicles will also come “Lyft-ready”, meaning private owners could seamlessly list their cars for ridesharing in markets where L4 autonomy is approved. Lyft expects to roll out hundreds of Tensor robotaxis across Europe and North America starting in 2027.

Even though this partnership is still a couple of years away, the ‘Lyft ready’ part is what stood out most to me. Tesla has obviously talked about this concept a lot, and to Lyft’s credit, this was one of the solutions offered up by their EVP, Driver Experience Jeremy Bird during our interview, when I asked about what will happen to human drivers:

So when you get the price low enough that people can buy AVs, you should be able to own an AV in your garage…what is it that you do as a driver today? You have your asset, which is your car, and you have your other asset, which is your time. Imagine if you can get a lot of that time back and put your asset on the platform.

Obviously, I’ve got a soft spot for drivers when it comes to AV proliferation, so it’s nice to see Lyft following through on their promise. The only thing I’ve heard from Uber on this topic lately was a quote from Dara that ‘Austin drivers are earning more’ which doesn’t make sense, and Gridwise data has shown to be false.

Lyft also stands to benefit from the deal thanks to its Flexdrive subsidiary, which owns more than 15,000 vehicles and operates a nationwide support network. That existing infrastructure could be leveraged to handle maintenance, charging, cleaning, and other fleet services for Tensor’s autonomous vehicles once they’re on the road.

Tensor hasn’t disclosed a price for their vehicle, but I assume it will be on the high end, and that brings me to my biggest question mark about this model. I’m not sure an owner will want to stick a brand new luxury AV on a ridehail network any time soon (see the story below about the mess in a Waymo for a taste of why). But as the price comes down, this could be a real possibility and a great way to solve the peak demand problem that fixed AV fleets like Waymo have.

AVs/Humans behaving badly

Tiktokers are sitting in Waymos like this (link). Seems unsafe but I also don’t have a problem with people doing stupid things as long as it doesn’t affect others’ safety :)

Waymo continuously circled the parking lot after picking up passenger (link). Guess Waymo engineers forgot to fix this one..

‘SF marketing is wild. Someone left a ‘Top Secret’ folder in the Waymo with an ad inside’ (link). But what was the ad for?!

Well this is awkward (link).

Rider maxes out Waymo’s heating on a hot day “for the next guy” (link). Lol, it must be so fulfilling for Waymo’s engineers to spend all day fixing stuff like this.

Your Waymo has arrived (link). I think this is going to be a big issue as Waymo continues to go mainstream (especially on the Uber and Lyft apps). Intoxicated passengers don’t behave well when there’s a human driver in the car, and now they get to push the limits even further since there’s no one there to babysit. This situation above is an egregious mess though and should result in a fee for the previous passenger/a ding on their rating, and a discount for the current rider. But what about the small stuff? It’s expensive to take vehicles offline for cleaning (loss of utilization) so I like the idea of ‘rating the vehicle’ when passengers enter the car (like you might do with Zipcar). This would assign a score to previous riders, and if the score falls too low, you are warned, penalized, and/or eventually kicked off the platform. What do you think Waymo should do here?

Related: Waymo’s (interesting) policy on cleaning fees (link). A $50 cleaning fee is a lot but may not even be enough to cover the cost of going back to the depot. Let’s imagine a passenger makes a mess in the back of a Waymo in Santa Monica, and now the vehicle needs to travel 20 minutes to Waymo/Terawatt’s charging/service location in Inglewood. 20 minutes for cleaning, and then another 20 minutes back to the service area. At $20 for a 20 minute Waymo ride, that is $60 in lost revenue, plus 20 minutes of an employee’s time ($10), for a total of $70. And don’t forget that the worst stuff, like puke, takes longer to clean and typically happens during Friday and Saturday night party hours, when surge pricing is at its highest. So if there’s a 2x surge, now you’ve lost $120 in revenue + another $25 for an employee’s time to clean up the puke. And as drivers can assure you, that car will never be the same :)

Other Stuff

‘I found the location on Google Maps where Google created fake roads to train Waymo! It’s in the Central Valley of CA at an old B-52 Air Force base. Now it has fake railroads, traffic circles, and driveways with no houses’ (link).

Look up, San Francisco! From now through 10/13, anyone on the Zoox waitlist can enjoy a free Tartine pastry and cup of coffee on Zoox. To claim: show the barista the Zoox app on your phone (link). Tartine pastries are delicious, but also expensive. So I’m a fan of this one :)

DoorDash to use Serve Robotics’ sidewalk robots for deliveries in Los Angeles (link). I’ll be covering autonomous delivery more over the next few months but there are some interesting parallels to autonomous mobility here. Serve has a strategic partnership and deep operational ties with Uber, yet now they are partnering with DoorDash. DoorDash is partnered with multiple delivery robot companies like Coco and Serve, but is also developing their own delivery vehicle as we highlighted last week.

Waymo gears up to push for driverless cars in Minnesota (link). Minneapolis averages 52 inches of snow a year and they have strong labor groups, so I expect more than average opposition to Waymo here.

U.S. launches probe into nearly 2.9 million Tesla cars over crashes linked to self-driving system (link).

Waymo named one of Time’s best inventions of 2025 (link). The emphasis was on the Waymo Driver’s superior safety record and its potential to cut down on the 40,000+ yearly traffic accident fatalities on American roads. I discussed whether Waymo’s safety record will actually translate into fewer traffic fatalities, among other things, with

David Zipper

in the next episode of The Driverless Digest Podcast, which will be published on Monday. Let’s just say for now that he was skeptical of this claim.

Rivian CEO, RJ Scaringe discusses Lidar on AVs (link).

How San Francisco became Waymo-pilled (link, no paywall).

Three Avride robots cross the street at the same time, people thoroughly entertained (link).

Lidar costs for autonomous trucks are dropping fast (link).

New Waymo Sign at San Jose Airport (link).

What else we’re reading/listening to

Autonomous System Safety by

Phil Koopman

: Blame-Free Robotaxi Crashes Are Still Crashes (link).

Junko’s Talk To Us by

Junko Yoshida

: AI: What does ‘end-to-end’ learning entail? (link).

Lessons Learned From Testing All of China’s Major Robotaxis with Dimitri Strobbe (link). My latest podcast episode with Dimitri Strobbe, Director of Road Maintenance at the Brussels Capital Region, who recently joined a study tour in China, testing autonomous vehicles from major local players. We discussed the China study tour — what inspired it, his meetings with leading Chinese AV companies, and his firsthand experience testing vehicles from companies like Pony.ai, Baidu, Xpeng, and Huawei. He shared what stood out about China’s urban infrastructure and technological advances, compared the transparency of Chinese AV firms to their American counterparts like Waymo, and some key lessons learned from the trip.

Cool Rides

‘Just had my first experience riding in a Waymo — no driver, just innovation at the wheel’ (link).

‘In San Francisco for work and spotted these autonomous vehicles on my run, then realised they’re actually autonomous passenger cars. It took about 0.5 seconds for me to be fully bought into this concept’ (link).

‘I decided to give Waymo a try for the first time — and what better place than Phoenix Sky Harbor after a great day of meetings on the Mesa?’ (link).

‘I took a ride with the Waymo self-driving car in the City and County of San Francisco, where innovation drives the business’ (link).

Neat Jobs

Social Media Manager at Waymo (link) via Jackie Hyun.

Senior Technical Program Manager, Issue Management at Zoox (link) via Hervé Hilaire.

Staff Software Engineer - Growth Platform at Waymo (link) via Victor Chan.

Supplier Industrialization Engineer, Chassis at Tesla (link) via Zengyi Dou.

Senior Staff Software Engineer - TLM at Waymo (link) via Emmanuel Christophe.

Senior Legal Counsel at Wayve (link) via Franklin Fink.

Until next week.

-Harry