WeRide Corporation

So then at some point, maybe they can scale up, but then are we putting our eggs in lucid, scaling up the volumes that they need relative to Waymo's partner or what Tesla is doing? And in terms of the number of cars, assuming they don't also do the same thing that Waymo did and leave Uber.

Well, Baidu, WeRide, Pony, Didi...

So here's the difference.

Those companies, in order to build an actual network, will require about $100 to $300 per acquired customer.

The only other company that has some advantage here with distribution is Elon, because he can tweet and get a million users and get earned attention.

And if Google decides to put Waymo into Google Maps and other products, they would have an advantage there, and their acquisition costs would go down to $10 per person or even free.

There's no way WeRide, Pony...

Nuro, Rivian are going to be able to keep the expense up of making these cars, doing fleet management, and then building a network where it costs 100, 200, or 300, depending on which city you're in, to acquire new customers and to displace existing customers.

Yeah, so I think w- it's fair to say they are the leader now.

There's two other players in China that are worth paying attention to, Pony.ai and WeRide.

But yeah, Baidu, uh, and Waymo, it's the, the leaders in this, this contest.

Here's an interesting one.

They've got 15 Ford Mustangs on the road.

Uh, they've partnered with the Chinese company Pony.ai, um, to deploy 2,000 robotaxis across five European cities.

They've also announced different partnerships with Waymo, WeRide, and Motional, which is another self-driving company.

So Uber is either gonna be massively disrupted by self-driving cars or a big winner of self-driving cars.

Unlike competitors who have invested in costly sensor suites and purpose-built vehicles, Tesla relies solely on cameras and plans to crowdsource its fleet via an Airbnb-style model from Tesla owners who presumably are happy to have their car return after a busy night out smelling like a phone booth.

Uber, who have flirted with the idea of robotaxis for years, is hedging its bets by partnering with multiple autonomous vehicle firms, including Waymo and WeRide.

Tesla, on the other hand, is planning on going it alone.

As The Economist notes, the regulatory landscape for autonomous vehicles is fragmented, public trust is fragile, and profitability remains elusive.

just nothing special if you think about it that way.

And internationally, WeRide is already running a fully driverless fare charging service with Uber in Dubai plus Abu Dhabi with Zurich and Madrid coming soon.

So there are just so many players coming in that it's hard to even wrap your head around.

You only hear about Waymo against Uber, but every company is having

So it should be interesting to see competition within autonomy, let alone what they're going to do to the human-driven rideshare companies.

Last thing before we go to wrap here, WeRide has their GXR Robo bus robo bus um operating in singapore and so pay attention to the singapore market it's a very important market so now that i've given the important markets kazachstan singapore pay attention to that might not be on your radar walt's going to give you the breakdown for next week because uh He's giving me a little tidbit insight.

It's a very busy week.

What do we have on deck next

That's the modular business model.

A couple of names there would be AV r- Ride, WeRide uh, one of those is owned by Nebius and one of them is publicly traded.

I always get, get the, get them mixed up, but there's like Pony Ai.There's a, there's a dozen or more companies that kind of fall in that category.

John what Do you think is gonna be happening with autonomous vehicles ten years from now?

Now, look, that was a 100% targeted Tesla.

But by the way, who's catching a stray here? Isn't this exactly how WeRide has talked about it? And WeRide is driver out and in China and expanding throughout Europe.

Isn't this also how Wave is? is doing effectively a driver assist system that can effectively evolve over time? Isn't this also how NVIDIA is approaching their system with effectively an ADAS or a level two system evolving to level four? Could be wrong on any of those, but this was kind of the mantra.

Again, I think clearly targeted Tesla ahead of their launch.

And I know there's been a lot of changes at DeepMind, but Gemini is a very solid, solid product.

And in terms of getting back to specifically the European and Munich.

Car-wise, what are the cars that we expect there? Because in Europe, obviously, the ability for Chinese vehicles, we've seen the progress that WeRide and now Pony have made.

What should we expect for Waymo in terms of vehicle partnerships?