Robotaxi Report #9: Waymo goes global, Cybercabs head to Dallas, and Uber buys into Verne

This newsletter couldn't happen without our long-time partner, Voltera. Here's a quick intro and why they fit into our robotaxi space so well:

Voltera builds and operates high-throughput infrastructure networks for AV ride-hail fleets, and our zero-capex next-generation hubs combine charging, servicing, staging, maintenance, data offload, and operations.

Voltera is building and operating the infrastructure that enables autonomous fleets to deploy faster, operate reliably, and scale with confidence.

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Important: this newsletter does not go through any editorial overview of Voltera's team, nor can they influence any of the reporting — the words in this newsletter are to be blamed on me alone.

🇨🇳 XPeng named its robotaxi "XPENG YOYO" and opened public registration in China through invitation codes (link). Before the rename, it ran more than 2,200 paid internal test rides at 1 RMB (about $0.14) each.

Interestingly, XPeng doesn’t plan to run the fleet & robotaxi platform operations itself.

It sees itself as the tech supplier, making money from hardware, services, and commission sharing while partners handle operations. Each YOYO runs four in-house Turing chips with 3,000 TOPS combined, and uses no HD maps and no LiDAR. One of the only vision-only bets next to Tesla.

I asked about this move, not running the fleet & robotaxi platform ops, right from the source while on my visit to the Paris Motor Show — directly from He Xiaopeng, the co-founder and CEO of XPeng himself.

I was lucky to be among the four people to do a direct interview with him:

Now, I asked He exactly why they decided to become just the tech platform provider for XPeng robotaxis instead of vertically integrating and running the demand and service platform themselves.

His message, if you’ll allow me to paraphrase, was that XPeng doesn’t want to vertically integrate every part of the business. It wants to do what it does best, the tech platform itself (the XNGP driving system and the vehicles), and have partners for the rest.

I will give you more about his thoughts and my Paris Motor Show adventures in a dedicated EVwire newsletter next week, and I will try to get the full interview translated by then. We did this interview through an interpreter, so I’ve got some work to do for direct quotes. So… consider this bit here an exclusive teaser. 🙂

I am also able to give you an exclusive look at a full ride with XPeng’s intelligent driving system, XNGP, with a first-of-its-kind ride on the streets of Paris in the XPeng L03. And then we’ll compare it with my ride on Tesla’s TAD system on Paris streets, too (still not approved by the French government, by the way).

In the last issue, I wrote that I had a feeling Uber's investment in Verne was about to be announced very soon. I didn’t expect it would be us who ended up confirming it directly and breaking the news.

Uber has invested in Verne, Verne co-founder and CEO Marko Pejković confirmed to EVwire (link), making the ride-hailing giant officially a backer of the Croatian robotaxi company.

Pejković gave the confirmation on LinkedIn, under Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's post about his visit to Verne in Zagreb. I asked in the comments whether Uber had invested, linking our earlier (also exclusive) report on Mate Rimac's Facebook post, and this time Pejković answered directly:

No amount or funding round details have been disclosed. It seems the companies wanted to focus on the business milestones rather than play up the funding news, and Verne has had plenty of the former that we’ve been able to report on.

In fact, I think we at EVwire might by now be the publication that has written the most articles on the company in the world.

Anyway, until the investment, Uber's only official word was that it "intends to invest" in Verne, a small line we had pulled from Uber’s March announcement of the Verne and Pony.ai partnership.

In his own LinkedIn post, Khosrowshahi said he took a fully driverless ride through Zagreb on the technology Pejković's team is building with Pony.ai, and that Uber is excited to bring rides like it to more people through its platform.

These are the ArcFox Alpha T5s that Pony.ai & Verne are using for the service:

The three companies have moved fast since March, and we’ve covered every step of it on EVwire.

Uber put Verne robotaxis into its Zagreb app in August, with a safety operator still on board, but then in September, Verne and Pony.ai pulled the operator for invited riders on a 22 km (13.7-mile) route linking Zagreb's airport with Verne's HQ and the city center (link).

Next up is Verne's own two-seater, built on the Mobileye Drive platform (although I wouldn’t be surprised if Mobileye is cut out of the plans by now and replaced): the "final" car with no steering wheel or pedals that Rimac talked about taking outside Croatia. The latest news on it is a video from Mate showing some 60 engineering prototypes built.

Why two seats? Nine in ten ride-hailing trips carry just one or two passengers, according to Verne and also confirmed by some Waymo data I’ve seen out of California.

🇬🇧 The partnership is heading to the UK too. Pony.ai is bringing its Gen-7 robotaxis to London through Uber (link), with testing expected to start in the coming weeks.

Just last week, we wrote that Uber, Pony.ai and Verne started testing in Manchester (link), making it Uber's second UK robotaxi city after London.

No date is set for public rides, and Transport for Greater Manchester says no applications to operate driverless taxis there have been made so far.

Meanwhile at Uber: Sarfraz Maredia, its Global Head of Autonomous Mobility & Delivery and a member of its executive leadership team, leaves on November 16 after more than 12 years, according to Bloomberg.
His duties are being split between senior directors Samarth Kejriwal and Aaron Emrich.

…well, it was moving in this direction already, but now we’re seeing some very specific market entries:

🇪🇸 Waymo is coming to Madrid, with its first riders targeted for 2027 (link). Spain is the third European country Waymo has officially said it is entering, after the UK (London) and Germany (Munich).

Its Jaguar I-PACEs will start appearing on the region's streets in the coming days. As in other markets, Waymo starts with manual driving, then moves to validation with trained local autonomous specialists behind the wheel.

🇨🇦 Toronto is Waymo's first Canadian market, with riders targeted for 2028 (link). Cars start mapping the city with humans driving in the coming days, then move to testing with autonomous specialists behind the wheel.

Canada is a market that I’m watching very closely to see which other robotaxi players are making their way in. Importantly, this is one that might end up going a bit similarly to Europe, where we see US & Chinese robotaxi companies converge to deploy in the market.

Toronto-based Element Fleet Management will run the fleet end to end for Waymo in Toronto. Element is the same company that manages Waymo's fleet and depot in San Diego. Speaking of which…

🇺🇸 Waymo opened its service to everyone in San Antonio, San Diego and Tampa (link), so anyone there can download the app and ride right away. In San Antonio, that includes rides to and from the airport. In Detroit, Waymo has started fully autonomous driving, with nobody in the driver's seat, though there’s no public launch date yet.

🇺🇸 Nashville International Airport is now Waymo's fifth airport (link), after Phoenix, San José, San Francisco and San Antonio. It's open to a limited number of riders first, with pickups and drop-offs at Terminal Garage 2.

To support the Nashville fleet, Lyft's Flexdrive opened earlier this month an 80,000-square-foot AV depot in the city (closer look: link), with dozens of fast chargers and room for hundreds of robotaxis.

🕵‍♂️ From my sleuthing through the images both parties shared, I believe Terawatt is behind the depot operations, at least on the charging side.

A week later, Waymo added its sixth airport: Las Vegas' Harry Reid International (LAS) (link), opening first to current Las Vegas riders, with pickups at Terminals 1 and 3.

Semafor reports Waymo plans to quintuple its fleet, from about 4,000 cars today to 8,000 by the end of this year and 20,000 by the end of 2027. Waymo declined to comment. A 4k→8k jump by the end of this year would be significant on its own, but reaching 5x by the end of next?

Tesla now has 858 total robotaxis registered in Texas, of which 351 are Cybercabs. On Tesla's Q3 earnings call yesterday, Ashok Elluswamy, VP of AI Software, said Cybercab rides launch in Dallas next month (link), which would make it the first city outside Austin to get the two-seater.

Tesla's Robotaxi service already runs there (and in Houston, Tampa, Orlando, Miami and SF) with Model Ys.

As for what’s next, Tesla posted just yesterday that its next Robotaxi markets will be:

Las Vegas, Nevada
Jacksonville, Florida
Phoenix, Arizona
San Antonio, Texas

Tesla just launched a Robotaxi Vehicle Safety Report page: tesla.com/robotaxi/safety, showcasing a ticker of the ~3.4M unsupervised miles driven (862k of them after dark, 113k in rain and 575k in rush hour) and saying that so far, it has had 0 people injured by a robotaxi, 0 airbag deployments and 0 pedestrians or cyclists hit.

My favorite bit is the video reel of nice “saves” by the Robotaxi on the website.

Tesla also launched a dedicated web page for first responders: tesla.com/robotaxi/first-responders, saying “We train first responders on our protocols, work with them to improve our operations and design features to help them safely interact with our Robotaxi fleet.”

More from the call (here’s our full transcript of the Q3 call):

Scale: Elon Musk said the Cybercab fleet in Austin has grown tenfold since launch, and CFO Vaibhav Taneja said cumulative unsupervised miles grew 8x in Q3. Robotaxi now runs in seven cities. This is what Tesla’s full fleet unsupervised miles curve looks like as of Q3:

Hours: service runs until 2am "pretty soon," with 24/7 operation, higher-speed roads and highways unlocked over the rest of this year. Currently, it’s running until midnight. Elon Musk explained on X why the late hours are coming back slowly:

Of course, some media immediately took this as Musk confirming that their robotaxis are running over grey kittens on grey tarmac…

Ownership: Tesla reiterates that it wants Cybercabs in customers' hands by the end of 2026, and says the first customer-owned cars could join the Robotaxi fleet around Q2 2027 through the V15 software release.

Money: Musk expects Robotaxi's contribution to Tesla's numbers to be noticeable from Q2 2027. Taneja said Tesla isn't at its 30-cent cost-per-mile goal yet, but sees a path to it.

Tesla's Q3 Supercharging scorecard also recently carried a new line: 7.0 GWh of "Robotaxi Energy" delivered.

NHTSA gave Tesla until October 30 to answer its Cybercab Special Order (link). Tesla had asked for eight more weeks, to November 20, citing "the voluminous nature of the request." NHTSA granted 30 days instead.

The order has 21 requests. Several focus on rules written with human drivers in mind, like FMVSS No. 135's requirement that service brakes be activated by a foot control. The Cybercab has no pedals. Failing to respond fully or truthfully can bring civil penalties of up to $27,874 per day, to a maximum of $139,356,994.

🇪🇸 Yesterday, Bolt picked NVIDIA's Alpamayo software for its European robotaxis (link), starting with Lucid vehicles in Madrid in 2027, pending approval, then Germany and France. It's the base for at least 25,000 Level 4-ready Lucids, and for Bolt's goal of 100,000 autonomous vehicles on its platform by 2035.

Notice how Madrid is becoming a hotspot for robotaxi deployments?

🇸🇰 Slovakia approved Tesla's FSD Supervised, now called Tesla Assisted Driving (TAD), as the ninth EU country to clear it. Croatia came just before it, joining the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia and Czechia.

Then came a strong move in the right direction for TAD:

Germany is now backing a swift EU-wide approval (link). In talks with the federal transport ministry in September, Tesla offered to rename FSD Supervised to "Tesla Assisted Driving", which it promptly did across Europe, and the two sides apparently agreed the system may go up to 10% over the posted speed limit.

The bloc-wide approval vote once expected in October now looks unlikely before the EU Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles meets in December.

🇩🇰 Denmark. WeRide with GreenMobility, targeting the first half of 2027, GXR robotaxis in the GreenMobility app. (link)

🇹🇷 Türkiye. Tensor and Marti, a multi-year L4 deal wired into the Marti app. No timeline and no vehicle count announced. (link)

🇧🇬 Tensor and Volt Premium Taxi want to bring driverless robotaxis to Bulgaria (link), with an initial order of 200 vehicles in Sofia and a longer-term goal of up to 2,000 across the region.

The cars are Tensor's Robocar, a Level 4 vehicle Tensor already sells for private ownership, here set to run only as driverless taxis. Volt plans to run the maintenance itself.

There's no date yet for driverless rides to start. The legal groundwork, at both EU and Bulgarian level, is still being worked out. I have been a bit surprised to see Tensor making very direct partnerships throughout Europe like this.

Fresh: Hertz-backed Oro Mobility raised $80 million to run rideshare and robotaxi fleets (link), including the Lucid and Nuro robotaxis it will manage for Uber.

Steve Cohen's family office is among the backers, and Hertz keeps a majority stake. Hertz employees already drive about 1,000 Oro vehicles for Uber, and San Francisco is set to be the first city for the Lucid robotaxis Oro will run.

"The future of mobility will be powered by professionally managed fleets. As new mobility models emerge, whether ride share and driver-led or autonomous, demand is growing for an operator that can own, operate and maintain vehicles safely, reliably and at scale. Oro was built for that role."
— Doria Holbrook, CEO, Oro Mobility

VW's robotaxi unit (reportedly) couldn't find an investor. (link) Per manager magazin, only Uber and Lyft showed interest in MOIA, which runs VW's ID. Buzz AD robotaxis, and both have now pulled out. VW has put about €2 billion into the MOIA arm so far.

A week later, MOIA America started carrying invited riders in Orlando's Lake Nona (link). The self-driving ID. Buzz vans run Mobileye's system on three routes, booked through the Beep app, with a human operator on board.

I’m watching closely what becomes of MOIA and how all this plays out.

Zoox leased more than 350,000 square feet across two buildings in Hayward, California (link), more than doubling its Bay Area footprint. It sits next to its 220,000-square-foot robotaxi factory, which can assemble up to 10,000 robotaxis a year.

May Mobility is going public (link) through a business combination with ACP Holdings Acquisition Corp., a deal that values the combined company at an implied pro forma enterprise value of about $1.4 billion.

It already runs paid rides with Lyft in Atlanta, has an Uber launch targeted for Arlington, Texas, and counts Grab and Geely's CaoCao as partners, with CaoCao taking it to Europe.

It is also one of the very few robotaxi players out there that still runs it on an ICE fleet (Toyota Siennas), so I am afraid I cannot possibly take them seriously until they go for that EV platform. Which I assume will be coming with their ecarx partnership deal, though.