Tesla Gets One Step Closer to Ridehailing with California Permit
Waymo got nearly 600 parking tickets in SF last year, Amazon's self-driving unit just hit a major setback and watch a Waymo predict the future.
Top Stories of the Week
Tesla a Step Closer to Ridehailing with California Permit (link, no paywall). Tesla just got the green light in California to start carrying passengers, bringing it one step closer to launching a ride-hailing service. The state approved Tesla for a transportation charter-party (TCP) carrier permit, which means they can first shuttle their employees in company-owned cars before eventually opening it up to the public.
I’m a fan of Tesla and love ‘Full Self Driving’ (FSD) but I don’t think it’s ready for prime time yet. Personally, I wouldn’t feel the same level of safety with Tesla FSD as I do riding in the back of a Waymo, but I am sure many of Tesla’s most enthusiastic supporters will gladly jump into the backseat. There’s not a great objective measure that can tell us when an AV company is ready to deploy on city streets, and when Tesla does launch, it will be controversial since some are going to say they’re ready and others won’t.
Waymo’s robotaxis can now ‘map’ SFO, paving the way for airport service (link, no paywall). We’re one step closer to robotaxi rides at SFO, although I wouldn’t be surprised if they are not allowed to pick up at the curb. Curbside drop off will be nice for riders but I’m not sure Waymo will be my go to option for airport trips. Airports like SFO and LAX are notorious for bad traffic and riders are often in a hurry. Human drivers have a leg up in this case (even if it is less safe), so Waymo’s product is at a disadvantage here in that respect.
Some are already wondering what this will mean for Uber and Lyft’s demand at the airport. And initially, I think the impact will be minimal, but airport rides tend to be longer and higher revenue than the average trip. A lot of human drivers like to employ ‘airport rides only’ strategies since your utilization is lower, but you make more money. So it will be interesting to see how Waymo balances the longer distance trips to the airport (freeways anyone?), lower utilization, and higher per trip revenue.
Cool Rides
Heading back from HIMSS the other week I literally found myself riding in the future (link).
Waymo two-way roboshuffle in SF (link). This made me lol.
AVs/Humans behaving badly
Can You Fool A Self Driving Car? (link). This was quite the fiasco this week in the Tesla world and I’m on team Tesla for now. Not sure why Mark would test with Auto-pilot (AP) instead of FSD (didn’t even know you could still use AP alone), and there are a number of strange inconsistencies with the video, his raw footage, etc. Like why would he publish a video where the AP disengaged right before hitting the wall? I don’t know if that’s ever happened to me while driving a Tesla on FSD. It doesn’t make much sense and the most charitable interpretation was that this was a terribly designed experiment by Rober.
Morning Waymo special, why can’t people clean after themselves?! 😭 (link). Waymo is having some issues with vandalism and trash but this might just be a simple case of someone forgetting an item. This happens ALL the time in the back of an Uber and typically human drivers (the good ones at least) will do a quick sweep in-between rides and clean up small messes here and there. If you’re Waymo, you don’t want the vehicle to go back to the depot every hour since that will obviously cut into your utilization. But you also can’t fine or kick passengers off the Waymo platform every time there’s a small issue.
One way to handle this would be for Waymo to ask each passenger to rate the cleanliness of the car when they get in, then Waymo would be able to assign a score to the previous passenger and give priority ETAs/pick-ups to the passengers that take the best care of the cars. This idea wouldn’t solve their high ETA problem completely but I do think that during times of high demand, Waymo needs to do a better job rewarding the most loyal and best behaved passengers.. Ie good riders get picked up quickly, bad ones don’t (and that’s ok).
Other Stuff
Watch Waymo predict the future + see around corners to keep this biker safe (link). Not sure how this works but it’s pretty cool.
Nvidia has released a new video showing how they are working on solving Full-Self Driving using synthetic data (link).
Waymo Secures CA DMV Approval to Expand Fully Autonomous Operations in South Bay areas including almost all of San Jose (link).
Amazon's self-driving unit just hit a major setback (link). In general, I'm weary of solving two extremely hard problems at once. Zoox is trying to develop commercially viable AV technology and a purpose-built vehicle (ie basically a new car company) at the same time. Not sure which one is harder.
I'm also skeptical that the latter does much to improve the actual self-driving product. We know most rides are 1-2 people (Cybercab actually got this part right), and Americans do not like to share rides (RIP UberPOOL). So how does this purpose built vehicle benefit the consumer? Does it enable better AV tech or reduce the cost? Those would be the only two things I think that matter at this stage.
I think it also limits Zoox's TAM to a subset of the AV ridehail marketplace. Waymo has a much bigger narrative they can pitch to investors since their tech can go on any car. So start now with ridehail where utilization is higher, and then once the tech gets better/costs come down, expand to every personally owned vehicle in the world and you have the opportunity for a trillion dollar TAM.
Waymo named the most innovative company of 2025 by Fast Company (link).
Volkswagen’s MOIA is testing its robotaxis in snowy, icy Norway (link). I’m not too familiar with MOIA but eager to hear from them and learn more on my panel at Ride AI on April 2 in LA (tickets here).
First time I’ve seen advertising on a Waymo (link) and I think it actually looks good. There are a lot of neat options that Waymo could go with if they want to explore advertising. I’m all for it. Here’s one below from Adway, that I recently started working with..
Waymo was slapped with nearly 600 parking tickets last year in SF alone (link, no paywall). In 2024, the city issued 1.2 million parking tickets, so that would have been just 0.05% of all parking tickets. Uber and Lyft represent about 13% of core Vehicle Miles Travelled (VMT) in SF so if we assume that Waymo is 10% of that number, we would expect their parking tickets to be around 1.3%. 0.05% is well below 1.3% though so this doesn’t seem like much of an issue yet.
Personally, I thought this would have been a bigger deal by now though. I’m surprised regulators in SF have allowed Waymos to double park, park illegally, and back up traffic occasionally. With humans, it’s sort of an unwritten rule that you’re not supposed to do any of these things, but obviously everyone (especially Uber and Lyft drivers) do it. But maybe cities like SF don’t want to bring attention to the fact that they’ve done next to nothing to allow for easier ridehail pick-up and drop-off on city streets.
Another way to look at it 👇🤔
The more things change, the more they stay the same…After the sun swallows the earth, we’ll still have personal injury attorneys, won’t we? (link). The twist to this image is that it was also shot from an AV 😭
Waymo is executing a textbook pincer movement against SFO (link).
Amazon's robotaxi unit Zoox agrees to recall over braking issue (link).
Former Waymo CEO on Tesla’s robotaxi launch: ‘there are many ways to fake a robotaxi service’ (link).
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Until next week.
-Harry