7:05
Waymo just gave its robotaxi fleet a major upgrade. This is the Ojai, a purpose built autonomous vehicle and Waymo's most serious attempt yet at cracking its cost problem. It is a boxy electric minivan rolling out to select riders in the coming weeks, starting in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Phoenix before expanding to San Diego, Las Vegas and Denver later this summer. What's unique about the Ojai experience is that it really was an opportunity to think about a vehicle platform that is purpose built for ride hailing.
Now, unlike the Jaguar I-PACE, which Waymo essentially retrofitted from a consumer car with all the headaches that came with that, the Ojai was co-designed with Geely's Zeekr from the start. The steering wheel is removable. What about the, you know, the gas and brake pedals? Over time, I think you'll see some of those relics, if you will, kind of go away. The steering wheel, the pedals, to really kind of embrace that rider experience and move from being a driver centric vehicle to a rider centric vehicle.
Zoox is also taking the purpose built approach, but with a very different model. No automaker partner, no steering wheel, and a cabin layout that breaks completely from the traditional car. Waymo currently operates a fleet of around 4,000 vehicles in the U.S., and is now completing 500,000 paid robotaxi rides a week across its U.S. markets, which is a ten fold jump from this time last year. The Ojai, alongside a coming wave of Hyundai IONIQ 5s, is a vehicle that's supposed to help get Waymo to its next target. More than a million paid weekly rides by the end of 2026, roughly doubling where it stands today. How many Ojai vehicles will be in your fleet by the end of the year? What's the target?
We'll be in the thousands by the end of the year, and then the number will continue to, of course, increase into the tens of thousands. The IONIQ 5 that we're working on right now with Hyundai. We're still a ways out, but you will start to see a number of those driving around today. And we're starting to kind of ramp up, you know, testing and everything on that platform. Now, when you strip back the Waymo branding, the Ojai comes from Zeekr, a Chinese automaker owned by Geely, the same conglomerate that owns Volvo and Polestar. Zeekr manufacturers, the base vehicle in Ningbo, China, then ships to Mesa, Arizona,
for final assembly. Waymo bolts on all the sensors and software that make it autonomous. Waymo still pays tariffs on those imports, and the China piece remains politically sensitive. But the economics are much better than the Jaguar era. Analysts say the Zeekr built Ojai should be meaningfully cheaper to produce than the I-PACE fleet. I've seen some analysts say that, like the Ojai costs half as much as the I-PACE. That's true. Even with the tariffs involved, it is a less expensive platform than the I-PACE. Where does that cost savings come from? Yeah, it really comes from the idea that we were able to, with Zeekr, really design a purpose built vehicle where you think about having everything ready to, you know,
sort of receive our self-driving system. The Ojai is also the first vehicle to feature what Waymo calls its sixth generation driver, a hardware and software system that actually does the driving. Combine that lower cost Chinese hardware with this new interior tech, which the company says was designed to cut sensor costs while improving performance. And the math starts to move in Waymo's favor in a way that it hadn't previously. Now, the last system running in the Jaguar fleet had significantly more sensors. The new one uses 13 cameras for LiDAR and six radars, and Waymo says it performs better.
The company switched to 17 megapixel cameras, a major jump from the previous specs. Higher resolution means the system can see more with fewer cameras. They've slashed the total sensor count by more than 40%. So cost is down and capabilities are up. The new system also builds heaters, wipers and sprayers into the sensor pods directly, which helps them clear snow, ice and road grime. It really improves our capabilities to drive an even snowier weather, so our fifth generation driver is capable of driving in snow, but this goes a step further than that.
Weather has also been a real safety test for the company. Waymo recently issued a voluntary software recall covering nearly 3,800 fifth and sixth gen robotaxis after some vehicles drove into standing water or flooded roads. The fix was a software update meant to keep the system from navigating into dangerous flood conditions, and Waymo is still finding other issues as it expands, like temporarily pausing freeway rides after spotting a problem around construction zones. We encounter, on a daily basis, about 10,000 construction zones a day. We discovered a couple opportunities recently where we could make some refinements to how we do that on a freeway, and so we decided,
again, with safety sort of being the most important thing for us to pause the service on the freeway and to make those changes so that we can get back up and running quickly. It's also facing more competition. Tesla, Zoox and Chinese rivals are all racing to scale, and in robotaxis, unit economics are everything. That's especially important now that Waymo is no longer just an Alphabet moonshot. The company closed a $16 billion round at a $126 billion valuation, with outside investors including Dragoneer, Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and Fidelity. It's also laid out a roadmap to enter more than 20 cities by the end of the
year, an aggressive and expensive expansion plan. The Ojai is how Waymo wants to get there. A cheaper, easier to service robotaxi built for higher volume from the start, and now moving from employee rides to paying riders.
