What is Waymo?

Wayve, an autonomous driving software company, has locked in partnerships with Nissan (2.7M vehicles/year), Volvo (hundreds of trucks by 2027), and Uber (25,000-plus robotaxis), making it a credible challenger to Waymo and Cruise in the AV platform race.

“Nissan announced that they are going to bring this technology, bring our approach to 90% of their vehicles. You know, they build about 3 million cars a year. So, this is That's 2.7 million.”

Waymo is on track for one million paid rides per week by end of 2026, a milestone that would validate autonomous ride-hailing at scale.

“Yeah. Going to a million by the end of this year.”

Companies like Netflix and Waymo illustrate why large-data incumbents will train domain-specific models from scratch rather than fine-tuning open weights. Netflix may pre-train its own recommendation models, and Waymo has derived its own scaling laws.

“We've seen the likes of Netflix with their recommener systems like just I think they might have done their own pre-training whimo has their own scaling laws like I think all these companies with really large data can benefit from training and they start.”

Chinese solid-state MEMS LiDAR costs roughly $130 per car versus Waymo's LiDAR at roughly $5,000 per car, a ~38x price gap.

“It's actually in China right now is I think being priced at like $130 a car, this solid state MIMS lighter. whereas the Whimo lighter is like $5,000 a car.”

Cruise was developing self-driving technology at a faster pace than Waymo before its shutdown, challenging the narrative of Waymo as the unchallenged leader.

“They were certainly moving at a much faster pace than Whimo.”

Waymo autonomous vehicles showed unexpected confusion when encountering an unusual object (a camera hanging from a car window), raising questions about edge-case reliability in AVs.

“The Waymo is not understanding what is happening. It's getting very freaked out by this camera hanging out the front of the window of the car in front of us.”

Waymo's $126 billion valuation is described as unjustified despite the company being technically interesting.

“Whimo is a company that is I would say very interesting for a long time but not worth $126 billion.”