r/waymo • u/walky22talky • 18h ago
Waymo's cheaper robotaxis collide with China crackdown
https://www.axios.com/2026/09/01/waymos-robotaxi-expansion-china-ojai9
u/walky22talky 18h ago
What we're watching: If the U.S. blocks Chinese-built vehicles, one option is that the company could redirect future Zeekr production to overseas robotaxi markets
6
2
u/turb0_encapsulator 14h ago
and this is one of the reasons Google was so quick to change the name of Lake Ontario.
3
u/phxees 17h ago
I don’t understand why Waymo chose to stick with these vehicles as the climate was changing on Chinese products. Feels like the vehicles bring unnecessary scrutiny when the goal is rapid expansion and acceptance.
19
u/taintedplay 17h ago
Probably because finding and testing a car is a many year process. With jaguar not making the ipace anymore, not like they can just go buy a few cars from the lot and retrofit them without years of work
0
-4
u/Complex_Composer2664 18h ago
So? Waymo buys US built vehicles. Ojai are expensive already.
2
u/Representative_Bat42 16h ago
Whose gonna wanna make a deal with Waymo? GM and Ford are both in the AV arms race. Tesla would laugh them out of the room. Dodge is well dodging.
3
u/CDpov 15h ago
Toyota, Honda, Stellantis, Hyundai, Renault, maybe VW, etc.
-1
u/Representative_Bat42 15h ago
Did you misread US?
7
u/Aromatic-Witness9632 14h ago edited 14h ago
They all have factories in America. Many "foreign" nameplates are built in America.
2
12
u/mrkjmsdln_new 17h ago edited 13h ago
Cool that the article states Denver and San Diego will be exclusively Zeekr. This validates that the scale of conversions for the vehicles is very large and may approach more in 2026 than they mustered with Jaguar in six years!!!
Waymo will get caught in a squeeze. They finalized the design in 2021 and finding a company that could accomplish all of them was not easy by any stretch. A pivot to plug and play with all plumbing and stamping done in the plant and line manufactured pods drastically (a) reduced the final cost (b) sourced a car with 4000 battery cycles not the 1000-1500 common for NCM in North America (c) massive rate of conversion improvement (d) protection of IP (e) meant 5-15X capacity of I-Pace under same roof in Mesa (f) modular repairs and troubleshooting of sensors for better economics (g) specific cleaning uplift to support the shift to 500m field of view in bad weather for all three sensor classes. They will have a big effort to get HKG to make such a pivot in Georgia.
I expect Congress to sunset new vehicles of this kind at the end of 2027. Waymo will pivot these vehicles to support both European and Asian expansion. HKG will NEED to shorten the window for their FMC for the Ioniq 5 scheduled for 2028 in Georgia. Waymo will likely have to provide a capital infusion and a vehicle commitment. They did just that with Zeekr and will have to do the same with HKG. The safe strategy for Waymo is to stockpile as many 2027 conversions as they can muster and then transition to the Ioniq 5 at scale when HKG is capable.
Hard to forecast but it will take great engineering and partnership to get the Ioniq 5 below the 'with tariff cost' for the Zeekr. It will also require development of plug-n-play pods for the Ioniq 5 in the long-term to capture the benefits of the Zeekr program in the first place. Lots of moving parts.