Analysis
Waymo has opened its next-generation robotaxi, called Ojai, to all riders in Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Francisco, marking the company's broadest fleet upgrade since it began commercial robotaxi service. About 300 of the new vehicles are now on the road, according to reporting this week, with Denver, Las Vegas and San Diego slated to get the vehicle later this year.
The Ojai is a four-seat electric minivan built with China's Geely Holding Group through its Zeekr brand -- shipped from China and finished with Waymo's self-driving hardware in Arizona. It's purpose-built for ride-hailing rather than adapted from a private-ownership vehicle, which is the same strategy Waymo pursued with its earlier Jaguar I-PACE fleet, but at lower unit cost. The vehicle runs Waymo's sixth-generation self-driving system -- modular software designed to work across multiple vehicle platforms -- and comes with an in-car assistant powered by Google's Gemini, following Google's July integration of Gemini into the Waymo cabin experience.
Waymo's push toward a cheaper, purpose-built vehicle is central to the company's path toward profitability, which has been the central question hanging over robotaxi economics since Uber and Waymo quietly ended their Phoenix partnership this summer amid disputes over revenue splits and fleet control. Cruise's shutdown and Zoox's slower rollout under Amazon have left Waymo as the only company operating driverless rides at meaningful scale in multiple US metros, ahead of Tesla's more limited robotaxi pilot in Austin and China's Pony.ai and Baidu Apollo Go, both of which are expanding overseas.
The unit economics case for Ojai rests on manufacturing cost: a purpose-built minivan produced at scale with an established automotive partner should cost meaningfully less per vehicle than retrofitting off-the-shelf luxury cars, though Waymo has not disclosed per-vehicle costs. That's the real bet here -- not the technology, which was already proven, but whether Waymo can get its cost structure low enough to expand faster than rivals can catch up on the driving stack itself.
The bear case is straightforward: Waymo remains a subsidiary of Alphabet and has never disclosed standalone profitability, so "path to profitability" is still a claim rather than a demonstrated result, and a minivan sourced from a Chinese manufacturer carries geopolitical and supply-chain risk that a domestically sourced vehicle wouldn't. Regulatory risk also hasn't gone away -- Uber and Waymo are currently fighting over Washington, D.C.'s robotaxi rules, a preview of the kind of local political fights that could slow expansion into new cities even as the technology and unit economics improve.
