What Waymo’s new van means for Tesla
Teslas are still cheaper, but Waymos can drive without drivers.
At the Consumer Electronics Show Wednesday, Google subsidiary Waymo announced the name of its latest self-driving vehicle, a Zeekr-made van called Ojai. It’s pronounced cutely as “oh-hi,” like the town in California it’s named after, and slated to roll out across Waymo’s planned 20-plus markets this year, but its real innovation is the price: roughly $125,000, which is way cheaper than previous iterations.
The vehicle itself is made exclusively for Waymo by Geely Automobile Holdings-owned Zeekr, but a similar build retails for around $38,000, and adding the sixth-generation driverless upgrades likely tack on an additional $85,000 in cost, according to previous estimates from Morgan Stanley. That’s a lot less than the current fifth-generation Waymo, which has twice as many cameras and costs about $120,000 to $130,000 to produce on top of its more expensive Jaguar I-Pace base, which goes for around $75,000. Waymo is also currently testing its sixth-gen software on the $35,000 Hyundai Ioniq 5.
“Greatly reducing [the number of] those sensors is one big part of our ability to scale this vehicle more cost-effectively and reduce complexity in the manufacturing process,” Waymo spokesperson Chris Bonelli told InsideEVs.
The elephant in the room is Tesla, which has pinned its future on making its existing lineup of cars driverless with software upgrades. Morgan Stanley estimates that Tesla Robotaxis cost just a fraction of what a Waymo does, at around $36,000, and expects Cybercabs to be an even cheaper $25,000.
Of course, Robotaxis still require a safety driver to be present in its ~180 vehicles in two markets, while over 2,500 Waymos are currently driverless in five cities across the country. To stay in the lead, Waymo will have to lower its price faster than Tesla removes its safety monitors and expands its fleet.
