Waymo Bulking Up Robotaxi Fleet With Electric Hyundai Hatchbacks
by Alan Ohnsman · ForbesWaymo, the biggest and only commercial robotaxi service in the U.S., has signed a “multiyear” agreement with Hyundai Motor to add electric Ioniq 5 hatchbacks to its Waymo One fleet starting next year as it expands operations and works to cut costs.
The Hyundai EVs, which will be built at a new plant the Seoul-based company is about to open near Savannah, Georgia, and outfitted with the next generation of Waymo’s self driving tech at facilities the Alphabet venture operates in Detroit and Phoenix. Waymo and Hyundai both declined to provide financial details of the supply agreement and say how many vehicles it might include.
Reducing the costs of its robotaxi service are critical for Waymo to reach profitability. Currently, it’s U.S. fleet includes at least 1,000 electric Jaguar I-PACE SUVs, but production of that model has concluded. Each I-PACE costs about $75,000 – before Waymo’s tech is added. By comparison, Ioniq 5’s base price is $42,000. The sixth-generation Waymo hardware that will be used in those new vehicles offers “significantly reduced cost … while delivering even more resolution, range, compute power,” the company said recently.
The Hyundai project comes as Waymo quickly expands its service area after 15 years of R&D. It currently provides more than 100,000 paid rides a week to Waymo One users in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles. It’s about to begin offering commercial rides in fully autonomous vehicles to paying customers in Austin and plans to expand the service to Atlanta in 2025.
The new supply deal is helpful as questions arise over whether Waymo can move forward with its plans to source electric vans from Zeekr, a brand created by China’s Geely Automobile Holdings. Waymo is testing Zeekr models in the U.S., but they’ll be highly expensive if it purchases large numbers of them owing to a new 100% tariff on imported Chinese autos levied by the Biden Administration that took effect last month.
“There’s no change to our plans on the Zeekr platform, but we always have said that we think of ourselves as building a generalizable driver,” Dmitri Dolgov, Waymo’s co-CEO and one of the original architects of its technology, told Forbes prior to today’s news. “The vision and the strategy and the approach is to deploy it across different platforms, different form factors.”
The supply deal also aids Hyundai, which invested more than $1 billion in Motional, a U.S. autonomous tech company, and had planned to launch a Motional-based robotaxi service using Ioniq 5s. That plan was scrapped this year and Motional founder and CEO Karl Iagnemma left the company last month.
Waymo said it plans to start testing Ioniq 5s next year. The possibility of a Hyundai-Waymo deal was first reported last month by South Korea’s Electronic Times newspaper.