Waymo’s newest robotaxi is Chinese-made, built to make money, and now accepting riders

Source: Transportation & Auto News | TechCrunch ↗

Waymo began offering select riders in Los Angeles, Phoenix, and San Francisco free trips in the Ojai, a Zeekr-built electric minivan robotaxi equipped with Waymo's sixth-generation sensor stack (13 cameras, 4 lidar, 6 radar). Waymo said it is scaling its Arizona integration factory toward tens of thousands of units annually, starting with the Ojai and followed by the Hyundai Ioniq 5, on top of a current fleet of roughly 3,700 Jaguar I-Pace vehicles serving 500,000+ paid rides per week.

Why it matters

The headline number is fleet capacity: Waymo is telling the market it can move from 3,700 I-Paces to tens of thousands of Ojais per year out of the Arizona plant. That is the gating constraint on robotaxi unit economics. At 500,000 weekly rides on 3,700 cars, Waymo is running roughly 135 rides per vehicle per week; the Ojai's flat floor, gondola doors, easier-clean interior and faster charging are all aimed at pushing utilization higher and cost per mile lower. The Jaguar fleet was always a science project priced like one.

Waymo's scale story now depends on a Geely subsidiary shipping stripped Zeekr bodies into Arizona for final integration, at the same time the US is tightening rules on Chinese-connected vehicle software and hardware. The Hyundai Ioniq 5 line is the hedge, not the headline. Operators watching AV capex should price in the possibility that Waymo's near-term scale curve is one Commerce Department ruling away from a forced platform swap, which is exactly why the sixth-generation stack was built to be modular across vehicle platforms.

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