Is Toyota the “next Tesla”?

Welcome to AI Collision 💥,

In today’s collision between AI and our world:

• Taxis to Toyotas
• A once in a lifetime windfall?
• King Henry VIII is not happy

If that’s enough to get the robotaxis fighting, read on…

AI Collision 💥

If I were to ask what are the major car companies leading the race to autonomous driving (self-driving) you might say, Tesla, or BYD, or Xpeng.

And you’d be right. Particularly when it comes to Tesla.

However, what if I were to say Toyota could trounce them all?

Toyota? The indestructible Japanese car maker?

Yes, that Toyota.

Granted it’s not completely Toyota. In fact, it’s Toyota and Waymo (owned by Google). So, it’s more like Toyoogle…

Anyway, just yesterday Waymo and Toyota announced a significant partnership that gives us an insight into both Toyota’s future and Waymo’s.

There’s a sentence buried in the new Waymo-Toyota partnership announcement that should send a ripple through the entire car market.

“In parallel, the companies will explore how to leverage Waymo’s autonomous technology and Toyota’s vehicle expertise to enhance next-generation personally owned vehicles (POVs).”

Forget robotaxis for a moment. This is the line that matters.

Waymo, long known as the most cautious and technically sound operator in the self-driving space, with their robotaxis, is now stepping outside its geo-fenced ride-hailing sandbox.

Waymo looks to be on the pivot from robotaxis to the car that sits on your driveway. And that’s a big deal.

Waymo has been around a long time. In 2009 you could still buy phones with keyboards, Blu-ray players and the iPhone had just been updated with 3G connectivity and a longer battery life. Heck, Apple still made iPods.

Waymo also started as a Google “Moonshot” project to, “improve road safety by removing the driver entirely.“

Their rollout has been slow, deliberate, and limited to a handful of US cities. Its focus has been commercial—autonomous fleets, app-based rides, and the regulatory grind of scaling up robotaxi services. And most Waymos you’ll see are Jaguars stacked up with Waymo tech.

But with this new announcement, it all changes. They quite literally have now put the foot on the gas and the idea of POVs with Waymo tech is a likely outcome. Personally owned Toyotas with Waymo tech.

This is very much the collision of AI-enable self-driving speciality with the mass market, mass production car making speciality.

America and Japan, forging a new future…

Toyota clearly brings manufacturing scale, global reach, and a brand that screams trust (and unbelievable reliability) to millions of consumers.

Waymo is kind of like the Toyota of self-driving tech.

I think this is one of the most ideal partnerships in tech today. It feels right that a company like Toyota is doing this with Waymo and not going down a path of licensing tech from someone like Tesla or Xpeng.

Furthermore, Waymo is owned by Alphabet. And for years, it’s been one of the least understood, least monetised assets on the balance sheet. Technically brilliant, commercially irrelevant.

That might be about to change.

If this partnership leads to consumer-facing Toyota cars powered by Waymo, bought by people like you and me, that opens up real-world monetisation and profits for Alphabet and Toyota.

It feels like they’re building a viable competitor to Tesla in the US, and globally.

Tesla still has a lead in terms of people’s awareness of self-driving cars, and arguably they’ve got more real-world experience with self-driving cars owned by consumers.

But Toyota meets it head on with brand loyalty, recognition and certainly trumps them for reliability.

Waymo meets Tesla at the tech level. So, it does seem that individually neither is really a competitor to Tesla, but combined, well, that’s a different story, and one that I think is an opportunity for both.

Id’ be running the ruler over Toyota again, and even alphabet, should this turn into a serious money-making line on the income statement. Maybe just maybe Tesla’s time as the king of self-driving is to be short lived.

Have we been locked out of a once-in-a-lifetime windfall?

An estimated £120 trillion mineral “trust” may soon be released… and not just for U.S. investors.

For over a century, the full scale of this endowment was hidden.

But now, thanks to a pivotal U.S. court decision, one former insider says Brits could benefit too.

Capital at risk

Boomers & Busters 💰

AI and AI-related stocks moving and shaking up the markets this week. (All performance data below over the rolling week).

Boom 📈

• BigBear.ai (NYSE:BBAI) up 39%
• Palantir (NASDAQ:PLTR) up 23%
• Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) up 22%

Bust 📉

• JD.com (NASDAQ:JD) down 2%
• Xpeng (NYSE:XPEV) down 2%
• IBM (NYSE:IBM) down 1%

From the hive mind 🧠

• LlamaGPT is on the way. Meta is sick of providing the underlying models, they’re now gunning for their own AI app. Game on.
• This is brilliant. Reddit users being influenced by AI. I think this is one of the best recent uses of AI and can’t wait to see more of it.
• Gosh, I covered Google AI podcasts ages ago, and it seems it’s still rolling out, this time with more languages, more voices, just generally more of everything.

Artificial Polltelligence 🗳️

Weirdest AI image of the day

King Henry VIII Irritated at his lack of leg room in economy class on American Airlines

ChatGPT’s random quote of the day

Thanks for reading, and don’t forget to leave comments and questions below,

Sam Volkering

Editor-in-Chief

AI Collision