Motley Fool Money checks in on some stock market news.
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This podcast was recorded on August 08, 2025.
Travis Hoium: We are in the heart of earning season, but autonomous vehicles have caught our attention. Motley Fool money starts now.
I’m Travis Hoium I’m joined by Lou Whiteman and Jon Quast. Today, we’re going to cover earnings from the. Trade Desk and Crocs get our pulse on the economy. But first, autonomous vehicles have reached something of an inflection point. We’ve heard from nearly all of the mobility companies over the past two weeks, and the theme is autonomous driving. It’s not just Tesla that’s talking about autonomy. Uber and Lyft made it a central piece of their earnings releases and conference calls. Mobileye seems to be gaining some traction with Volkswagen. Zoosk got an approval. It needed to roll out its mini bus design to more places. Jon, it seems we’re at an inflection for autonomy. Is that really the case today?
Jon Quast: Listen, Travis, is it OK for me to say that I don’t really like the idea of autonomous vehicles?
Travis Hoium: Of course, that it’s on brand for you, John.
Jon Quast: I’m going to be behind the wheel of a car with the open road ahead, but I do want to be really fair to your point here about the industry reaching an inflection point. There is, indeed, concrete data that supports that statement. If you look at Waymo, for example, the driverless car division of Tech Giant Alphabet. In late 2020, Waymo launched driverless rides to the general public. By the end of last year, it had completed five million rides. But in May of this year, it announced it had already completed 10 million. It took four years to get the five million rides, then five months to get to another five million. That seems like an inflection point. I like the fact that you mentioned Uber and Lyft here, Travis, because I think that these companies are just looking ahead, seeing the future for what it is, and trying to position themselves accordingly. I like Lyft’s vision approach here in particular with fleet management. It’s fleet management business flex drive. I think that if ride-hailing truly moves more and more autonomous, I think it’s likely that there’s going to be large fleets of vehicles, businesses that run fleets of these autonomous vehicles. If you’re going to do that, if you’re going to put your fleet on a ride-hailing app, you’re still going to need fleet management. You’re still going to need somebody who’s cleaning the cars, making sure the tires are inflated, things like that. Lyft Flex Drive business addresses that potential need in the future, and so that’s one of the reasons I do like Lyft here.
Travis Hoium: It’s interesting, all these companies are trying to figure out the business model. Even Waymo has a different business model in Atlanta than it does in Austin than it does in San Francisco, for example. We’re really in this testing phase. But speaking of testing, the Chinese automakers seem to be pulling ahead in a lot of different ways. They’re going to launch partnerships, at least with companies like Lyft in Europe. Volkswagen is partnering with Mobileye, they’ve got over 100 vehicles on the road. You have May mobility. Well, the names that we haven’t brought up here are the names like General Motors, Ford, Stellantis, the US Detroit Auto Companies. Lou, are they getting left in the dust, or are they waiting in the wings with some brilliant strategy that we just haven’t seen yet?
Lou Whiteman: For better or worse, Detroit is sitting on the sidelines, that let in this play out. To be clear, this could be for the worse. I don’t think anyone has a real sense of where things will be a decade from now. It could be they are way behind. But I’m inclined to give the benefit of the doubt here. For one, these companies know better than we do, the cost and what goes into autonomous. It isn’t like they’ve had their head in the sand. Ford with Argo, GM with Cruz. They looked at the costs. They looked at the benefits, and they made a choice. I think their calculus here is that, their manufacturing footprint makes them relevant. We will still need vehicles, whether they have steering wheels or not. Look, automakers for the last century have done a good job incorporating new technologies from third-parties into their vehicles. They know how to do this. Travis, all of these players, all these potential options, I think there’s at least a chance the actual tech will be somewhat commoditized, that bet will pay off. Just like they used to add cruise control or add all things from other vendors, one day, they’ll just add autonomy.
Travis Hoium: It does seem like everyone is at least trying to lay the groundworks. Lou, you mentioned that it isn’t like GM and Ford have been completely asleep at the wheel. They did have acquisitions that they made. They just decided to go a different direction than companies like Tesla have. But look, Elon Musk has been thinking that we could fall asleep in LA and wake up in New York City for over a decade at this point, and we aren’t there yet. As we think about this potentially being an inflection point, Uber launched in 2010, and it was unheard of to get into a stranger’s car at that point for a ride. A decade later, 110 million people were using Uber. The company was doing seven billion trips a year five years from now, will we be seeing a similar explosion in adoption for autonomy, Jon?
Jon Quast: No, I don’t think that we’re going to see that same level of explosion and adoption. I think that Uber was addressing something with a wider use case personally. A couple of weeks ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said, I think we’ll probably have autonomous ride-hailing in probably half the population of the US by the end of the year. Personally, I would be surprised if it got to half of the US population in five years. The reason being and Musk did allude to this, there’s red tape involved here, and for better or for worse, there needs to be consensus on the regulatory front, and in a polarized political environment, sometimes that can be hard to come by. I think where we’re going to see autonomy taking off most is where we see ride-hailing thriving right now. The denser the city, the better it is for this kind of adoption.
Lou Whiteman: I’m not going to be [inaudible] here, because I’m in Atlanta. Waymo is all over Atlanta. I was downtown not too long ago early in the morning, and it was just me and a bunch of Waymo’s driving positioning themselves for the day, really freaky. You know what? I’m starting to get used to it. I’m starting to get be a believer. Travis, I do think yes, we are going to see an explosion and adoption in the coming years. But I think Jon’s right. It’s not going to be everywhere. It’s not going to be ubiquitous. I think the use case will remain limited or at least not unlimited, if that makes sense. I don’t think we’re just going the way of everybody right now. We’re still a long way from riding around with vehicles without steering wheels. But I think just looking at what’s going on in Atlanta, I think that, that can be transferred to other cities, and I think we are going to see just these numbers go up big time very quickly from.
Travis Hoium: I’m in Minnesota and I saw May mobility vehicle driving around last week. That was a shock to me because this is not usually the place where we’re going to be adopting autonomous vehicles first with the winters that we have here. It sounds like there’s an opportunity, especially Lou, if you’re seeing this, they’ve only been in Atlanta for a few weeks now. If you’re already getting used to it, I think that shows how quickly our attitudes can change about technology. Look, this is an investing podcast. As we’re looking at autonomous vehicles stocks and what people may want to be putting on their watch list, what stacks are you looking at, and what metrics are you looking at for success over the next decade, Lou?
Lou Whiteman: This is boring. I’ll give you two, though. For me, the big winner here, the one I’m interested in is Alphabet, partially because seeing is believing and what Waymo is doing is really remarkable, so I’m biased by that. Partially because, look, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I am not convinced, I know what the future is, with how we get around. With Alphabet, you have so many non-transportation ways to win. It feels that Waymo is just the icing on the cake of a good stock, and it feels like cheating. I like that. Second for me is Uber, because, again, as I said before, I do think the actual tech could end up commoditized, just like with Apple and their control of the consumer and what that gives them with the phone space. Having the customer already. The customer might be what everyone fights over, and Uber has it already.
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