Newsletter · · Ashutosh Agarwal

Waymo Goes Global While Tesla Waits on the Federal Regulator - The Auto Disruption - Week of September 21, 2026

The Auto Disruption for the week of September 21, 2026. Podcast synthesis on the odds that NHTSA forces Tesla's Cybercab to add a wheel and pedals, Waymo's push into Tokyo, Singapore and Europe, the valuation fight over robotaxis, Tesla's shrinking-market paradox, Washington's split stance on Chinese carmakers, Canada's rejected trade deal and Volkswagen's 19 billion dollar retreat.

The Auto Disruption

Week of September 21, 2026: Waymo Goes Global While Tesla Waits on the Federal Regulator

Covering podcasts published September 14 – September 21, 2026

Two weeks ago Tesla put a driverless gold car onto public streets and started charging for rides. Last week the safety regulator asked how it was allowed to. This week, the podcasts told us that question is still open, and while everyone kept staring at Tesla, its main rival used the same seven days to go global. On the podcasts, one host summed up the split screen perfectly: "Waymo takes the world while Tesla takes the NHTSA test."

That was the shape of the week. Waymo announced it is heading to Tokyo, Singapore and across Europe, and opened Las Vegas so you can finally ride it anywhere in the city. Tesla, meanwhile, is waiting to find out whether a federal audit forces it to bolt steering wheels and pedals back into a car built to have neither. Around that fight, the money argument got louder: Waymo is now valued near $130 billion, JPMorgan slapped a $325 billion future revenue number on Tesla's robot cabs, and one famous Tesla bull said out loud that he thinks Tesla and SpaceX will merge inside a year.

And underneath the robot-car noise, two slower machines kept grinding. In Washington, the government did two contradictory things at once: floating the idea of letting Chinese carmakers build plants in America, while Congress and a group of retired generals moved to ban Chinese-connected cars outright. And in Germany, Volkswagen confirmed the size of its retreat: another 50,000 jobs gone, four plants closing, roughly $19 billion to shrink.

Here is what the people building, running, financing and covering this industry actually said, with every number and quote tied to the specific podcast where it was said.

1. The robot car is still on trial, and now we have odds

The Cybercab is driving. What is not settled is whether it is allowed to keep driving, and this week two podcasts put real numbers on the risk.

Quick refresher on the mechanism, because it is the whole story. In the United States a carmaker does not get a car approved before selling it. It "self-certifies": signs a document swearing the car meets every federal safety standard, and the regulator, NHTSA (the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration), can audit that claim afterward. On September 3rd, hours after the first paid Cybercab ride, NHTSA opened exactly that kind of audit. The trap is that the federal rulebook assumes a human is driving, and the Cybercab has no steering wheel, no pedals and no conventional mirrors.

The most useful new detail came from The Road to Autonomy (Sept 18), whose host Grayson Brulte runs an autonomous-vehicle research firm and is an outspoken Tesla booster, so treat his framing as friendly to Tesla, though the odds he cites cut against it. Using his firm's prediction tool (which he nicknames "Omega"), he laid out the branches:

  • There is roughly a 25% to 30% chance NHTSA rejects Tesla's self-certification and forces it to put pedals, a wheel and mirrors back in, "a very real, valid risk," in his words. "I know the Teslarati crowd is going to get mad, but that is a very real valid risk," his co-host added; Brulte agreed: "One hundred percent."
  • A softer outcome he floated: a "temporary rejection." NHTSA could tell Tesla to come back after it finishes writing the new rules, and in the meantime let it use the same special authority Amazon's Zoox got, the catch being Tesla "can't charge" for rides during that window. Tesla might then offer the rides free, or challenge the ruling in court.
  • Only about a 20% chance, he estimated, of the cleanest result: "a documented pathway secured, a resolution establishing a clear compliance route."

One reassuring wrinkle for Tesla he has noted before: the audit sits in NHTSA's certification-paperwork office, not the defects office where recalls are born, and the agency's early incident data suggests "Tesla is generally doing a pretty good job of staying out of trouble."

The elephant in the room is political, and the hosts raised it directly: Elon Musk and President Trump have a well-known personal relationship. Could Musk simply call the president and get a "no" overturned? They left it open, genuinely unsure whether this is NHTSA and the Department of Transportation's call alone, or something a president could lean on.

The independent view was more blunt. On Shift: A podcast about mobility (Sept 20), Automotive News reporter Lonnie Iliff called it "another Elon Musk thing… don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness." His bet is that Tesla "will probably get a waiver," because "Elon Musk has a good relationship with the federal government, [and] the federal government says it supports robotaxis", "but we'll see."

And on The EVs for Everyone Podcast (Sept 16), TechCrunch's Sean O'Kane made a sharp observation about the pre-launch messaging. Tesla spent weeks saying it would "go slow and safe," then flipped to hyping "a storm of cybercabs." O'Kane's read: the "careful" talk "really sounded more like they wanted to be careful because they didn't want to draw bad press… versus actual road safety." His reality check on the scale: just under 50 Cybercabs are registered with the Texas DMV, and "not all 50 of them seem to be on the road", "it's not an entire fleet of these things just sort of unleashed."

2. Waymo takes the world

While Tesla waited on paperwork, its rival announced it is going global, and the podcasts that cover this most closely were genuinely excited.

On the same Road to Autonomy feed (Sept 19), Brulte and telecom analyst Walter Piecyk broke down a run of Waymo news. (Brulte is a Tesla bull; here he is straightforwardly bullish on Waymo too, so read the enthusiasm as the enthusiasm of an AV believer.)

  • Las Vegas is now wide open. Previously riders had to pick from a fixed set of destinations; now "there is no pre-fixed destination, you can go anywhere in the operating area." (Still no airport.) That matters because the rival service, Zoox, still limits you to "a limited number of hotels."
  • Tokyo and Singapore are next, and this is the big one. Brulte's read is that Waymo is "going global at scale" because the thing that used to hold it back, not having enough cars, "is now going away." His prediction: Singapore will run Hyundai Ioniq 5s (built at Hyundai's innovation factory there) and Tokyo will eventually be a Toyota market, starting with fleets under 100 vehicles. He pointed to a Waymo holding company, "Omega," that quietly holds "$20.2 billion", war chest for the expansion.
  • Europe is being wired up behind the scenes. Waymo signed an insurance partnership with Allianz for European claims and safety research. Brulte called this "one of the final pieces": "We have the corporate filings. We have the offices. The real estate is there. Now they have the insurance… it's a very bullish signal on Waymo's grand European ambitions."
  • Domestically, Waymo also launched in Nashville, this time paired with Lyft rather than Uber.

The scale is now real, not hypothetical. On The Intrinsic Value Podcast (Sept 20), the hosts laid out Waymo's numbers: 127 million fully autonomous miles driven, with "90% fewer serious injury-related crashes versus human drivers" over that mileage; 50 million rides in 2025, three times 2024; about 500,000 rides a week now, targeting a million by year-end.

The contrast with Tesla's low-hundreds fleet is stark. On Shift (Sept 20), Iliff framed the whole race as tortoise-and-hare: Waymo published a blog on lessons from "200 million miles autonomously driven," and it is "the tortoise… slow and steady," while Tesla is "the hare saying, oh no, we're going to flip a switch and pass that tortoise." His core point is that Tesla still has to prove something it has promised for a decade: that a car can drive itself "only with cameras, a computer and software," no lidar or radar. "That's why the Model Y robotaxi hasn't scaled."

3. What is any of this worth? A $130 billion robot vs. a $1.4 trillion carmaker

The launch mattered so much because the money attached to these robots has gotten enormous, and this week the numbers on both sides got a fresh airing.

Start with the eye-opener. On The Intrinsic Value Podcast (Sept 20), the hosts noted that Waymo is now valued at nearly $130 billion in its February funding round, up from a raise around $50 billion not long ago (and above an earlier $200 billion estimate that had since deflated). Co-host Shawn O'Malley, who owns Uber and is therefore talking his own book, thinks that price is absurd: "It's pretty obscene for Waymo to have the same valuation as Uber. Uber is doing tens of millions of rides per day and generating billions of dollars in profits with a very proven and quickly scaling business model, while Waymo is still in the cash burn phase, it's losing a ton of money and its viability as a business model has not been proven. It's entirely speculative." He did concede the tech is real: "I saw it for myself in Austin… it really makes you feel like you live in the future."

On the Tesla side, the bull argument was pure ambition. On The Compound and Friends (Sept 18), analyst Dan Ives (one of Wall Street's most vocal Tesla bulls, so weigh accordingly) called autonomous technology "the golden goose" and "one of the biggest technology innovations that we ever see." Asked which single stock best plays the robot future, his answer was "Tesla and everyone else." He went further than most would: he put "over an 80% chance by the end of next year that Tesla and SpaceX ultimately merge" into one company under Musk: "that's the golden vision… that ultimately becomes one company [and] the biggest company in the world." That is a striking claim, and it is one bull's speculation, not a company announcement.

The sell-side number of the week came via Autoline Daily (Sept 14): JPMorgan forecasts Tesla's Cybercabs will generate $325 billion in revenue by 2035. As the hosts stressed, that headline rests on three enormous "ifs": "if Tesla gets regulatory approval, if it can scale production, and if it can cut operating costs." (Note the timing: this is the same week a federal audit is questioning the first of those ifs.)

And on the ground, the demand signal looked genuine, if early. On We Talk Money (Sept 17), retail investors mostly talking themselves into buying a Tesla, so not a neutral panel, a host ran a sentiment analysis of ~1,600 owner responses about Tesla's Full Self-Driving software: "about 80% of them are strongly positive," with phrases like "life changer" and "drives better than most humans," and negative comments "very low," mostly from older 2023-and-earlier hardware. His investing angle: only about 1 in 500 cars on US roads is a Tesla running the latest self-driving hardware, so if the software really is that good, "the TAM [total addressable market] is so huge." The same hosts, based in Austin, estimated Waymo has gone "from essentially zero two years ago" to "north of 30 or 40% of all rides" in the central city.

4. Tesla's quiet paradox: winning a market that is shrinking fast

Lost in the robot debate was a striking fact about Tesla's actual car business. On Morning Brew Daily (Sept 14), the hosts laid out the split screen:

  • Tesla now sells more than half of America's electric vehicles: 52%, up from 43% a year ago (though far below the 80% it once had).
  • It is not that Tesla is thriving. Its US sales are down 16% this year, it just looks great next to an overall EV market that has plummeted 30%. As the hosts put it, Tesla "is doing less worse than others." The Model Y alone is one in three EVs sold in America and is down "just 2%."
  • The competition is being culled: the Honda Prologue, VW ID.4 and Ford F-150 Lightning are all heading for discontinuation, and GM is shrinking the just-revived Chevy Bolt again.

They credited Musk's own prediction from last year: that killing the federal EV tax credit would be "painful at first, but over the long run, beneficial," because it would "hurt his rivals more than Tesla." That is roughly what happened. Two tailwinds are helping: the FSD software habit ("a transportation robot," as one owner tweet put it), and rising gas prices pushing some buyers toward electric.

There is even a nuance in the used market that cuts against the doom narrative. On The EVs for Everyone Podcast (Sept 14), reviewer Andrew Lambrecht argued the tax credit's expiry has actually stabilized used EV values: prices "aren't depreciating as much now that the tax credit is removed, because previously EVs were depreciating significantly due to heavy incentives being thrown at them." Demand, he said, is still strong for the good models: the Tesla Model Y and the Rivian R2.

5. The Roadster, at last (with cold gas thrusters and, possibly, upside down)

For a lighter beat: after nearly nine years, Tesla finally set a date to re-reveal the next-generation Roadster. On Ride the Lightning (Sept 20), a devoted Tesla-fan show hosted by Ryan McCaffrey, so the excitement is baked in, the details:

  • The event is October 1st in Waco, Texas, and unlike the Cybercab launch it will be livestreamed. Tesla is billing it as its "most epic product demo ever," almost nine years after the Roadster was first shown in November 2017.
  • The teaser image shows the back of the car with four SpaceX cold gas thrusters firing, and the car "very much appears to be upside down." (In a nice touch, the "10.01" date reads the same right-side-up or upside down.) Musk has long hinted the thrusters could let the car do things ordinary cars cannot.
  • Separately, Cybertruck lead engineer Wes Morrill publicly posted a running list of tweaks to that truck: swapping an "aeroshield" part from aluminum to polypropylene, camera-lens improvements, tire-efficiency upgrades.

Whether the Roadster can actually "drive upside down" is exactly the kind of Musk spectacle to treat with a raised eyebrow until October 1st, but it is coming.

6. Washington's split brain: welcome the Chinese carmakers in, but ban their cars

The week's strangest story was the US government pulling in two directions at once on Chinese cars.

On one side, invitation. On Autoline Daily (Sept 14), the hosts reported that President Trump "said he's okay with Chinese automakers building cars in the USA", a line he has used before, ahead of a planned meeting with China's Xi Jinping "in a couple of weeks." "The American auto industry is dead set against it," they noted, and it may just be "a bargaining chip." Contrast that with Germany, which is pushing the EU for higher tariffs on Chinese cars (including plug-in hybrids), as its trade deficit with China runs near €90 billion a year.

On the other side, a wall. On Autoline Daily (Sept 18), host John McElroy reported that a group of retired generals, admirals and executives came out to back the Connected Vehicle Security Act, a bill to ban any car using Chinese hardware or software tied to connectivity. It has "strong bipartisan support," and McElroy's read is that "it will almost certainly be enacted." Backing them up, Hyundai CEO José Muñoz warned that without tariffs and safeguards, Chinese automakers "would eat up the American market like they're doing in Europe." His framing of the stakes is worth quoting: the US is "the last large profit pool in the world where mass production automakers can still make good money", and that pool is what is at risk.

So within four days, the same government floated opening the door to Chinese plants and moved to slam it on Chinese-connected cars. That is not a policy so much as a live argument.

Meanwhile China's own market is straining. Autoline noted domestic Chinese car sales and profits are "down sharply," prompting Beijing to push state automakers FAW and GAC to merge, an early sign of the consolidation many expect, because "China simply has too many car companies making too many models in too many factories."

7. Did Canada walk away from the best deal it was going to get?

The US–Canada trade war we have tracked for weeks did not cool off, but this week the sharpest podcast take argued Canada made a mistake.

First, the mechanics, cleanly explained on PwC's accounting podcast (Sept 17). Summer negotiations failed; the US invoked a legal provision (Section 338) to hit Canadian products, including dairy, alcohol and autos, with tariffs up to 50%, with no exemptions under the USMCA trade pact. Canada retaliated with 15% to 50% tariffs on US goods as of September 8th. The damage is amplified because so many products cross the border repeatedly before reaching a buyer: "flows back and forth between the US and Canada for the same product." The episode also flagged a hardening enforcement climate: the US Justice Department's trade task force has passed $1 billion in recoveries and penalties in under a year, with a crackdown on "transshipment": routing Chinese goods through a third country and relabeling them to dodge tariffs.

The contrarian argument came on RealAgriculture (Sept 17). Sean Spear (a former senior economic adviser to Conservative PM Stephen Harper, now at The Hub, and openly in the minority here) walked through a deal that nearly happened. Around August 21st, the US trade representative announced a deal "in principle": it would have "protected tariff-free access to the US market for the vast majority of Canadian exports," including agriculture, in exchange for Canada keeping tariffs on aluminum, steel and autos and making concessions on big tech and its supply-managed dairy sector. By that Friday night, Prime Minister Mark Carney "is telling the Canadian negotiating team to go home." Spear's verdict: "I think that we may rue the day that we didn't sign the deal… far better than my operating assumption going in." His deeper worry is about the debate itself: that a war footing has made it hard "to think dispassionately and rationally about what Canadian interests are."

The human cost of that standoff has a name: Brampton, Ontario. On both Autoline episodes (Sept 14, Sept 18), the hosts detailed how Stellantis (which scrapped plans to build the new Jeep Compass at Brampton after Trump's auto tariffs, leaving a plant of roughly 3,000 unionized workers idle since 2023) has signed a memorandum to sell the plant to Canadian armored-vehicle maker Roshel, which is chasing a $3.5 billion Canadian military contract. The union, Unifor, opposes the sale because defense assembly employs far fewer people than car assembly, and says a strike is "a real possibility." Stellantis told workers there is "no long-term business case to continue making vehicles there." A car plant turning into a weapons plant is about as literal a picture of "Fortress North America" as you can get.

8. Volkswagen names its number: 100,000 jobs and roughly $19 billion to shrink

Europe's largest carmaker put hard figures on its retreat. On Today in Manufacturing (Sept 14), the hosts walked through VW's "Future Plan 2030":

  • VW approved cutting another ~50,000 jobs (on top of an earlier 50,000), bringing the tally toward 100,000, and will end car production at four German plants (phased out between 2031 and 2034), while cutting its model lineup roughly in half.
  • The bill is staggering: close to $19 billion over ten years, most of it employee benefits and severance. "This is one plant. It's going to cost them… over the next 10 years, closing just two plants, one plant was going to cost a billion, another was going to cost $2 billion."
  • The context: VW has ~650,000 employees but saw a 30% drop in after-tax earnings in the first half as China sales sank. Germany, the hosts noted, is "exponentially more expensive to manufacture" than almost anywhere: high labor, tax and energy costs, and VW is still "reeling" from the ~$40 billion Dieselgate scandal a decade on.
  • The pivot is toward defense and new verticals. VW is exploring "energy storage, semiconductors, robotics, and defense," and struck a deal to convert its Osnabrück plant (already slated to stop building cars next summer) for Israeli defense firm Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, aiming to keep much of the workforce.

The hosts' blunt bottom line: "I don't think this is the last we've seen of these cuts, and I think they're going to continue to be pretty dramatic." As a small, ironic counterpoint to the gloom, Autoline (Sept 14) noted VW also showed off a "Mission Efficiency" concept car that manages over 9 miles per kilowatt-hour (7.5 in a real 800-mile road test), proof the company can still engineer, even as it shrinks.

9. Cheap batteries, dear gasoline: the cross-currents under the whole market

Three smaller threads this week rhyme into one picture: the technology keeps getting better and cheaper while the economics around it whipsaw.

Batteries keep improving, mostly in China. On Kilowatt (Sept 18), the host detailed CATL's new "Tektrans 2" battery platform for heavy trucks: around 1,000 km of range on China's test cycle (likely ~500 miles by stricter Western measures), megawatt-speed charging (80% in 25 minutes), an energy density of 170 watt-hours per kilogram (which CATL claims is 13% above the industry average), and enough weight savings to add "0.6 metric tons" (about 1,300 pounds) of payload. CATL is also taking truck battery-swapping to Europe with delivery giant DHL, through a joint venture with Octopus Energy delightfully named "Swaptopus" (Autoline, Sept 18). And in a sign of where affordable EVs are going, the 2027 Chevy Bolt switches to a cheaper, tougher LFP battery (a lithium-iron-phosphate chemistry that lasts more charge cycles) at a sub-$30,000 price, "Mary Barra did us right with the battery," as one reviewer put it on EVs for Everyone (Sept 14).

Gasoline is suddenly expensive. Morning Brew (Sept 14) put oil at $108 a barrel and California diesel at a record $8 a gallon (some stations showing $9.99 because their signs can't fit another digit). Autoline (Sept 18) pegged average US gas near $5 a gallon and diesel above €2 a liter (~$9/gallon) across the EU. That is a real tailwind for electric, and terrible timing for GM, which just launched new gas-guzzling small-block V8 engines into the teeth of it.

Discounts are back. With the EV market soft, the deals are large: Kia is offering $10,000 cash off the 2026 EV9, and "some dealers are even offering more", around $15,000 off (Kilowatt, Sept 18). Cheaper, better hardware colliding with a shrinking, discount-heavy market is the whole tension of this moment in one line.

What we're watching

  • Does the NHTSA audit force a retrofit? For the first time we have odds: the Road to Autonomy's own tool puts the chance NHTSA rejects Tesla's self-certification (and demands pedals, a wheel and mirrors) at roughly 25–30%, with a "temporary rejection" (drive, but don't charge) as a middle path. Watch whether Tesla files a formal exemption like Zoox, keeps betting on self-certification, or the whole thing gets resolved by a phone call to the White House.
  • Waymo's global sprint. Tokyo, Singapore, an anywhere-you-want Las Vegas, and European insurance now in place: the vehicle shortage that capped Waymo is easing. The number to watch is rides: ~500,000 a week now, targeting a million by year-end. If it hits that, the "$130 billion is obscene" argument gets harder to make.
  • The Roadster reveal, October 1st in Waco. Livestreamed, cold-gas thrusters, possibly upside down. Spectacle aside, watch for anything concrete on price and delivery timing, the car has been "vaporware," in one fan's own word, for nine years.
  • Washington's contradiction. In the same week the administration floated letting Chinese carmakers build in the US and Congress moved to ban Chinese-connected cars. Watch the Trump–Xi meeting, and whether the Connected Vehicle Security Act actually becomes law, the two cannot both be the policy.
  • Whether Canada reopens the deal it walked from. By at least one well-connected account, Canada turned down a deal that protected most of its exports. Both sides now have tariffs up to 50% live. Watch for a return to the table, and watch Brampton, where a car plant is being turned into a weapons plant.
  • VW's $19 billion retreat, and who's next. VW has now named the number: ~100,000 jobs, four plants, roughly $19 billion, a pivot toward defense. Its own hosts think "this is not the last we've seen of these cuts." Watch which other legacy names in Europe follow.