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The robotaxi market has been heating up, with industry heavyweights such as Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU), Uber (NYSE:UBER) and Amazon (AMZN) ramping up their respective driverless vehicle offerings for consumers.
We asked Seeking Alpha analysts Jonathan Weber and Daniel Jones which robotaxi stock they view as most attractive for investors right now.
Jonathan Weber: Tesla’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) robotaxi introduction in parts of Austin has come, but it remains pretty limited in size, which is why I still see others significantly ahead of Tesla. Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) Waymo is active in more markets already and continues to expand, recently by starting mapping in Philadelphia and introducing a taxi service for teenagers.
Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) also remains a key robotaxi player: a recent partnership with Uber (NYSE:UBER) for several countries in Asia can be seen as a vote of confidence by the ride-hailing giant, and Baidu continues to expand its Apollo Go service in its home market of China, too.
Between GOOG and BIDU, I like GOOG more due to a better growth trajectory, broad AI exposure, and less “China risk”. I think that GOOG trades inexpensively compared to other big tech names.
Daniel Jones: In this space, I think that the best player has got to be Waymo, which is owned by Google parent Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL). It is one of the only robotaxi companies out there that has achieved Level 4 autonomous driving. To put this in perspective, the most advanced technology that Tesla (TSLA) has is only at Level 2.
Back in April, Waymo announced the big milestone of finally hitting 250,000 paid robotaxi rides each week in the U.S. That compares favorably with the 200,000 it achieved just two months earlier in February. Waymo is also collaborating with Toyota Motor Corporation (TM) to accelerate the development and deployment of autonomous driving technologies.
Even though this is not a pure play in the space and would represent only a slice of what Alphabet does, the size of the industry and the financial resources of its parent company make Waymo the clear favorite for industry dominance.