The Waymo Ioniq 5: How Busier is Your Business? An Analysis of Its Recent Hyundai-Hilkins Partnership Announcements
But Waymo’s business is significantly, well, busier than those firms. The company recently celebrated a significant milestone: 100,000 paid trips a week.
The Ioniq 5 has received favorable reviews since it was released in late 2021, in addition to raking in numerous awards. Today, it’s one of the bestselling EVs on the market, with 30,000 sold in the US this year alone. Its popularity has helped Hyundai, along with its sister company Kia, overtake Ford and GM as the No. 2 seller of EVs in the US behind Tesla.
When it comes to the amount of Ioniq 5s that it plans to buy from Hyundai, there is a difference between its approach and other vehicle announcements. Some of this could be due to the fact that Waymo has grown more cautious about overly optimistic predictions, after critics panned the AV industry for setting unrealistic deadlines.
However, the multinational partnership is the latest to prompt questions about how Waymo, arguably the world’s most successful autonomous-driving company, will handle a global realignment of the automotive industry.
With robotaxis, one of the most important metrics is uptime, or the amount of time it’s on the road ferrying passengers. Time spent plugged into a charger is time not making money. The Ioniq 5 is an electric SUV that has a 300 miles of range and 800-volt architecture to enhance its charging speed. When plugged into a 350kW fast charger, Hyundai says the Ioniq 5 can charge from 10–80 percent in just 18 minutes, depending on the conditions. Those charging speeds were seen as a benefit to its unprofitable business.
Soon you could see Waymo self-driving tech in Hyundai cars. The autonomous driving tech developer Waymo said this week that it would partner with the Korean automaker Hyundai to equip a fleet of its electric vehicles with self-driving technology. The Ioniq 5s will become part of the ride-hail service in late 2025, according to the companies.
The US government said that such tech installed on US vehicles could be a long-term national security issue. “Imagine if there were thousands or hundreds of thousands of Chinese-connected vehicles on American roads that could be immediately and simultaneously disabled by somebody in Beijing,” US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said earlier this year.
The design center and one of its research and development facilities are not in China, but in Sweden. The Swedish city is also the headquarters of majority Geely-owned automakers Volvo and Polestar, an all-electric premium automaker.
