Hey —
The deal that mattered most this week didn't get framed as the deal that mattered most. Plus three more signals from a week that kept moving.
1. Waymo just entered the grid services business
On June 4, Waymo and B2U Storage Solutions announced a strategic supply agreement to repurpose retired Waymo electric vehicle batteries into grid-connected battery energy storage systems. Hundreds of megawatts of storage capacity across California and Texas. Most coverage framed it as a sustainability story.
The structural read is different. Three observations:
The Capital Stack just gained a new revenue arrow. Layer 3 (vehicles) now generates contracted revenue flowing into the grid services layer. That changes the depreciation schedule on AV fleets and strengthens the asset-backed financing structures already in market (Moove.io's $1.2B debt raise gets a structural tailwind).
Battery storage just became an AV-native deal category, not an adjacent one. Adjacent capital was already deploying in trucking and commercial industrial (Generate Capital, Spring Lane Capital, NextEra, BlackRock-Generate). The Waymo-B2U deal is the first AV-operator-supplied deal at scale. Expect Zoox, May Mobility, Nuro, and others to follow over 12-24 months.
The most interesting capital signal in the deal is Marubeni. Marubeni led B2U's Series A in October 2021, five years before Waymo's commercial scaling produced the contracted supply that now flows into the infrastructure. Marubeni is also an investor in the Lyft-Mobileye Dallas AV REIT vehicle ownership structure. Multi-layer institutional positioning across the AV value chain, executed years before the broader market recognized the pattern.
2. Uber's $100M charging strategy in context
The picture is bigger than the February announcement suggested. Uber is targeting 1,000 DC fast-charging stations globally, with regional partnerships across multiple cities. US: EVgo in NYC, LA, Boston, and SF. International: Hubber and Ionity in London, Electra in Paris and Madrid. The existing Revel partnership (now Voltera-Revel) continues in NYC. Uber-developed and operated sites open first in the Bay Area, LA, and Dallas, many co-located at Uber AV depots.
The analytical signal: Uber's operations-layer strategy isn't just Uber Autonomous Solutions. It's Uber owning the full operations-and-infrastructure stack — charging, depot, dispatch, demand. That's structurally different from Lyft, the Waymo-Uber partnership, or the demand-platform-agnostic operators. Watch for the first major dedicated Uber AV depot announcement.
3. Tesla expanded the Austin geofence. The fleet didn't grow.
Tesla announced June 6 that unsupervised Robotaxi rides are now available throughout the geofenced Austin metro, with the chase car removed. That's a real operational step.
The fleet remains roughly 20 active vehicles. The Texas DMV data from May 28 disclosed 42 Tesla vehicles registered in Texas total. Tesla's CEO previously committed to "500 robotaxis in Austin alone by end of 2025." The actual count is less than 10% of that target.
The pattern is consistent. Tesla's narrative this week says scaling (geofence expansion as proof point). The operational data says contraction. The interesting question for the next 6 months: do California's expected disclosure requirements produce the same pattern outside Texas, and what does it mean for valuing the AV operator category against Tesla's projected market position.
4. The operator series adds a sixth profile
The Transdev profile went live Friday. The structural observation it surfaces: the operator landscape bifurcates into AV-industry-origin operators (Avomo, Moove, Avis, Hertz/Oro, Flexdrive) and legacy multi-modal transit operators (Transdev, with Keolis, RATP Dev, MV Transportation, First Transit, Arriva as the broader category). U.S. AV coverage has profiled the first category and largely missed the second. Worth tracking whether other legacy transit operators surface as active AV operators over the next 12 months.
Until next Tuesday,
AVFleetTech