Waymo and Toyota have announced a partnership aimed at competing with Tesla in the development of personally owned self-driving vehicles.

Waymo is already widely regarded as the market leader in autonomous driving, as it currently provides approximately 250,000 autonomous paid rides per week in the few markets where it operates.

Tesla is playing catch-up as it plans to offer the same service Waymo offers, starting in Austin in June, with 10 to 20 vehicles.

However, there’s an area of autonomous driving where Tesla is still seen as the market leader: personally owned self-driving vehicles.

Advertisement – scroll for more content

While Tesla has yet to deliver on its promise of unsupervised self-driving capability in its consumer vehicles, it uses the same technology in those as it plans to do in its internal fleet in Austin, albeit with more Austin-specific training and some teleoperation assists.

Some see this as an opportunity for Tesla to take the lead in personally owned autonomous vehicles if it can solve self-driving on its current hardware, which is a big if.

It already has smoothly integrated sensors that don’t clash with the designs of its vehicles, which is something that car buyers care about, but it’s not a big deal for an autonomous ride-hailing fleet, which is what Waymo has focused on so far.

Now, Waymo and Toyota have announced that they are exploring collaboration on autonomous vehicles :

Toyota Motor Corporation (“Toyota”) and Waymo reached a preliminary agreement to explore a collaboration focused on accelerating the development and deployment of autonomous driving technologies. Woven by Toyota will also join the potential collaboration as Toyota’s strategic enabler, contributing its strengths in advanced software and mobility innovation. This potential partnership is built on a shared vision of improving road safety and delivering increased mobility for all.

More specifically, the collaboration will focus on “next-generation personally owned vehicles (POVs)”:

Toyota and Waymo aim to combine their respective strengths to develop a new autonomous vehicle platform. In parallel, the companies will explore how to leverage Waymo’s autonomous technology and Toyota’s vehicle expertise to enhance next-generation personally owned vehicles (POVs). The scope of the collaboration will continue to evolve through ongoing discussions.

This would point to Waymo integrating its technology into Toyota’s vehicles for consumers.

While it’s still early, Waymo appears to be doing something Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, claimed Tesla would be doing soon: announcing deals to integrate its ‘Full Self-Driving’ technology in vehicles built by other automakers.

For more than a year, Musk has said that Tesla has been in discussions with other automakers about licensing its self-driving technology, which is still in development; however, no progress has been disclosed about those discussions yet.

Waymo also announced a similar partnership with Hyundai last year, though this one is expected to first focus on Waymo using Hyundai vehicles for its own autonomous ride-hailing fleet.

Electrek’s Take

This is a big deal. The world’s leader in autonomous vehicles is partnering with the world’s largest automaker.

It’s still early in the collaboration, as per the press release, but it does sound like Waymo is going to develop a hardware suite that can be fitted into Toyota’s consumer vehicles.

This would go after Musk’s argument that Waymo can’t compete with Tesla due to the high cost of its autonomous vehicles.

Waymo’s counterargument is that it hasn’t focused on cost because safety is the priority, and the cost of the vehicles doesn’t matter as much if they are to be used in an internal ride-hailing fleet.

Kia’s first electric van has officially arrived. With pre-orders opening this week, Kia revealed prices and key specs for the new PV5. The PV5 will start at £32,995 ($44,000) in the UK and can travel up to 249 miles on a single charge. Here’s everything you need to know.

Kia announces PV5 prices and specs ahead of pre-orders

The PV5 marks the start of Kia’s new Platform Beyond Vehicle (PBV) electric van business. It’s the company’s first fully electric passenger van and will be available in two trims: Essential and Plus.

It will be offered with two battery options: 51.5 kWh or 71.2 kWh, providing up to 179 miles or 249 miles of WLTP driving range, respectively.

The longer-range (71.2 kWh) battery variant is available only with front-wheel drive (FWD) and features a 120 kW electric motor. Although the Plus trim is available exclusively with the long-range battery, the Essential model will be offered with either the standard or long-range battery.

Advertisement – scroll for more content

With 400V fast charging capabilities, the PV5 can charge from 10% to 80% in under 30 mins when connected to a 150 kW charger.

At 4,695 mm long, 1,895 mm wide, and 1,899 mm tall, the PV5 is slightly smaller than the European Volkswagen ID.Buzz model (4,712 mm long, 1,985 mm wide, 1,937 mm tall).

Thanks to its new E-GMP.S EV platform, the PV5 offers a flat floor design to maximize interior space. With all five seats upright, Kia’s electric van offers 1,320 L of rear luggage capacity. When the second-row seats are folded, cargo capacity expands to 2,315 liters.

Every PV5 model comes with standard features including a 12.9″ touchscreen navigation with Android Auto OS, a 7.5″ driver display, Wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto, LED headlights, and a 2-spoke bio-artificial leather steering wheel.

It also includes OTA update capabilities and several safety assist features, such as front and rear parking sensors, a reversing camera system, Highway Driving Assist, Lane Keep Assist, and Intelligent Speed Limit Assist.

Upgrading to the Plus version will gain you heated front seats and steering wheel, a powered tailgate, V2L capability (with adapter), a wireless phone charger, blind-spot collision avoidance assist, and an optional heat pump.

The PV5 comes with a Clear White color as standard. For an additional £750 (including VAT), you can choose from White Pearl, Midnight Black, Cityscape Green, Steel Grey, Runway Red, Mint Green, Lakehouse Grey, and Frost Blue.

Kia will open PV5 pre-orders in the UK on Thursday, 1 May 2025, starting at £32,995, which is around $44,000. It will launch in Europe and Korea this year, followed by other global markets in 2026. The PV5 is a five-seater, but Kia said a seven-seat variant is coming soon.

Following the midsize PV5, Kia will expand its electric van lineup with the larger PV7 in 2027, and the PV9, which will be introduced in 2029.

House republicans have proposed putting a $200/year federal registration tax on EVs, with the false rationale that it will help to close a supposed budget shortfall that has in fact been caused by Congress’ refusal to raise the federal gas tax since 1993.

The proposal was announced by the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, chaired by Sam Graves (R-MO), who received $163,300 in bribes from the oil & gas industry in the last campaign cycle.

It proposes a massive tax hike on the nation’s electric vehicles, not just increasing taxes on those cars far beyond what is reasonable by any measure, but also adding yet another abusive tax on EVs that is yet again higher than the tax that polluting, damaging gas vehicles have to pay.

We’ve already seen these ridiculous laws pass state by state, and every one we’ve seen has been abusive or overpriced in some way.

Advertisement – scroll for more content

In many states, EVs not only have to pay a registration tax far in excess of the amount a similarly-efficient gas vehicle would have to pay, they also have to pay taxes on the energy going into that EV.

Some are particularly abusive, like in Kentucky, where EVs are charged two taxes where gas cars only pay one (or, in some cases where utility services are taxed, three separate taxes). But all of them that we’ve seen so far are one-size-fits-all measures which do not account for road damage, do not account for vehicle efficiency, and do little to nothing to fill any budget shortfalls.

Rather than going for fairness and actually calculating the amount of road use that any given EV does, and attempting to charge a fair fee based on that (as one might rightly do with a weight/mileage fee, applied to all vehicles, as Washington state kind of tried to do), these taxes instead just add a large penalty to EV drivers in order to disincentivize EV ownership. No wonder, given that the push for them started with the Koch brothers, who became billionaires by poisoning you with their oil and gas products and have then spent those proceeds lobbying to ensure that they continue to be able to poison you further.

But now House republicans want to add yet another tax, meaning that EVs nationwide would have to pay not only taxes on the energy that goes into the car (at least in regions where electricity is taxed), but also both state and federal registration taxes. And the number associated with that tax is just as insane as you might expect out of this current Congress.

The $200/year tax hike is equivalent to the federal gas taxes that would be paid on 1,087 gallons of gasoline. With most EVs being quite efficient and achieving something on the order of 120MPGe, the amount of energy from those 1,087 gallons of gasoline would be enough to pilot those EVs over a hundred thousand miles in a year. Quite a bit more than the average driver. You may claim that efficiency isn’t a fair way to figure these taxes, but that’s how they’re figured on gas cars, entirely, so if it’s fair for them then why isn’t it fair for EVs?

Even if we were to give the EV a handicap and pretend that it’s the same efficiency as the average gas-powered vehicle (it’s not), a 24mpg vehicle would have to drive over 26,000 miles in order to pay that much in gas tax, which, again, is much higher than the average driver.

But if we claim it only has to do with road damage caused, and not with efficiency (despite that that’s how the gas tax is levied), then we must look at what actually causes road damage: big trucks. A heavy duty tractor-trailer loaded to 80,000lbs does 9,600x as much road damage as a 4,000lb automobile, and these trucks tend to run higher average mileage.

If a truck does 10,000x as much damage and runs 5x as many miles as the average EV, then a road usage fee of $10 million a year must be fair, right? And if you balk at that number, then you must also balk at a $200/year registration fee. (Not to mention, in most states, gas taxes don’t pay for a majority of road costs anyway).

So regardless of the method we go about figuring fairness, this tax is too high. Unsurprising, from a bought-and-paid oil stooge like Graves.

Graves’ release goes on to state the sort of nonsense you might expect from a recipient of bribes from the oil industry, claiming that the purpose of this tax is to make up for a budget shortfall which he blames on electric vehicles (nevermind that it started to come about well before EVs showed up on the US’ roads). In his desperate quest for justifications for his massive tax hike, though, he fails to mention that the federal gas tax has not been raised since 1993, when it was set at the 18.4 cents that it remains at today.

As costs of just about everything have gone up since then, strangely, the gas tax hasn’t increased – if it kept up with inflation, it would be around 40 cents today. So that’s 32 years worth of free ride that gas cars have gotten on roads, with their taxes gradually decreasing relative to the inflated dollar.

I wonder if that might contribute to any sort of shortfall, and not the roughly 1.4% of the US vehicle fleet that runs on electricity?

But, hey, I guess if we need to raise funds, we can surely milk a lot more out of those ~4 million EVs (times $200/year, that’s less than a billion dollars) than we can out of the ~290 million gas cars on the road (a single penny increase in the federal gas tax would increase federal revenue by twice the amount the proposed EV tax will – and if it was indexed to the level of inflation, it would raise more like $30 billion this year).

Add another failure of simple math to this proposal, but tack on a mark of cowardice for targeting a smaller group who won’t complain as much, and who won’t rock the boat of the industry responsible for your political bribes, Mr. Graves.

The document goes on to betray its lack of interest in good governance or basic math and to show that it is motivated by partisanship and an attempt to buoy gasoline vehicles, not budgetary concerns.

For example, it talks about the “wasteful” spending of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). But here’s the rub: the IRA was actually revenue-positive, reducing the federal government deficit by $90 billion over 10 years. That differs from the current republican House budget, which Graves supports, and which will increase the deficit by $6 trillion in a decade.

So much for caring about the deficit, but math never got in the way of good propaganda from Graves’ oil industry benefactors.

But, well, there’s one thing I neglected to discuss. Graves’ proposal also does propose a registration fee on gas vehicles… so it’s being fair, right?

Well, not quite, because the proposed tax on gas vehicles would be $20 per year, compared to the ten times higher EV tax of $200 per year, despite that both vehicles have similar effect on roads. The gas vehicle registration fee would only start in 2031, seemingly giving gas vehicles a free ride until then… but in fact the $20 fee would represent a decrease in total taxes paid by gas cars, because the suggestion is that the $20 fee should replace the gas tax, which Graves refers to as “broken” (perhaps because it hasn’t been raised in over 30 years, hmm?).

So it turns out we didn’t even have to do that math above about how these EV fees are unfair – because Graves is telling us, right out, that he wants to tax EVs at ten times the rate of gas cars.

Note that $20/yr would represent about a 4-5x decrease in tax paid per gas vehicle, compared to current levels, which means that government revenue would drop by a similar amount, while costs for construction are likely to continue to go up. This means that the deficits related to spending to fix the US’ broken infrastructure would increase drastically – but then again, we already know from their budget proposal that republicans love deficits.

What is perhaps most surprising is that one of the top supporters of the republican party that has proposed this massive tax hike on electric vehicles and giveaway to gas cars is Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, the largest EV company in America.

Musk gave, and continues to give, hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money, most of which came from his company that sells electric vehicles, to the party that wants to put disproportionately high taxes on those EVs. This does not seem particularly productive to Tesla’s mission, but it’s not the first bad business decision we’ve seen from him lately as he seems to have forgotten about that mission.

If Graves, or the republicans, or anyone wanted to actually solve this problem, the actual fairest solution remains a mileage tax on all vehicles, scaling significantly based on the weight of the vehicle involved (at least partially recognizing the fourth power law that makes heavier vehicles worse on roads); and a separate fee to account for the unpriced externalities of pollution created by vehicles, relative to the amount that each vehicle creates and the costs they foist on the populace – as proposed in the past by old guard republican leadership, along with basically every economist and Elon Musk himself.

To reduce your carbon footprint and live more sustainably, consider going solar. EnergySage is a free service that connects you with trusted, reputable installers in your area – without having to give up your phone number until you select an installer. Your personalized solar quotes are easy to compare online and you’ll get access to unbiased Energy Advisors to help you every step of the way through EnergySage. Get started today! – ad*