Waymo: Costly ride
If you’re an Uber driver and you hear a strange noise at the back of your vehicle, it may be the sound of time’s winged chariot hurrying near in the form of a giant fleet of robotaxis that is lining up to automate you into oblivion.
The news is not all bad for Tesla drivers, with Elon Musk promising that the company is within spitting distance of the gold medal situation of allowing its customers to send their cars off to do an autonomous shift while they put their feet on the sofa and watch the Test match, piña colada in hand.
Alphabet’s Waymo is leading the way with the technology, clocking more than a quarter of a million rides per week in five US cities. Tesla has launched a service in Austin, and Amazon’s Zoox is planning to launch operations in Las Vegas by the end of the year.
This is clearly a game that requires deep pockets to play — Waymo is estimated to have raised $11bn of funding to date but refuses to comment on the service’s profitability (read: not by a long chalk).
Waymo uses Jaguar I-Pace SUVs equipped with sensors that harness radar and lidar (light detection and ranging) to map the area around it, and it seems to have taken the approach of getting the safety aspects sorted out first and bringing the unit costs down later. It stresses that its systems are never going to slip behind the wheel after a couple of cocktails or send a cheeky text from the fast lane.
Puma: Spit and polish
It’s not unusual for an incoming CEO to announce the need for a cleaning of the Augean stables soon after their arrival; Arthur Hoeld has certainly done that after taking the hot seat at Puma from Arne Freundt, whose 2½ years at the helm saw the company’s shares plummet 50%.
Puma’s third profit warning of the year spoke of a sharp deterioration in trading conditions that would result in a full-year operating loss and a low double-digit drop in revenue.
Hoeld was previously head of global sales at adidas, and the town of Herzogenaurach in Bavaria where the two sportswear giants are headquartered appears to have become something of a poacher’s paradise: Bjørn Gulden was the boss at Puma before Freundt and now heads its three-striped rival.
The two companies were spawned from a huge punch-up between the Dassler brothers in the aftermath of World War 2, after which they never spoke again and ended up buried at other ends of the same cemetery.
Adolf took the sensible view that an eponymous brand was a little tainted in 1948 and instead used his nickname Adi to create adidas, while Rudolf went for a more athletic approach with Puma.
Adidas has markedly outperformed Puma of late, with strong demand for its retro trainers, though both companies will be hit by the impact of whatever tariffs the US ends up imposing.
Hoeld said that “2025 will be a reset for Puma and 2026 will be a transition year for us”. Long-suffering shareholders will certainly be hoping he manages to get performance back on track.
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