Driverless Cars Take the Fast Lane

Our Head of U.S. Internet Research Brian Nowak and Andrew Percoco, Head of North America Autos and Shared Mobility Research, discuss why adoption of autonomous vehicles is likely to gain traction this year.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Brian Nowak: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Brian Nowak, Morgan Stanley's Head of U.S. Internet Research. Andrew Percoco: And I'm Andrew Percoco, Head of North America Autos and Shared Mobility Research. Brian Nowak: Today we're going to talk about why we think 2026 could be a game changer and a point of inflection for autonomous vehicles and autonomous driving. It's Thursday, January 8th at 10am in New York. So, Andrew, let's get started. Have you ridden an autonomous car before? Andrew Percoco: Yeah, absolutely. Took a few in L.A., took one in San Francisco not too long ago. Pretty seamless and interesting experience to say the least. Brian Nowak: Any accidents or awkward left turns? Or did you feel pretty comfortable the whole time? Andrew Percoco: No, I felt pretty comfortable the whole time. No edge cases, no issues. So, all five star reviews for me. Brian Nowak: Andrew, we think your answer is going to be a lot more common as we go throughout 2026. As autonomous availability scales throughout more and more cities. Things are changing quickly. And we kind of look at our model on a city-by-city basis. We think that overall availability for autonomous driving in the U.S. is going to go from about 15 percent of the urban population at the end of 2025 to over 30 percent of the urban population by year end 2026. Andrew Percoco: Yeah, totally agree. Brian, I'm just curious. Like maybe layout for us, you know, what you're expecting for 2026 in more detail in terms of city rollouts, players involved and what we should be watching for throughout the next, you know, nine to 12 months. Brian Nowak: We have multiple new cities across the United States where we expect Waymo, Tesla, Zoox, and others to expand their fleet, expand autonomous driving availability, and ultimately make the product a lot more available and commonplace for people. There are also new potential edge cases that we think we're going to see. We're going to have our first snow cities with Waymo expected to launch in Washington, D.C.; potentially in Colorado, potentially in Michigan. So, we could have proof of concept that autonomous driving can also work in snow throughout [20]26 and into 2027 as well. So, in all, we think as we sit here at the start of [20]26, one year from now, there's going to be a lot more people who are going to say: I'm using an autonomous car to drive me around in my everyday practice. Andrew Percoco: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I guess, what do you think the drivers are to get us there, right? There's also some concerns about safety, adoption, you know, cost structure. What are the main drivers that really make this growth algorithm work and really scales the robotaxi business for some of the key players? Brian Nowak: Part of it is regulatory. You know, we are still in a situation where we are dealing with state-by-state regulatory approvals needed for these autonomous vehicles and autonomous fleets to be built. We'll see if that changes, but for now, it's state by state regulation. After that, it comes down to technology, and each of the platforms needs to prove that their autonomous offerings are significantly safer than human driving. That is also linked to regulatory approval. And so, when we think about fleets becoming safer, proving that they can drive people more miles without having an accident than even a human can – we think about the autonomous players then scaling up their fleets. To make the cars and fleets available to more people. That is sort of the flywheel that we think is going to play out throughout 2026. The other part that we're very focused on across all the players from Waymo to Tesla to Zoox and others is the cost of the cars. And there is a big difference between the cost of a Waymo per mile versus the cost of a Tesla per mile. And we think one of the tension points, Andrew, that you can, you can talk about a little bit here, is the difference in the safety data and what we see on Tesla as of now versus Waymo – versus the cost advantage that Tesla has. So, talk about the cost advantage that Tesla has through all this as of right now. Andrew Percoco: Yeah, definitely. So, you know, as you mentioned, Tesla today has a very clear cost advantage over many of the robotaxi peers that they're competing with. A lot of that's driven by their vertical integration, and their sensor suite, right? So, their vehicle, the cost of their vehicle is – call it $35,000. You've got the camera only sensor approach. So, you don't have lidar, expensive lidar, and radar in the vehicle. And that's just really driven a meaningful cost improvement and cost advantage. On our math about a 40 percent cost ...