Aug. 18, 2025 | Automakers see future prospects degrade; ‘The Rideshare Guy’ Harry Campbell

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Welcome to Daily Drive. For Monday, August 18th, 2025, I'm Kellan Walker in Las Vegas.

Today on the show, automakers see future prospects getting worse.

Cleveland Cliffs inks a multi-year deal to supply U.S. car makers amid tariffs,

and Lucid offers a lease discount to cover repealed EV tax credits.

Plus, we'll hear from the rideshare guy, Harry Campbell, about the momentum behind

robotaxies and partnerships with traditional platforms such as Uber and Lyft.

Why does Wiimo need Uber? There's an argument to be made that maybe they don't,

so if I'm Uber, I'm going to work like hell to get these other partners right up to that Wiimo level.

Let's run through all the news you need to know to keep up in the auto industry.

Automaker executives are fairly upbeat about their current business conditions,

but they're less enthusiastic about the future. That's according to the inaugural

Auto Industry Confidence Index by Automotive News. Tariffs and the uncertainty surrounding

them was the biggest issue that automaker respondents cited as holding down current sentiment.

They also noted suppressed confidence among customers, product planning issues related to

electrification and supply chain issues. Cleveland Cliffs has signed fixed price

contracts to supply steel to multiple U.S. car makers for up to three years.

That's an unusually long time, and it signals the auto industry is guarding against

possible pressure from inflation. The new two- and three-year deals are for industry standard

sheet steel. That's according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke with Bloomberg News.

Another source told Bloomberg that General Motors is one of the car makers to agree

to a multi-year pact. It's not clear what kinds of prices Cleveland Cliffs and automakers

agreed on, and Lucid is offering a $7,500 lease discount on its gravity crossover in the fourth

quarter that will cover the loss of the federal EV tax credit that expires at the end of September.

The company says the credit applies to customers who place a lease order by September 30th

and take delivery between October 1st and the end of the year. The three-row crossover

has a starting price of $96,500 with shipping. And those are today's headlines. You can find

more details on all those stories at AutoNews.com. Joining me now to talk about our first-ever

auto industry confidence index and what automaker executives are telling us is our own Larry

Velquette. Larry, welcome back to Daily Drive. Thanks, Cal. Great to be here.

So, Larry Legend, first off, tell us about this new quarterly index and why we're doing this.

So, the reason we're doing this is automotive news has a very specific place in this industry,

right? It's one of the very few nexus points in the entire industry, one of the very few places

where the whole industry, this whole vast global industry meets, right? Where the retail world

meets, where the manufacturing and suppliers meet. And so, we thought there are a number of different

metrics, different measurements that try to capture what different segments of the industry

are doing at any given time. But nobody really takes full temperature of the entire industry.

And we have the capacity to do that because of that position. So, we came up with this

auto industry confidence index. It's a quarterly survey. We just did our first one and we're going

to have them in subsequent quarters. And what it is, it gives us a nice check on the sentiment

of the industry and its various sectors at any given point, as well as we're asking

the executives that responded and there were several hundred of them to look six months

into the future, not only for their own company, but for the industry as a whole.

Well, what were your biggest takeaways from what we heard from automaker executives?

So, what was really interesting, automakers had the second highest score in terms of how they feel

about where they were at the present time, right? They only trailed financial services organizations

for how well they felt they were doing right in the moment. But like every other sector of

the industry, they saw their prospects degrading over the next six months. And what was really

interesting was when we delved into what they were telling us, the only real place where they

felt good was production capacity utilization, right? We asked them about supply chain. We asked

them about labor costs and availability, the regulatory and policy requirements, i.e. tariffs and

cafe, et cetera. We asked them about gross margins on vehicle production

and retail demand. The only place that they felt better than neutral was production capacity

utilization. And if you think about those different categories that I just laid out,

production capacity utilization is the only one that they control themselves,

right? They're not beholden to outside forces to a great degree. Those other inputs, they're

dealing with tariffs and they're changing regulatory landscape, labor, even retail demand with

consumers. They have some levers they can pull, they can try to pull,

but it's a challenge. The only place where they felt even remotely comfortable was production

capacity utilization. Good stuff, Larry. I can't wait to dig a little deeper into this index.

Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you, Kel. We'll also talk with our own Mark Homer and

John Irwin this week on the show about their coverage of franchise dealer and supplier executive

confidence. You can find all of our coverage of the Auto Industry Confidence Index at

autonews.com. Coming up, Harry Campbell, aka the ride share guy, talks about the momentum behind

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Welcome back to Daily Drive. I'm Kellan Walker. Harry Campbell is known in the mobility world

as the ride share guy. He's a ride hailing driver himself and says he's been studying

the ride share industry since 2014. His YouTube channel features his insights as well as interviews

with everyone from Uber and Lyft drivers to CEOs for ride share companies. Campbell spoke with our

own Pete Bigelow on Shift, a podcast about mobility. They talked about the influx of new

driverless deployments and how self-driving partnerships are disrupting the status quo

in the ride hailing realm. Here's a piece of their conversation.

First, I want to ask you about the big new RoboTaxi partnership announced within the last few weeks

and I'm going to confess I did not see this one coming from Lucid Neuro in Uber. That's

left my head spinning a bit. Really interesting combination of automaker, software provider

and network. So what do you make of this one, Harry? Yeah, I wrote about this recently

in my driverless digest newsletter and honestly, I spent a lot of time writing and I wouldn't even

say writing. I would say thinking about this, rewriting, re-editing, sending it to a couple

people for feedback because we start to get to Lucid and even Neuro. I think it's maybe a bit

out of my wheelhouse from, I'm not an expert on OEM. So I think that I looked at more

quantitative, like, hey, Lucid's stock price jumped at the end of the day. It was up 36%.

Okay, seems like investors at least thought that this was a great deal for Lucid. More

quantitatively, I think the company only produced 3,300 vehicles last quarter and now,

if you look at this partnership, it was 20,000 vehicles divided by six years. That's close to

that number 3,300. So it's going to be basically one-fourth of their production. And I think

what was really interesting, I have to admit, I didn't know this beforehand, but I did find

that this 8K, so this is a filing that Uber needs to make with the SEC. See, I'm not a

real journalist. I kind of just go based off of personal experience. I'm not a real journalist

like you, Pete and others. You're doing all the same things. I'm going to call you a journalist.

I wouldn't give yourself any caveats there. All right. So what was interesting about this deal

was Uber actually, it was a minimum purchase order and contractual, so per this 8K. And

I feel like every single announcement, I'm not that I'm pessimistic, but I feel like any time

something isn't announced, you can almost assume that it's kind of the pessimistic side, right?

Oh, Amazon's going to buy a million cars in 40 years or whatever it might be, right? And it's

like, okay, how many buy when? Is there a contract, right? And if that isn't explicitly

announced, I think that's sort of where I say, I think you can almost

say I actually assume that it's the opposite, right? And this one was different, right? And so I

thought that was interesting. Uber, I think it still shows that they might have a couple outs

if they're not able to get the technology or the vehicles to the right place. But yeah,

I thought this was an interesting announcement because it is a very high-end vehicle. The Jaguar

iPace that Waymo uses is a $75,000 MSRP car. They're looking at partnering with Hyundai on

the Ioniq 5. The Chinese vehicle Zika is out there being tested all over the place. And I don't

know if they're going to be able to get many more of those, but obviously that's a much lower end

kind of vehicle. So the direction that other companies like Waymo are going are cheaper.

Here, Uber announces this huge deal, $1.2 billion lucid gravities, $80,000 car,

20,000 vehicles, that is a much bigger fleet than Waymo has right now at just 1,500 vehicles

and super high-end. So I don't know, there's a lot going on there, but I thought it was

interesting for those reasons. There are. There are. That was going to ask you about that aspect

of here. You're putting a much more expensive vehicle onto the Uber network. Do you see this as

something Uber would offer as a Uber Black or some sort of premium tier service?

Yeah. I think that was the most obvious play, that this would be a high-end option.

I mean, right now, I don't think a lot of people say, oh, I love Waymo. It's so great.

I tell people, you're getting into a really nice car. Don't forget that. The average Uber car is an

Uber X, Toyota Prius, a few years old. I think I looked it up the other day. It's $30,000 value.

So $75,000 versus $30,000, that's just the product you're sitting in alone. That's before

you even consider that, hey, there's no driver and all the great aspects that Waymo brings there.

So I do think there will be people willing right now. Waymo customers have actually shown.

I like their price point right now. It's about there was a report from a company called

Obi, and they said that Waymo is priced about 30% to 40% higher than Uber and Lyft in San Francisco,

and riders are willing to wait longer. So if I'm Waymo, why would I drop the price? I kind of like

having that high-end option for people who are willing to pay, who love the product.

And so I think you could kind of make that argument here with this Uber deal, where,

you know, Uber, they're not dumb. They know what they're doing. So I'm sure that they,

you know, kind of crunch the numbers. I'm guessing that they either think the

market is going to be so huge in six years, or they've got some outs, or maybe they don't have to

buy, you know, how these legal contracts can be. Maybe there's something where if they don't, you

know, absolutely hit every single metric and number, they only have to get 10,000 or 5,000,

whatever it might be. But yeah, 20,000 vehicles at $80,000 a pop seems like a lot to me. I would

be very surprised if they had that many on the road in six, seven, eight years.

No question. And kind of to mirror your skepticism from a moment or two ago, I definitely felt like,

you know, I'm old enough to remember the days when Uber said it was going to deploy 20,000

RoboTaxies in a partnership with Volvo. And I think that was 2016 or 2017.

Right. I should do an article about all the broken promises.

Right. Yes. Yes. I think, you know, you're exactly right. You know, Waymo,

the leader has 1,500 or so today. I'll believe 20,000 when I see them out there, but it's ambitious.

Yeah. And I think that's where it's this interesting conundrum, because if you look at

all the Waymo stats, I just featured, you know, they just hit 100 million paid driverless miles

and, you know, exponential growth on vehicles and number of miles and rides and everything.

If you look at that on its own, you know, you would sort of say that, wow,

Waymo is doing great. They're crushing it. But they only have 1,500 vehicles.

You know, I talked about, you know, Uber is doing 10 million trips a day in the United States

versus Waymo at just tens of thousands. Right. So they still have a ways to go.

And I think that's kind of where it's this interesting inflection point, because even

though Waymo is so exciting, they're still a very small percent and it's hard to grow.

It's hard to scale. I mean, lift themselves. They actually have a program called FlexDrive.

I know you interviewed Jeremy Bird in the past. I can't remember if you mentioned this or

not, but they own and operate 15,000 vehicles themselves. So they're the biggest fleet

owner right now, you know, you've never even heard about. So I think that is kind of

what makes it interesting. How does this deal fit into Uber's AV strategy overall from your

vantage point? It seems to be coming into sharper focus with each passing week in partnership

here. But how do you see this lining up for Uber? Yeah, I think they've actually been

pretty clear with their AV strategy. Dara has been out there, their CEO, Dara Kosrashahi,

Uber CEO has been out there sort of beating the drum at conferences and on podcasts and in the media

that they are basically open arms to everyone in the AV space. I think the argument that they are

making to AV players is that we have a ton of demand. We have all the millions of monthly

active users. You guys do the AV technology. You come to us, put them on our platform.

We know how to drive demand. We know how to do a lot of the back end stuff, the fleet operations,

you know, the behind the scenes, you know, all the nitty gritty parts of actually running a ride

hail business, you know, airport permitting, for example, right, all of that stuff, which I think

Uber has a fair case for it is a lot tougher than maybe meets the eye. And so I think it's

been pretty clear that they are basically open and willing to work with anyone, everyone,

Waymo, Neuro. They've been, you know, kind of courting Tesla and Elon Musk for a while,

but it seems like they want to go at it on their own, no shocker there. But and I think they also

have a compelling case. So I think that has been sort of Uber's AV strategy. And then the other

interesting thing is they're actually starting to make significant investments in companies.

So this deal particularly, they did $300 million investment into Lucid. And then I think Neuro's

president didn't say the number, but he said that Uber would also invest at least

$300 million into Neuro. That's kind of a significant investment. And so you can kind

of think about why is Uber, you know, they're open to partners, but now they're actually kind of

trying to move the needle. I think the reason is they benefit from a fragmented AV market.

But right now, there's only Waymo, you can only get a ride with Waymo. So I think,

you know, a lot of people have asked me the question, and we could get into this,

but why does Waymo need Uber? And, you know, there's an argument to be made that maybe

they don't. So if I'm Uber, I'm going to work like hell to sort of get these other

partners right up to that Waymo level so that now I've got other AV players, because I don't

think customers are going to download, they've already got Uber and Lyft on their phone. Okay,

I download Waymo. Maybe I download the Tesla app. Am I going to download Zooks? Am I going to

download Neuro? Am I going to download May Mobility? I got to download all these AV players

that are only operating in a few cities in warm weather places. And, you know,

I think it's much easier to just go to the Uber app and, you know, if an AV is available,

like in Austin and Atlanta, I grab one. If not, I get matched with a human driver and

I'm on my way.

Harry Campbell is a rideshare driver and host of the rideshare guy on YouTube.

You can hear his full conversation with her own Pete Bigelow on Shift,

a podcast about mobility. That's available now wherever you get your podcast.

That's daily drive for today. I'm Kellan Walker. Thanks to Automotive News executive producer

Jake Neer, as well as our own Larry Velquette and Lauren Siliff for their reporting for

today's podcast. You can get the latest news on rubble taxis, industry confidence,

and everything happening in the auto industry at AutoNews.com. Come back tomorrow for a

conversation with NADA executive vice president of public policy, Paul Mitre.

It's been super active and really a lot of public policy accomplishments have been

present in the first half of the year that we really think will benefit

franchise dealers and certainly their customers.

We'd love to hear from you. Let us know what you think of the show and the topics we cover today.

Send us an email at dailydriveatautonews.com or leave us a voicemail at 313-444-2774.

And if you enjoy the podcast, remember to like, leave a review, and subscribe so you never miss an episode.

Aug. 18, 2025 | Automakers see future prospects degrade; ‘The Rideshare Guy’ Harry Campbell

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