Inside Waymo's Robotaxi Factory
The Analog #134
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Interesting Links 🏭
Curious what goes on inside a self-driving car factory like Waymo’s? Their new Arizona facility, run with automotive contract manufacturer Magna, converts about six Jaguar I-PACEs a day into fully autonomous vehicles. It’s a strange inversion of the usual flow: the factory’s input is already a finished car. Vehicles arrive with body panels pre-cut for sensors, bumpers removed, and protective tape marking install zones. Technicians manually add wiring harnesses, onboard computers, and Waymo’s full sensor stack including the rooftop lidar “top hat.” Each car is then calibrated, test-driven, and synced back to Mountain View before deployment. It’s wild to think in 2025 that the bottleneck for autonomous vehicles isn’t software anymore, but manufacturing capacity.
If autonomous driving still feels speculative, consider this: Waymo now has more market share than Lyft in San Francisco at 27%. With a fleet of 1,500 vehicles, they’re doing around 250,000 rides per week.
Use topology optimization for parts you can actually machine. A new integration connects DTU’s open-source TopOpt solver directly to a CAD environment, then rebuilds the output as clean geometry optimized for 2.5-axis or 3-axis milling. Instead of producing mesh-based shapes better suited for additive techniques like metal 3D printing, it generates geometry that fits within conventional machining constraints.
For anyone unfamiliar with topology optimization: it’s a tool that helps figure out where material should go in a part. You give it a rough shape, some loads and constraints, and it spits out a geometry that maximizes stiffness or minimizes weight. Typically popular in aerospace and robotics where reducing weight without compromising strength is critical, and where low-volume, high-cost manufacturing can handle complex geometries.
Three big booms for supersonic flight. FAA is moving to allow commercial overland supersonic again, with new noise-based certification standards. For context, the original Concorde flights (1970s–2000s) were restricted to subsonic speeds over land and only accelerated to supersonic over the ocean. This 2019 NASA report charts how humans perceive sonic booms in regards to the Concorde and X-59, NASA’s quiet boom supersonic research aircraft. Startups like Boom that are looking to commercialize supersonic flight again are aiming for a target of 85 PLdB, roughly a quarter as loud as the Concorde (~105 PLdB). (Rule of thumb: every 10 dB drop cuts perceived loudness in half.)
When you send a plastic part out for injection molding, it’s almost like putting it in a black box, only to return 8–12 weeks later as a finished component. This injection molding Gantt chart template by Fictiv shows what’s actually going on behind the scenes: mold design reviews, steel procurement, rough and finish machining, EDM, polishing, mold fitting, and a few rounds of test shots. At its core, tooling means cutting the negative shape of your part into blocks of hardened steel where every surface and detail has to be machined with precision. For simpler parts, a core and cavity set might be enough. Once you introduce undercuts or side features, the mold needs sliders, lifters, and other moving inserts to release the part without damage.
How do you stop a battery fire on a ship where vehicles are packed in tight and there’s no easy way to move them? In Sweden, some ferries are using a system called Battery Briner: a chilled 23.3% saltwater solution held at -19°C, designed to suppress EV thermal runaways in enclosed spaces. It ties into the ship’s existing chiller and uses thermal cameras to detect early signs of a fire. When triggered, it floods the vehicle interior through a dedicated nozzle. Cool thermal video feed here of a full-scale test.
A couple fun links to round out the week:
Loctite 222MS threadlocker is trending on TikTok as a fix for jewelry (specifically Cartier Love Bracelets), with tiny screws that keep working themselves loose.
Mihir from the Hardware FYI team recently went on a podcast to talk about machine shops, startup stories, and how we actually got started writing the newsletter!
Sponsored: Allspice is hosting a live workshop on 6/12 covering seven ways to improve hardware design productivity, from smarter reviews to better cross-team collaboration.
Workshop: Injection Molding Defects (and How to Design Around Them)
Curious to learn about plastic part design in practice?
We’re bringing in Robbie Long, a molding expert at Fictiv, to talk through how common injection molding defects happen and what you can do in the design phase to prevent them.
It’s part failure analysis, part design review. Workshop on 6/26 – register here.
Startup News 🚀
Anduril announced a $2.5B Series G round at a $30.5B valuation (at that scale, it’s less a funding round and more a sign they’re approaching the size of traditional defense primes). The company says it’ll use the capital to support M&A, international hiring, new product development, and expansion of its Arsenal-1 facility in Ohio—a software-driven factory built for high-rate production of autonomous systems like loitering munitions and air defense drones. The round was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.
Impulse Space has raised a $300M Series C round, one of the largest private rounds in space to date, for its orbital rideshare programs. Founded by former SpaceX propulsion lead Tom Mueller, Impulse has $200M in signed contracts across its two vehicles: Mira, an in-space hosting platform for LEO delivery, and Helios, a cryogenic kick stage for fast transfers to GEO and beyond. Orbital rideshare lets multiple satellites share a single launch and get dropped off at different orbits while cutting costs and speeding up delivery timelines.
Assemble Labs launched with a $1.25M pre-seed round led by Menlo Ventures. Not a lot of detail yet on what the product actually does, but the startup’s building an AI copilot for electrical engineers, meant to “boost productivity and catch late-stage errors.”
Swap Robotics raised a strategic round from Silicon Ranch, one of the largest solar and agrivoltaics operators in the U.S. The two companies already work together: Swap’s electric robots handle vegetation management at several Silicon Ranch sites. The company builds autonomous systems for utility-scale solar farms, covering tasks like mowing, panel transport, and installation. The company previously raised $7M in 2023 and $3M in 2024.
SpaceForge raised a $30M Series A round to manufacture semiconductors in space, where microgravity and extreme cold allow for fewer defects during crystal formation. After losing its first satellite in the 2023 Virgin Orbit failure, the company plans to launch again later this year. Their system includes a patented umbrella-like re-entry shield that enables controlled descent and ocean recovery. The company is one of a few startups like Varda Space pushing to make high-purity, space-grown manufacturing a reality.
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Summit Interconnect – Quick-turn complex rigid, flex, and rigid-flex PCBs.
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Formlabs Fuse – Office-ready SLS printer for in-house nylon production with industrial part quality.
Fictiv – On-demand custom manufacturing from prototype to production.
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Wow six jobs a day out of the Waymo facility, wonder what the unlock is to achieve more scale when it is needed? Maybe their Gen 6 with Zeekr will be designed to have lidar, compute, harness, etc integrated into the Bill of Process at source rather than a retro-fit facility?