Hundreds of Waymo’s newest robotaxis have been photographed massed in a Southern California port lot without any of the sensors that make them drive themselves — as the company continues expanding its fleet with China-built vehicles. A user posting as ‘Full_Astern’ posted the photographs on Sunday to the r/waymo forum showing hundreds of pale-blue vans, roofs bare, parked at the Los Angeles Port. The Ojai is built by Zeekr, the premium marque of China’s Geely Holding Group, on the SEA-M platform at Ningbo, Zhejiang. The US Commerce Department’s connected-vehicle rule takes effect for model year 2027 and bars vehicle-connectivity and driver-assistance hardware or software sourced from China or Russia. Waymo’s answer is to import the shells stripped of Chinese connectivity hardware and sensors entirely. The vehicles are shipped to a facility in Mesa, Arizona, operated with the Canadian giant Magna, where Waymo installs its own US-designed compute and sensor suite: 13 cameras, four lidar units, six radar units, an array of external audio receivers and a 17-megapixel imager. Waymo’s regulatory framing is that what arrives is not a connected vehicle at all — a rolling chassis, a glider. “Those Chinese vehicles, the Geely vehicles, have no smarts, no connectivity,” Chief Safety Officer Mauricio Peña has said earlier this year. The company has also said Zeekr receives no access to its autonomous driving technology, sensor data or rider information. The relationship runs deeper than an off-the-shelf purchase — Waymo and Zeekr announced a partnership in 2021 and co-developed the vehicle on the SEA-M platform over three years — but the hardware and the data stay on the American side. The Political Risk None of that has settled the question in Washington. A bipartisan Senate bill would bar the Zeekr-built chassis by 2027. Zeekr is a Geely subsidiary, and Geely’s Polestar brand