Uber, the world’s most valuable private tech company, has had a bad few months. Between allegations of sexism and sexual harassment; a federal inquiry over its use of a tool to evade authorities and regulators; a Trump-related P.R. crisis that resulted in some 200,000 people deleting their accounts; a viral video of C.E.O. Travis Kalanick blowing up at a driver; a lawsuit that accuses Uber of colluding to illegally obtain proprietary technology; and an internal investigation that is expected to yield even more bad headlines, the ride-hailing company is not the invincible behemoth it was last year. According to The Information, Uber’s secondary market value has fallen 15 percent, from about $70 billion to $50 billion.

And yet the world continues to rub salt in Kalanick’s wounds. According to an analyst note published by Morgan Stanley, Waymo—the Google-owned driverless car start-up currently suing Uber for allegedly stealing its trade secrets—could be worth $70 billion if it was spun out as its own company. Equity analysts Brian Nowak and Adam Jones conclude that Waymo’s new partnership with Lyft will allow the company to get more mileage—and more data—out of its cars, allowing it to improve its product faster. At a $70 billion valuation, Waymo could be worth more as a private company than Uber is today.

The back-of-the-envelope math is somewhat sketchy. Nowak and Jones argue that Waymo could boost Google’s market capitalization by as much as 12 percent (or about $80 billion, as of Tuesday afternoon) if the company’s vehicles made up 1 percent of miles driven globally by 2030. At the same time, they suggest that Google parent company Alphabet would be better off spinning Waymo off into its own distinct business, allowing Alphabet to protect itself from potential litigation as the still embryonic autonomous vehicle industry wrestles with regulatory issues to get off the ground. “Even assuming Waymo’s cars are involved in 90 percent fewer crashes than the average human driven car [they] would still involve 5 per year (roughly 1 every 10 weeks),” Nowak and Jones write. “One could argue that even in the event Waymo’s cars are an order of magnitude safer than today’s human driven cars GOOGL may not want to test the US court system for the precedent.”

Either way, Alphabet would be well-placed to capitalize on Waymo as driverless tech becomes a bigger part of the $2 trillion automotive market. As Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen told Bloomberg View last week, “Car C.E.O.s, the new generation, they’re all working on [driverless technology].” Nobody wants to be the “Nokia of cars,” he added, noting how phone manufactures eventually lost out to smartphone software makers.

Waymo, which is among a handful of tech companies racing to develop autonomous vehicle hardware and software, could leapfrog past Uber and other tech rivals if its technology proves to be more advanced. “Of course, it’s very possible that Waymo could be very big, especially when autonomous vehicles become ubiquitous,” Anand Sanwal, C.E.O. of analytics firm CB Insights told me. At the same time, the driverless car space is getting cutthroat. “Driverless is a very crowded field with lots of folks trying to get a piece of it. We’ve counted 44 big corporations working on autonomous vehicle projects presently,” Sanwal added. “So it’s not a foregone conclusion that Google/Waymo win this.”