Top Story of the Week

Bolt picks NVIDIA’s Alpamayo Stack to drive its European robotaxis (link).

Related: How NVIDIA Alpamayo Is Accelerating Autonomous Driving with Matt Cragun (link).

Alphabet’s Waymo plans first Canada robotaxi service in Toronto in 2028 (link, no paywall).

‘Today marks an exciting global milestone for Waymo: we are officially laying the groundwork to bring our autonomous, all-electric, ride-hailing service to Spain, beginning with the Region of Madrid’ (link). Waymo is really on a tear with expansion right now. Exciting times for the industry.

DC vs AVs

Despite rising backlash, D.C. robotaxi bill set for council vote (link).

Allen's bill, introduced last April, would propose several guardrails, like initially setting a 200-vehicle limit for robotaxi operators and waiting until 2028 to begin the commercial rollout. Notably, the bill would charge companies a "vehicle miles traveled" fee. Its proceeds would help support rideshare drivers facing job displacement and funding Metro.

‘The Mayor’s Office has denied The Washington Sun’s appeal for DDOT data showing how many times AVs have crashed while testing here. The good news is that Waymo gave us the data D.C. won’t..’ (link). Well isn’t this ironic? Cities are constantly demanding more transparency from AV companies, but in this case Waymo was more transparent than D.C. itself. D.C. really seems to be mishandling the AV issue from multiple angles.

Group fighting to block Waymo in D.C. has mysterious origin, backers (link, no paywall). This seems a bit shady. Obviously, folks are free to protest robotaxis, but I do think we should know who’s behind those efforts.

The organizer was the People First Transportation Alliance… The group operates in Philadelphia and New York, according to its website, and describes itself as a “national coalition” that opposes robotaxis because of concerns about job loss and public safety. The Transportation Alliance lists 13 individuals and organizations as “founding members” on its website. But four of them told The Washington Post they are not.

“People First Transportation Alliance”? Did they have to pick the most communist name possible? 😂 (link)

‘New: A poll backed by some of the anti-Waymo labor unions finds 58 percent of DC voters opposed to AVs and 22 percent in support’ (link).

Related: Every City Comes Around on Robotaxis Once the Rides Start (link).

Other Stuff

Walmart drone deliveries take flight in Charlotte area, raising privacy, safety questions (link).

Walmart has launched drone delivery service at seven locations in the Charlotte area… The service is operated by Wing, a drone delivery company that says its aircraft are designed to navigate autonomously and deliver packages quickly while minimizing risks to people on the ground.

Scoop: Bedrock Robotics raising $600M to automate construction (link, no paywall).

Wayve, Stellantis and Nvidia partner on autonomy in France (link).

GM targets ‘eyes-off’ autonomous driving for pickups, SUVs (link, no paywall).

Tesla is prepping a Cybercab onslaught (link).

Tesla says it is preparing to launch its shiny gold Cybercab in new markets outside its home of Austin, Texas, in a bid to “literally take over every part of terrestrial transportation.”

Related: First impressions of CyberCab (link).

Rivian buys world model startup to accelerate self-driving ambitions (link).

Rivian has acquired Third Dimension, a U.K. startup founded by veterans of the gaming and AV industries that uses AI to turn images and videos into lifelike 3D worlds. Rivian isn’t getting into gaming, but it does want to leverage Third Dimension’s technology to turn real-world data into 3D worlds that can accelerate the development of its advanced driver-assistance features and the self-driving system for the robotaxis it plans to supply to Uber.

Related: ‘I went for a ride through NYC with Rivian's CEO, RJ Scaringe. We talked about autonomy’ (link).

Designing Charging Hubs for Autonomous Fleets

We are excited to partner with Terawatt this week, one of the leading charging infrastructure providers. To learn more about Terawatt’s nationwide real estate portfolio and track record of cutting cost per mile for AV fleet operators, reach out to Peter Cohen at peter@terawattinfrastructure.com

‘Starting today, Las Vegas travelers can catch their next flight at Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) via safe, reliable, and magical Waymo rides. Current Waymo riders in Las Vegas now have airport access, and we’ll gradually welcome more riders over time before opening to everyone’ (link).

The Most Polite Trucker in America Is a Driverless 18-Wheeler (link, no paywall).

Google Maps now offers Waymo-transit connection! (link).

Santa Monica moves toward deal to park Zoox robotaxis at Main Library (link).

Santa Monica expects the deal to generate at least $500,000 a year from Zoox simply paying to park its robotaxis at the Main Library. Zoox would charge the vehicles elsewhere.

Exclusive: Steve Cohen backs Hertz's robotaxi ambitions with $80M investment (link).

The rental car giant is establishing Oro Mobility as a standalone company and has secured $80 million in strategic equity funding from a group of investors including Cohen Private Ventures, the family office of New York Mets owner and Point72 founder Steve Cohen.

Exclusive / Waymo plans to quintuple its fleet (link).

The company, which currently has 4,000 cars, is looking to bring its total number to 8,000 by the end of the year and grow to 20,000 by the end of next year, according to people familiar with the matter.

Lucid Motors: Built in Arizona. Bound for the Bay. Another robotaxi shipment on the move as our fleet expands. Proud to keep delivering for our partners Uber and Nuro (link).

Gridwise Analytics Q2 AV Impact Report (link). Gridwise’s Brandon Sellers brought this up on our panel last week (link) in Austin at the Urban Autonomy Summit and it really stood out.

Uber’s take rate has actually gone down in AV cities compared to non-AV cities, which is a big win for consumers. More competition means lower prices for customers, while Gridwise’s prior data has also shown downward pressure on hourly driver earnings in several AV markets.

From Q2 2024 to Q2 2026, median platform fees per trip fell 13.8% across those cities combined. Nationwide, excluding AV cities, they rose 19.2%.

Unsupervised Tesla Robotaxi clips (link). Impressive!

Tesla says customers can add their own vehicles to the robotaxi fleet next year — will it happen? (link, no paywall).

According to Tesla VP for Autonomous Driving Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla owners will be able to add their own vehicles to the company’s robotaxi fleet in the second quarter of 2027

‘Halloween Waymo spotted’ (link).

Bot Auto taps Lenovo, Nvidia, pegs autonomy hardware at $50,000 (link).

Related: Inside Bot Auto’s Driverless Trucking Milestone with CEO Xiaodi Hou (link).

What else we're reading/listening to

Austin Urban Autonomy Summit 2026 Recap (link). Our latest recap pulls together the key takeaways from all three panels, covering the people and infrastructure needed to scale robotaxis, opportunities in autonomous trucking, and what it takes to demonstrate safety. Catch up on the discussion and watch the full panel recordings linked in it.

Scaling Driverless Trucks Safely with Aurora CSO Nat Beuse (link). Our latest podcast where we discuss Aurora’s safety case, lessons from fully driverless operations, and what changes as its fleet grows. We also discuss reliability, public trust and the hurdles to a federal framework for autonomous trucking, among other topics.

Unsupervised with Dave Ferguson: Giant Autonomous Machines with Bedrock Robotics’s Boris Sofman (link).

Related: The Road to Driverless Robotaxis with Nuro Co-CEO Dave Ferguson (link).

by Tom Riley: Waymo targets millions in London ad blitz (link).

AV Events

“Join us for an evening with Aurora's senior leaders! Join Chris Urmson (Co-Founder & CEO), Michael Samples (VP of Engineering Map Technology), Drew Steedly (VP of Engineering, Autonomy Action) and Pedro Urbina (Sr Director of ML Data Engine) for an intimate, open-floor discussion at Aurora’s Seattle office on Wednesday, November 4” (link).

AVs/Humans behaving badly

‘Loud knocking sound when driving in an incline’ (link).

Tesla driver says he was asleep on FSD when he hit CHP car, 2 officers hurt (link). If FSD was engaged, this would be a major issue, both for how the system handled an obvious freeway closure and for the driver-monitoring system if the driver was really asleep.

CHP hasn’t released the Tesla model or the software version. And for now, the driver’s word is the only evidence FSD was on. Tesla’s vehicle logs will settle that.

‘My Waymo was covered in vomit. Guess how they made it right’ (link). [NSFW]

Tesla driver using Full Self-Driving struck and killed a man crossing I-80 (link, no paywall). This one seems hard to pin on FSD. The pedestrian walked onto a highway at 2:30 am and the Tesla reportedly braked and swerved before hitting him. We don’t know how the average human driver would have handled the same situation, but it seems like FSD responded appropriately.

Woman arrested after blocking delivery robot in Philadelphia confrontation (link).

Shout-outs

Big thanks to TDD readers at HDI Global for referring new subscribers. If there’s someone you think would enjoy TDD, feel free to forward this email or use the referral button below, and we’ll make sure to shout out your company.

Refer a friend

Neat Jobs

Technical Product Manager, Development Vehicles at Wayve (link) via Rutvik Topkar.

Legal Counsel - Canada at Waymo (link) via Rabin Bhattacharya.

Research and Design partners at Waymo, via Megan Neese.

Project Manager – Autonomous Logistics at LOXO (link) via Lara Amini.

Job Moves

Nuro Appoints Rajiv Bhatia as Chief Product Officer to Drive Commercial Launches and Platform Expansion (link).

Devdatta Gangal: Rivian -> ? (link).

Jeff Chung: Meta -> Applied Intuition (link).

Trung Pham: NVIDIA -> Hyundai (link).

Until next week :)

-Harry

Across three panels, our speakers traded lessons on what it takes to move autonomy from pilots to everyday operations. They tackled everything from charging and depot infrastructure, permitting, and insurance to edge cases, labor, regulation and the economics of falling vehicle costs.

Panel 1: Building the AV Ecosystem

Deploying autonomous vehicles at scale depends on a wider ecosystem of fleet operators, infrastructure providers, insurers, customer support teams and policymakers. Guided by moderator Julia Pickar of NPR/Marketplace, the first panel looked at what it takes to build that ecosystem.

Why Texas?

Julia opened by asking why Texas has become the proving ground for AV deployment. Panelists pointed to consistent statewide rules, a deep talent base, lower costs and stable weather. But Ben Seidl, CEO and Co-founder of Autolane, offered the most vivid answer:

I think Austin is the only place on planet Earth where you can see all of these companies operating fully driverless, paid commercial activities in one place. So this, in my opinion, is absolutely the heartbeat of autonomy, and that’s why we’re here.

What is the biggest missing piece of the puzzle?

Several panelists named the physical layer: parking, charging and energy. Nick Allen, Head of AV Mobility at TaskUs, went a step further:

I do think the real estate and the charging is going to be a huge roadblock to get through, especially because you’re going to need multiple depots per city and per market. But as you look at it from a scale perspective, the ability to bring on partners that have the human infrastructure built in, with experience, safety management systems, protocols that follow compliance based on state regulations, is really going to be something needed as you see more and more companies scaling their product.

At what point do edge cases stop being edge cases?

Daniel Severin, Head of Global Mobility Insurance at The Ride Platform, brought the insurer's perspective. His argument was that unpredictability comes largely from people, and since people will be sharing the road with AVs for a long time, edge cases won’t disappear soon.

Don't take this the wrong way, because I love driving, but all the time there's us behind the steering wheel, there are always going to be those edge cases, because the autonomous vehicle is never going to be able to predict what we do. There'll be a day you get up in the morning and you're stressed. There'll be a day you rush into work and you take a different risk or a different chance. Whereas the autonomous vehicle is not programmed to take those risks or those chances, right?...Some of us in this room might be a bit crazy behind the wheel.

What are the biggest business opportunities as fleets scale?

Julia pointed out that what’s manageable at 100 vehicles becomes much harder at 10,000, and asked where the opportunities lie.

Ben was bullish, arguing that autonomy is deflationary and that vehicle costs will follow the path of phones and computers, ending up

So cheap, so ubiquitous, so high quality that delivery, I believe, is essentially going to be free.

Yulia Shveyko, Head of Public Affairs at Avride, agreed that costs will fall, and focused on what that means for unit economics. As vehicles and delivery robots trend toward the cost of their components, the main expense becomes the human labor needed to operate them. Avride's response is a three-word playbook, applied to everything from charging to tire changes, with the aim of automating as much as possible so costs keep dropping.

The main goals for us at Avride, when we operate our cars and robots, can be put into three words: automate, delegate, and innovate. Automate as much as you can: charging, cleaning, basic maintenance, software updates, log uploading. Then delegate what cannot be automated, for example changing the tires, some basic maintenance for the vehicles. And then keep innovating to automate more things, because this will significantly drop the cost.

Panel takeaways

1. Texas wins on consistent rules, talent, cost, weather and the sheer concentration of AV activity

2. Depots, charging and energy are emerging as the real constraint on scale, along with the people to run them

3. Edge cases won’t go away, and human unpredictability will outlast the transition

4. As vehicle costs fall, operations become the bottleneck: automate what you can, delegate the rest

You can find a recording of this panel here.

Panel 2: Hub City, Robotaxis’ Electric Infrastructure

As robotaxi fleets grow, the question is shifting from whether AVs can operate safely to whether cities have the charging, depots and grid capacity to support them at scale. Moderator Jonah Bliss, Co-founder of Curbivore, guided a discussion on what it takes to build that infrastructure, and how cities like Austin can prepare.

What does an AV charging hub look like?

Sloane Perras, Chief Administrative Officer at Voltera, which has four sites in Austin, set the scene by saying what they’re not:

Well, it does not look like the Walmart parking lot with 20 chargers in a row. It's a private, secured site where the AVs can safely come in and out. They can charge, on average, about 40 stalls...It can be anywhere from around an acre to two acres. It can have operational facilities. It can have maintenance and repair facilities...It will have a data offload system so that data can be pulled off the cars, and of course, very importantly, the power coming onto the site from the upstream infrastructure.

How do you permit and locate these sites?

Rachel Castignoli, Senior Consultant for Transportation and Public Works at the City of Austin, who runs the city's automated vehicle program, said the challenge is power:

We want them to be located in places that work for the AV companies. They have the best maps of where they're located and where they need to be. Access to freeways is increasingly important as all our rideshare gets on the freeway. It's actually very hard to get that much electricity to a site. We need to upgrade our infrastructure to make it work.

Sloane explained that they are trying to locate sites that hit the sweet spot of demand nearby, fewer deadhead miles and power that already exists.

Ted Silverman, Chief Operating Officer, at LAZ Parking Reality Investors (LPRI), echoed this by sharing that the industry is overlooking dormant power.

One of the things the industry does not do as much of as we could is figure out how to use existing power that is not being utilized. We manage a hundred venues, for example. That's a huge opportunity in this country: to take power that is sitting dormant for the vast majority of the time and use it for fleets.

Brandon Sellers, VP of Marketing at Gridwise, added that demand clusters around airports and going-out districts, and that sites far from those centers mean empty miles and weaker profitability.

How are robotaxis changing the rideshare market?

Brandon said the clearest effect so far is fewer trips for human drivers, and platforms are paying more to attract reliable, highly rated drivers. Asked how a driver can compete with a robotaxi, he said drivers are already adapting:

They're changing the shape of how they drive. They're repositioning so they get longer rides that are more profitable. That could be a lot of airport rides, or rides in suburbs where it makes less sense for AVs to be out there. You definitely see more premium rides: Uber Black, comfort rides to get a more premium experience. And where I think AVs are going to do very well is as the base layer of demand.

What is the city's north star?

Rachel’s answer was safety. With almost 100 deaths a year on Austin's roads, the city sees AVs as a tool to bring that number down. She said they are focused on the basics, repainting road markings and improving signage where AVs struggle, which she said makes a huge difference.

If you could snap your fingers and change one thing...

Jonah closed by asking each panelist to name the one change that would unlock the next level of AV uptake. Brandon wanted better education and care for the 10 to 12 million drivers worried about the impact of AV technology. Sloane would educate city staff, planners and council members, because unlocking land for charging is on the critical path. Ted said the industry needs a targeted, strategic approach, finding power “for the fewest dollars possible” while satisfying the tenant. Rachel chose accessibility: she wants AV companies to support the disabled community, which has already embraced the technology.

Panel takeaways

1. Charging hubs are not your average car park; they are secured, purpose-built sites

2. Power is the bottleneck

3. Sites work best close to demand centers like airports and nightlife districts, where deadhead miles are lowest

4. Humans are repositioning themselves as the more premium ride

You can find a recording of this panel here.

Panel 3: From Long Haul to Last Mile: AVs Take on New Form Factors

Autonomous vehicles are moving beyond robotaxis, with trucking, freight and transit emerging as major opportunities. Moderated by Nicole Cobler of Axios, the panel explored where autonomy can deliver the most value, what investors are looking for and how the industry can make their products safer.

Where do you see the most value in autonomous driving right now?

Derrick Nueman, VP of Investor Relations, at AV trucking company PlusAI, kicked things off by arguing that autonomous trucking offers the greatest value, though admits he’s “pretty biased.” With a US driver shortage of almost 100,000 people, he sees an opportunity to address labor gaps, improve safety and cut costs.

Each mile of long-haul trucking costs about $2.30, of which a dollar is the driver,” he explains. “So when we think about autonomous trucking, there's this opportunity…to take the driver out, solve this driver shortage issue, make things safer and save a ton of money.

Kaylee Nix, Head of Communications at autonomous trucking company Bot Auto, agreed, but pointed to a more specific opportunity: the middle mile, where routes are difficult to staff because of overnight hours and long driving shifts.

People don't want to run those routes. It's not fun. You're away from your family. That’s where we see a very constrained labor problem in trucking.

Nix pointed to a concrete example: in April, Bot Auto completed a fully driverless, 251-mile overnight run from Houston to Dallas. The customer needed pickups between 8 and 10 p.m. and delivery by 4 a.m. but was cycling through a different carrier almost every load because the shift was so difficult to staff.

What are investors looking for?

Derrick took this one by sharing that investor focus has shifted from the technology itself to the path to commercial success.

A couple of years ago, investors were asking, does your technology work?…Now everyone assumes your technology works, and the question really is, what is your go-to-market strategy? Do you have deployments? Can you scale? What is your financial model?

Armir Harris, CEO of CharterUP, offered a broader view of why the sector is attracting investor attention. After two decades in which software dominated Silicon Valley, he argued, the focus is shifting back toward hardware, specifically, physical AI.

The hottest space right now is physical AI. Billions of venture dollars are being deployed towards this sector, Harris said.

He pointed to the scale of the opportunity: labor is a $30 trillion market, and intelligent machines are beginning to offer a new model for delivering it.

What are the key data points you’re thinking about when it comes to making your products safe?

Moderator Nicole Cobler noted that companies often lead with the number of miles their autonomous vehicles have driven, comparing their safety records with human drivers. But she asked the panel what other data points matter when it comes to proving safety, inviting Evan O’Brien, Director of Enterprise Growth, at Empiric Earth to speak.

“I think exposure is certainly important, but an odometer never really saved a life,” O’Brien said.

The real measure, he argued, is what companies capture from those miles and how effectively they use that data to identify risks and improve performance. No single company can gather every insight it needs on its own. Sharing real-world learnings across the industry can help AV developers spot hazards earlier, strengthen safety where they already operate, and anticipate risks before expanding into new environments. Nueman of PlusAI added that they have a safety framework built around extensive testing and validation, including edge cases, and are currently at 93% of its target. Ultimately, he said, the goal is to prove through real-world miles that autonomous trucks are not just safer than human drivers, but meaningfully safer.

• Autonomous trucking can ease driver shortages, improve safety and cut costs

• The middle mile offers a major opportunity for hard-to-staff overnight routes

• Investors want proven deployments, scalable business models and a clear route to market

• Proving safety takes more than miles: rigorous testing and meaningful data matter

You can find a recording of this panel here.

The Reactions

Here’s what some of the people who were in the room shared about the summit:

⚡ Voltera

🤝 Bailey Lucius (DVP, Strategic Growth at TaskUS)

👁️ Mobileye

🛡️ Daniel Severin (Head of Global Mobility Insurance at The Ride Platform)

🚘 Autolane

🔌 Steve Kelley (CEO at L-Charge)

🚐 MOIA America

🔋 James Kirk (Founder and CEO at Nerava)

👥 Elena Sagunova (Global HR Director at Avride)

Next up on the calendar is our San Francisco Urban Autonomy Summit on January 27th, 2027, bringing together leaders from Waymo, Wayve, Moove, Terawatt, Gridwise and more. Last year's event drew more than 600 RSVPs, so please reach out as soon as possible if you'd like to join them on stage as a partner.

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Substack. Transcripts are also available by clicking on the “transcripts” button in the top right corner of this post on the app/web version. You can also access them from the email version by clicking here.

In today’s episode, I’m speaking with Nat Beuse, Chief Safety Officer at Aurora. Nat shares his background in vehicle safety across the public and private sectors, the lessons he’s learned along the way, and how those experiences shape his approach to autonomous trucking.

We dive into Aurora’s fully driverless operations and the steps the company took to close its safety case. Nat explains the operating conditions its trucks are designed to handle, how Aurora plans for edge cases, and how it tracks uptime, reliability, and other metrics. We also discuss the company’s latest milestones and what changes as its fleet scales.

The conversation explores public perception, how autonomous vehicle companies balance competition with collaboration on safety, and Aurora’s approach to sharing knowledge and safety information with the public. Nat also discusses the benefits of being a publicly listed company and the importance of transparency as driverless operations expand.

Finally, we look at the regulatory landscape for autonomous trucking and the hurdles to establishing a federal framework.

Chapters

• (00:00) Introduction to Nat Beuse

• (02:07) Nat’s background in vehicle safety, across the public and private sectors

• (05:57) Nat’s safety philosophy and what he’s learned from working on vehicle safety over the years

• (09:55) Aurora’s operations and the safety case for its driverless operations

• (12:50) Facts and figures from Aurora’s fully driverless operations

• (15:55) The steps Aurora took to close its safety case

• (19:20) Aurora’s operational design domain (ODD) and the various use cases for its customers

• (22:12) The operational limits of Aurora’s driverless trucks and how they plan for edge cases

• (24:05) How Aurora tracks uptime, reliability, and other metrics

• (25:50) Aurora’s latest milestones and what changes as its fleet scales

• (28:00) The importance of public perception and how it changes as the business scales

• (30:15) How AV companies collaborate on safety and the role of competition in the space

• (33:27) How Aurora contributes to knowledge sharing across the AV industry

• (34:55) The benefits of being publicly listed and sharing Aurora’s safety case with the public

• (37:30) The current regulatory landscape for autonomous trucking

• (41:09) The hurdles to establishing a federal regulatory framework for autonomous trucking

• (43:19) Conclusion and final thoughts

Designing Charging Hubs for Autonomous Fleets

We are excited to partner with Terawatt this week, one of the leading charging infrastructure providers. To learn more about Terawatt’s nationwide real estate portfolio and track record of cutting cost per mile for AV fleet operators, reach out to Peter Cohen at peter@terawattinfrastructure.com

Notes/Links:

• You can find Nat Beuse on LinkedIn.

• Aurora’s website (link).

• Dave Ferguson of Nuro’s interview with Aurora CEO Chris Urmson, mentioned at the 05:43 timestamp (link).

• Aurora’s Safety Case Framework, mentioned at the 10:41 timestamp (link).

• The independent assessment of Aurora’s safety case, mentioned at the 18:00 timestamp (link).

• Aurora’s voluntary safety self-assessment, mentioned at the 36:24 timestamp (link).

• Feel free to leave us a review on our Apple Podcasts page, then send us a screenshot in an email reply to score some TDD swag!

-Harry

Top Story of the Week

Uber and Pony AI take robotaxis to Manchester (link).

The vehicles are mapping the city’s streets with safety drivers behind the wheel. No passengers are being carried, and the companies have not announced when a service might launch. Manchester is the first UK city outside London where robotaxi testing has been announced as part of plans for an autonomous taxi service. The Manchester programme also involves Verne, a Croatian autonomous mobility company that is working with Pony AI and Uber to develop robotaxi services in Europe

Urban Autonomy Summit

The Austin edition of our Urban Autonomy Summit (UAS), presented by Empiric Earth, was a huge success! It was cool to meet lots of TDD subscribers in real life and it was awesome to see how many people travelled into Austin for the event!

We also teased our 2027 UAS line-up so if you’d like to get involved, please let me know! We’re heading to San Francisco on January 27, 2027, Los Angeles on April 16, 2027, London in June of 2027, and New York City in September of 2027.

Big thanks to our partners at Empiric Earth, Voltera, MOIA, TaskUs, EVKON, Autolane, The Ride Platform, Gridwise, Terawatt, CharterUP, Mobileye and Verizon for making this event possible.

See what people were saying about the event: Voltera, Bailey Lucius (DVP, Strategic Growth at TaskUS), Mobileye, Daniel Severin (Head of Global Mobility Insurance at The Ride Platform), Autolane, Steve Kelley (CEO at L-Charge), MOIA America, James Kirk (Founder and CEO at Nerava), and Elena Sagunova (Global HR Director at Avride).

Other Stuff

Waymo begins airport rides in Nashville (link).

The company announced Tuesday that airport trips are starting now, but access will roll out gradually. Riders will be notified through the Waymo app when the service becomes available to them.

Related: Waymo Wants Into LAX. What’s Taking So Long? (link).

FMCSA lets driverless trucks swap warning triangles for cab-mounted beacons (link).

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration on Oct. 7 granted a five-year, limited exemption allowing Level 4 autonomous trucks to use cab-mounted warning beacons in place of the reflective triangles or flares a driver would normally set out around a stopped truck… Aurora Innovation applied for the exemption in April, but other carriers operating Level 4 trucks can take advantage of it if they notify FMCSA before starting.

Exclusive: Amazon’s Zoox more than doubles its robotaxi footprint in Bay Area city (link). This is cool to see, and it reinforces a point Rachel Castignoli raised at our Urban Autonomy Summit in Austin this week. While AVs could eventually reduce demand for some driving jobs, the companies building and operating these fleets are also creating high-quality local jobs through depots, fleet operations and, especially, manufacturing.

The Amazon-owned company is placing a major foothold in Hayward. The company has leased two industrial buildings that would more than double its footprint near its existing robotaxi facility, the Chronicle has learned. The new lease spans more than 350,000 square feet at 25500 Clawiter Road, in western Hayward’s industrial corridor, just north of Highway 92.

Looks like The Driverless Digest is officially two years old (link).

Powering the Future of Autonomous Mobility for Cities and Businesses, Today

MOIA America develops autonomous mobility solutions designed to help transform how people move through cities and communities. The MOIA brand’s turnkey autonomous mobility platform combines a purpose-built autonomous vehicle, an integrated self-driving hardware and software system, and a Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform that enables operators to launch and scale autonomous transportation services. MOIA America is currently testing in U.S. markets, including Los Angeles, Austin, and Orlando.

‘Starting today in San Antonio, San Diego and Tampa, anyone can hail a Waymo, including at San Antonio International Airport’ (link).

Waabi signs Warrior Logistics for Dallas-Houston freight (link).

Dubai launches trial of Glydways’ AI-powered driverless pods on Bluewaters Island (link).

Designed to offer on-demand transport around the clock, the pods can reach speeds of up to 50 km/h and travel up to 250 km on a single charge. The system can also virtually link more than 10 vehicles with intervals of less than one second, giving it the capacity to carry more than 20,000 passengers per hour in both directions.

‘Waymo Ojai has launched in Texas!!’ (link). Looks like Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio all have it.

‘The Wayve AI Driver, integrated into our Fiat 500e development vehicle, taking on the streets of Turin’ (link).

Harry: Quick thoughts after my first cybercab ride in Austin. Pricing and eta were great (link), the experience was unique, and most importantly: smooth/safe driving! (link).

Rivian limits point-to-point driving to invite-only testers under NDA (link).

China’s Delivery Robots Are Learning to Tackle the Night Shift (link).

‘Got paid $8 to close the door of a Waymo today’ (link).

Volvo makes a bigger bet on Nvidia for hands-free automated driving (link).

The companies announced on Thursday that Volvo will use three pieces of Nvidia hardware and software in its future vehicles to provide an automated driving system that can navigate urban streets and highways.

DC robotaxi debate grows as drivers warn of job losses (link).

Related: DC Mayoral Nominee Janeese Lewis George: DC is facing a jobs crisis. Rushing the legalization of autonomous vehicles is irresponsible given the anticipated AI-related job displacement and disruptions that put countless workers at risk (link).

Xpeng launches its own robotaxi brand called Yoyo (link).

Xpeng intends to provide the vehicles and required technology, while its partners will handle the operational management. The manufacturer expects revenue from hardware sales, services, and commission-based participation.

SpaceX alumni nab $100M to rethink shipping with autonomous freight trains (link).

Parallel Systems might have a way to keep freight moving while allowing railroads to recapture market share. The startup has developed a rail vehicle capable of moving over several tons of freight as far as 500 miles without an operator. If the company can scale production of its Panther vehicles, it stands to make railroads profitable over short hauls once again.

What else we're reading/listening to

Automating Group Transportation with CharterUP CEO Armir Harris (link). Our latest podcast where we discuss how CharterUP is preparing for autonomy, its partnership with HOLON, and where autonomous vehicles could have the biggest impact on group transportation.

Analyzing Waymo’s City Distribution Using Rider-Only Miles - Update (link). Our latest article where we analyze Waymo’s rider-only miles across five cities through June 2026, highlighting where growth is slowing and how its geographic footprint is shifting.

Moving People by : Mobileye: acquiring MOIA or keeping Beep + Moovit (link). Barak just moved his publication over to Substack. Feel free to go show him some love!

Related: The Real Impact of Autonomy Will Come From Buses (link).

The Innovation Majority Institute by : The Subway or the Segway: Invention Isn’t Enough (link).

AVs/Humans behaving badly

‘Apparently someone put a doll against a cybercab’s front tire in downtown Austin and it just ran it over’ (link).

School zone petition adds to Tesla’s robotaxi probe pile (link).

U.S. safety regulators are considering a formal defect investigation into allegations that Tesla robotaxis have sped through active school zones. The petition cites four incidents and three social media videos, with no reported crashes or injuries.

One notable detail: the filing covers an estimated 1,000 Model Y and Cybercab vehicles, offering the first official indication of the size of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet.

Shout-outs

Big thanks to TDD readers at EPRI and Uber for referring new subscribers. If there’s someone you think would enjoy TDD, feel free to forward this email or use the referral button below, and we’ll make sure to shout out your company.

Refer a friend

Neat Jobs

Lead Program Manager - New Platform Validation Operations at Waymo (link) via Will Shepherdson.

Global Supply Manager - Indirect at Waabi (link) via Shweta Upganlawar.

Senior Principal Engineer Team Lead - Fleet Software Platform at Motional (link) via Ping Seng N.

Strategy & BizOps Lead, Singapore at Waymo (link) via Sarah Basham.

Lead Technical Program Manager, Robotaxi at Waabi (link) via Ryan Wallace.

Job Moves

Sarfraz Maredia is leaving Uber (link).

Related: Uber Executive Overseeing Robotaxi Expansion to Depart (link).

Paul Adam: General Motors -> Wayve (link).

Branch Kampe: Einride (link).

Michelle Tsai: GoPro -> General Motors (link).

Selinay Parlak: Atoms (link).

Juan Ibañez de Aldecoa: Waymo (link).

Until next week :)

-Harry

Waymo highlights this data to benchmark its performance against human drivers. And so far, the results have been fantastic. Compared to an average human driver over the same distance in its operating cities, Waymo reports significantly better safety outcomes: 95% fewer serious injury or worse crashes, 82% fewer crashes involving airbag deployment, and 82% fewer injury-causing crashes.

Historical Rider-Only Miles Data

Waymo doesn’t publish historical breakdowns of Rider-Only miles, so to get a better sense of how things are evolving, I’ve been tracking the data by city since mid-20243:

From the chart above, we can see that total rider-only miles have scaled to ~271M to date, roughly 8x growth since Q3 2024.

Looking at the data on a quarterly basis below, a few trends stand out: San Francisco and Los Angeles have continued to pull ahead of Phoenix, with both now exceeding 15 million rider-only miles in the latest quarter. Phoenix has started to decline slightly from its recent peak in Q4 2025, while Austin continues to grow steadily. Atlanta remains smaller, but has continued to grow from its initial ramp-up.

Total Rider-Only Miles

On an absolute basis, Phoenix is still in the lead, but Los Angeles and San Francisco continue to catch up.

It’s worth noting that all of this data reflects Rider-Only miles, not trips or revenue. Average trip length likely varies by city, so while miles are directionally correlated with usage, they’re not a perfect proxy. Still, the trends here are telling.

City Distribution Over Time

Next, we can look at how each city’s distribution of total RO miles is evolving. This is not market share, but rather each city’s share of Waymo’s overall RO mileage.

Looking at both total share and quarterly changes, a few things stand out:

• Phoenix is still losing share, but the decline slowed in Q2 2026. After several quarters of roughly 4-point losses, its latest decline was closer to 2.5 points.

• Los Angeles continues to gain share every quarter, but the pace has slowed. After adding more than 4 points in late 2024, its latest quarterly gain was just over 1 point.

• San Francisco has become much more stable. After modest losses through much of 2025 and another decline in Q1 2026, its share was essentially flat in Q2.

• Austin is still gaining share, but the pace of growth has slowed noticeably. Its quarterly increase peaked around 1.5 points and has since fallen to roughly half a point.

• Atlanta is also still gaining share, but the pace appears to have slowed. Its latest increase was 0.74 points, compared with an estimated average of about 1.2 points per quarter across the prior period4.

It’s too early to draw a direct connection, but the slowdown in Austin and Atlanta is worth watching given that both are Waymo on Uber markets and the partnership appears to be on the outs.

Quarter over Quarter Growth

Finally, quarter over quarter growth has slowed dramatically in 2026. Los Angeles is down to about 9% growth in Q2, San Francisco bounced back to around 13%, and Austin has fallen all the way from triple-digit growth in early 2025 to just 4%. Phoenix is the clearest outlier, with rider-only miles declining for two straight quarters. Atlanta, meanwhile, grew about 20% in Q2, the fastest of any market in the latest quarter.

Put together, the data shows Waymo’s center of gravity continuing to shift away from Phoenix. Phoenix still leads in cumulative rider-only miles, but Los Angeles and San Francisco are now generating the most miles each quarter, while Phoenix has declined for two straight quarters. Austin is still adding miles, though growth has slowed considerably. Atlanta is the newest market in the data and grew about 20% quarter over quarter in Q2, though it still represents a relatively small share of Waymo’s total rider-only miles.

-Harry

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Substack. Transcripts are also available by clicking on the “transcripts” button in the top right corner of this post on the app/web version. You can also access them from the email version by clicking here.

In today’s episode, I’m speaking with Armir Harris, founder and CEO of CharterUP. Armir breaks down the company’s group transportation business, the customers it serves, and why it has built its platform without owning any buses. Armir will also be speaking at our upcoming Austin Urban Autonomy Summit on October 14th, on the panel “From Long Haul to Last Mile: AVs Take on New Form Factors.” Apply to attend here so you don’t miss out!

We explore how CharterUP is preparing for autonomy, including its partnership with HOLON and plans to bring autonomous shuttles into its network. Armir shares where he sees the biggest opportunities for autonomy to impact the business, the limitations of automating mass transit, and what autonomous group transportation could offer customers.

We also discuss how autonomous shuttles could fit into the broader transportation network alongside robotaxis and human-driven vehicles. The conversation covers the potential safety benefits of autonomous buses, the role people will continue to play in deploying and operating these services, and how CharterUP is approaching that transition.

Finally, Armir discusses CharterUP’s first autonomous vehicle deployment, future deployment timelines, and what it will take for autonomous shuttles to become a mainstream transportation option in the coming years.

Chapters

• (00:00) Introduction to Armir Harris

• (01:08) What is CharterUP and what does it do?

• (03:01) CharterUP’s footprint, offerings, and customers

• (05:07) Why CharterUP doesn’t own any buses and the advantages of its business model

• (06:00) Armir’s thoughts on the current autonomy landscape and how it could impact CharterUP’s business

• (08:18) How CharterUP’s business is evolving to embrace autonomy

• (09:40) Where Armir sees the biggest impact of autonomy on CharterUP’s business

• (11:02) The limitations of automating mass transit

• (12:30) CharterUP’s partnership with HOLON and their plans to advance autonomous group transport

• (15:43) Who are the leaders in the autonomous group transportation space?

• (17:28) What is CharterUP’s most compelling value proposition for its customers?

• (19:38) Would autonomous buses be safer than human driven ones?

• (20:25) The role of humans in deploying autonomous group transportation and how CharterUP is looking at the transition

• (23:30) Autonomous group transportation vs. robotaxis

• (24:20) How autonomous shuttles fit into the transportation network alongside robotaxis and human-driven vehicles

• (25:19) CharterUP’s first AV deployment and future deployment timelines

• (26:04) Armir’s outlook for autonomous shuttles and what it’ll take for them to go mainstream in the coming years

• (27:50) Conclusion and final thoughts

Notes/Links:

• You can find Armir Harris on LinkedIn/X.

• CharterUP’s website (link).

• The CharterUP-HOLON partnership mentioned at the 12:30 timestamp (link).

• You can find some of our previous coverage on shared autonomous transport:

  • The Real Impact of Autonomy Will Come From Buses (link).

  • Redefining Travel Time with PIX Moving’s Autonomous Shuttles (link).

-Harry

Top Story of the Week

‘Silver looks good on the Ojai. Introducing the silver Ojai, featuring leatherette seats, wireless charging, and refreshed interior details’ (link). I like the color, and Waymo says both the silver and the existing blue Ojais will remain on the road going forward. In some cities, the two versions will operate side by side, while others may only get one. Waymo also upgraded the sound system, which I’m happy about since that was something I thought was lacking on my first ride.

Waymo locks in $5B loan from Blackstone, PIMCO to fuel robotaxi expansion (link).

The loan marks Waymo’s first-ever debt financing and comes just months after its $16 billion equity raise. Waymo says the new capital will give it more financial flexibility as it expands in existing markets and launches in new cities in the U.S. and abroad, although the company offered few specifics on exactly how the money will be used.

Other Stuff

Deliveroo signs exclusive UK robot deal with Coco Robotics (link).

DoorDash-owned Deliveroo is launching its first autonomous delivery service in the UK through an exclusive partnership with Coco Robotics, which is also making its UK debut. The robots will also collect data on pavement hazards, construction barriers and abandoned e-scooters to improve real-time navigation alerts for blind and partially sighted pedestrians.

‘32 people have died on DC roads already this year. We have a mobile billboard in DC today calling on policymakers to legalize autonomous vehicles, which don’t drive drunk or distracted’ (link).

Uber invests in Verne, confirmed by the CEO of the Croatian robotaxi company (link).

Volvo, Waabi Launch Autonomous Freight Runs From Dallas To Houston (link).

The Volvo announcement said Volvo VNL Autonomous trucks powered by the Waabi Driver are now moving freight for logistics company Warp directly to third-party facilities along the Dallas-Houston corridor. The trucks are operating autonomously, although an observer currently remains in the driver’s seat.

Related: From Trucks to Robotaxis: Waabi’s One Driver with CEO Raquel Urtasun (link).

Robotaxi emergency phone numbers found disconnected and unstaffed (link, no paywall). Great reporting by David here.

Of the 17 hotlines that NBC News tested, a person answered immediately in seven instances. In four other cases, including those of the phone numbers of Tesla and Waymo, machines answered initially but then moved the calls to people in less than a minute.

Waymo: Sober Drivers Still Face Nearly 4x Nighttime Risk: Why Road Safety Demands a Safe System Approach (link).

Mobileye’s Approach to Scaling Autonomous Mobility

We’re excited to partner with Mobileye this week. Bringing autonomous mobility to scale takes AI that can understand the complexity of the real world, systems designed for verifiable safety, and technology engineered for commercial deployment. Mobileye brings decades of experience working with automakers around the world to that challenge.

Uber and China’s Pony.ai plan to launch robotaxis in London (link). What’s most interesting to me about this announcement is that Pony.ai is now Uber’s third AV partner targeting London, joining Wayve and Baidu’s Apollo Go. That makes London one of the clearest examples yet of Uber’s AV aggregation strategy playing out in the real world, with multiple autonomy providers plugging into the same marketplace.

The two companies said on Thursday that they would begin testing Pony.ai’s Gen-7 robotaxis in London in the coming weeks.

‘Someone built a Waymo teleoperator with San Francisco map’ (link).

China Robotaxis Face Losses as Utilization Trails Waymo, BI Says (link, no paywall).

Chinese robotaxi operators Pony AI and WeRide face sustained operating losses through 2028 as domestic fleet utilization lags Waymo’s rate of more than 58%, Bloomberg Intelligence said.

Hundreds of self-driving cars coming to Nashville with new Waymo, Lyft facility (link).

The 80,000-square-foot depot, located in a former post office building near the airport, officially opens Oct. 12. It will run around the clock with three shifts monitoring and servicing vehicles. The depot is operated by Flexdrive, Lyft’s fleet management subsidiary, which took over day-to-day operations of Waymo’s vehicle fleet earlier this year.

Musk explains why Tesla Robotaxi is not running at night, and lidar is the answer (link).

‘Our Vision for London: How Waymo can Support a Safer, Connected UK Capital’ (link).

‘This is how Tesla charges unsupervised robotaxis at a public supercharger’ (link).

Waymo: Preparing for the Unexpected: A New Framework for AV Incident Management Exercises (link).

Related: The AV Crisis Playbook (link).

San Francisco cracks down on where robotaxis can go during Fleet Week (link).

People traveling into San Francisco's northern waterfront during Fleet Week may have their trip cut short if they're in a robotaxi, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency said. Robotaxis, such as Waymo, will not be able to enter the area as geofencing will be in effect Friday through Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Traditional rideshare services such as Uber, Lyft and taxis will be able to provide service without boundary restrictions.

‘Spotted on a Southern California highway’ (link).

Can good design stop content creators from having sex in robotaxis? (link).

Waymo begins fully autonomous testing in Detroit, other northern cities (link, no paywall).

What else we’re reading/listening to

Europe’s Robotaxi Reality Check with Augustin Friedel (link). Our latest podcast where TDD Editor sits down with software-defined vehicles (SDV) and AI-enabled mobility expert Augustin Friedel to discuss Uber and Bolt’s roles in Europe’s robotaxi market, the infrastructure needed to support autonomous fleets, and what it takes to turn pilots into scalable businesses, among other things.

Terawatt’s First Product Chief on Building The Infrastructure Behind Autonomous Fleets (link). Our latest partner piece where Ben interviews Titiaan Palazzi about what it takes to build depots for autonomous fleets. They discuss screening 50 sites for every one built, laying 10 miles of cable per depot, and why these facilities handle much more than charging.

EXCLUSIVE: Waymo Wants Into LAX. What’s Taking So Long? (link).

Related: Waymo is testing SFO terminal curbside drop-offs, according to a now-deleted tweet by a Waymo employee (link).

Understanding Robots by : Tesla is finally scaling up driverless robotaxi service (link).

Changing Lanes by : Who Drives Ridehail? (link).

AVs/Humans behaving badly

Waymo passenger captures video as man hurls eggs at the driverless vehicle (link).

‘Riders exit Waymo driving wrong direction’ (link).

‘Cut off by a Waymo’ (link).

Shout-outs

Big thanks to TDD readers for referring new subscribers. If there’s someone you think would enjoy TDD, feel free to forward this email or use the referral button below, and we’ll make sure to shout out your company.

Refer a friend

Neat Jobs

Autonomous Vehicle Field Support Agent at Oro Mobility (link) via Michelle Russell.

Lead Mechanical Engineer at Rocsys (link) via Merel Hageman.

Field Safety Engineer, Germany at Waymo (link) via Andrea Vaccaro.

Job Moves

Guy Peterson: Uber -> Also (link).

Barrie Dickinson: Lightship -> Zoox (link).

Andreas Wendel: Kodiak -> Applied Intuition (link).

Mollie Cohen D’Agostino: UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies -> California Public Utilities Commission (link).

Until next week :)

-Harry

Titiaan Palazzi has made it his life’s work to help drive the shift to clean energy.

An engineer by trade, he founded energy startup Myst AI and sold it to cloud data platform Snowflake in 2023 before joining Terawatt as its first Chief Product and Strategy Officer. His task is to help shape the roadmap for Terawatt, a company that builds, owns and operates depots powering autonomous and electric fleets.

Terawatt has raised more than $1 billion, counts Waymo among its customers and has charging depots under development across more than 20 markets. Five sites are live today, another five are going live in the coming weeks and many more are slated for 2027 and beyond.

The Driverless Digest: You’ve spent your whole career on the energy transition. What shaped that path?

Titiaan Palazzi: I feel privileged that early in my undergrad years I got to meet leaders in sustainability. People like Al Gore and Janine Benyus, the founder of biomimicry, a form of nature-inspired design. My first boss was Amory Lovins, co-founder of Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), one of the world’s leading clean energy think tanks. I’ve always worked toward building a better energy system, and doing so through business.

As Terawatt’s first Product and Strategy head, what are you most excited to dig into?

I’ve spent 15 years working on the energy transition but I’ve never had the chance to actually put steel in the ground. If you fast forward to 2030, this is the thing that’s really necessary in order to reduce global carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions.

Electrified autonomous fleets are basically a new clean energy category, and building charging depots with other services attached to them is a genuinely new market forming right now. Transportation is the largest source of U.S. greenhouse gases, accounting for around 30% of the country’s total. If you want to tackle climate change, this is a key area of focus.

What are your views on autonomy?

I’ve come to believe the best way to drive sustainability is to build products and services that are compelling beyond just their sustainability benefits. Tesla is a good example. I don’t think it won because it was the sustainable choice, it won because it was a superior car. My first job out of grad school involved some work with Nest, the smart thermostat company, and Nest won for the same reason: it was so much more intuitive and better designed than the incumbents.

I think the same logic applies to autonomy. As a passenger, taking a Waymo or a Zoox is a premium experience to human-driven rideshare, and that’s the real driver of adoption. On top of that, there are genuine safety benefits, and real embodied-carbon benefits too: a private car is used only 5% of the time, while an autonomous vehicle can be utilized roughly 10x as much. But ultimately, I think autonomy wins because it’s simply a superior product.

Which companies are you partnering with in the robotaxi and trucking space?

We work with many of the leading players. I can’t share all the companies publicly right now but I can say this includes Waymo in the rideshare world, all the major drayage companies operating near the port of Long Beach in California, and all the major heavy-duty shippers and carriers including PepsiCo.

How many sites do you have across the U.S. today?

Historically, we’ve been concentrated in California, since that’s where our AV and heavy-duty trucking customers wanted land, with the big hubs being in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

We own land in about 25 states, and as far as where we’re opening next we’re now expanding east and south: Nevada, Arizona, down into Texas, and further onto the Eastern Seaboard. We’re opening in Miami and Austin in the coming weeks.

You’ve explained why you chose Terawatt, why do you think Terawatt chose you?

I see two main roles for myself. First, launching new platform offerings. Today, our core promise to customers is developing sites on time and on budget, then operating them to a high standard. Uptime and reliability matter enormously to rideshare and autonomy operators. My primary responsibility is to launch new offerings that help our customers lower their cost-per-mile by reducing energy costs or automating site operations. My second role is turning Terawatt into a self-learning organization using AI. Having previously founded an AI startup and worked inside big tech companies like Snowflake, I think I can uniquely contribute there.

Tell us more about that self-learning idea.

A lot of what we do isn’t glamorous. Getting a site plan approved, extending a curb, filing a third load study with a utility. It’s blocking and tackling and most of that knowledge lives tacitly in the workforce rather than being written down. Becoming a self-learning organization means capturing all of it, including informal conversations, and codifying the lessons so every project makes us better at the core activity. Entitlement for a site in the LA area might take 18 months today; by 2028, we might get that to 15, and catch the issues that would sink a site in month three.

What makes Terawatt’s platform unique?

I can answer this question best by looking at the life of a site. By the time we hand over the keys to a customer it may look simple, but it’s not just a parking lot with chargers. There is 24 months of work that sits behind that. Our real estate team screens more than 50 sites for every one that makes it through development into operations. Our development team works through entitlements and easements, confirming approval for EV-charging use. Our utilities team may file load studies for 20 adjacent parcels and work with the utility on grid upgrades. Our construction team might lay something like 10 miles of underground cable just to enable 40 charging stalls. What makes us unique is a team with deep expertise in developing powered land in the places that matter, people like Neha Palmer, who led energy for data centers at Google for a decade.

Walk us through the journey of a robotaxi.

A typical passenger AV might carry a battery on the order of 100 kilowatt-hours and use around 20 kilowatt-hours per hour, mostly on inner-city rides with the occasional highway trip. A vehicle might run three to five hours between charges. When it comes into the depot, it charges, offloads its data, gets inspected, and gets cleaned if needed, so it’s ready to go straight back out for its next ride.

Beyond charging, cleaning, and maintenance, what else happens at a depot?

Autonomous vehicles capture huge amounts of data from lidar and cameras, so every site we build includes high-bandwidth data offloading. Some AI runs directly on the vehicle’s onboard chip but model training and calibration often happen off-vehicle, some in the cloud, and potentially some at the depot itself over time. Our sites have a point of presence: a high-bandwidth fiber connection into the main network, which sends that data on to a data center.

Do you see humanoid robots taking over some of the work at depots?

Yes. Forming partnerships in site automation is very much on our product roadmap. But my take is that it won’t be humanoids right away. Between now and 2030, I think it’s more likely to be task-specific robots. But in due course, it may well shift toward humanoid labor, where a variety of tasks can be performed by a single robot.

How do your sites differ for trucks compared to robotaxis?

Trucks often need parking, not just charging. Heavy-duty sites tend to have multiple tenants rather than one, so we need license-plate recognition and per-session invoicing rather than a single monthly bill. Heavy-duty sites are larger, and they need megawatt charging infrastructure versus the lower power density needed for light-duty vehicles. Our trucking customers today are mostly long-haul carriers running electric, not yet autonomous trucks, plus some drayage customers moving goods from ports.

Finally, do you think this ecosystem is too big for one company to own?

Mature industries always end up with a variety of players. Think about data centers: there’s a wide variety of companies in the ecosystem, including hyperscalers, chipmakers, equipment manufacturers, and the companies that develop the physical land and power. What’s exciting is that autonomous electric rideshare is really taking off, and I believe electric heavy-duty transport will too within a few years. Rather than everyone optimizing for their own slice, it makes more sense to grow the whole pie which is exactly what’s happening now.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Waymo operates across more than 120 square miles in Los Angeles but there’s one place it still can’t operate: LAX. Now, the company is asking riders to help change that.

In an email titled “Help bring Waymo to LAX,” the company tells riders it is actively working with airport leadership and asks them to support autonomous rides to LAX. “Your voice can make the difference,” the email says.

Even though I’m an active Waymo user here in LA, I didn’t receive the e-mail or see anything in my app. But from screenshots on social media, it looks like a number of folks did. The link takes you to a page where you can input your information and then Waymo drafts an editable e-mail that you can send to LA Mayor Karen Bass, your local city council member and LAX leadership.

Waymo’s LAX Workaround

For anyone who regularly flies out of Los Angeles, the appeal here is easy to understand. Airport trips are a great use case for ride-hailing, and LAX remains a gap in Waymo’s service.

The company serves the surrounding area, but excludes LAX. You can’t book a pickup or drop-off at the terminals.

There is a workaround though: take a Waymo to the LAX/Metro Transit Center and transfer to the free shuttle serving the terminals. Some riders report using that connection with enthusiasm, and Metro confirms the shuttle departs from bus bays 1 and 2. I’m planning to try it soon to see how the cost, transfer time and luggage experience compare with a regular airport ride, but obviously, getting dropped off curbside would seem to be more convenient.

That transfer should eventually become easier when the airport’s Automated People Mover opens. But the project, originally expected to open in 2023, has been delayed again and again, with the latest projected opening now January 2027.

Frankly, I’m not holding my breath. As a lifelong LA resident, the repeated delays are embarrassing for the city. If you’re interested, here’s a good breakdown of what went wrong with the People Mover.

How Other Airports Handle Waymo

Other airports have already found ways to accommodate Waymo. Its current airport service guide lists terminal curbside pickups and drop-offs at Phoenix Sky Harbor. At San Jose Mineta, passengers can be dropped off at departures, with pickups at designated locations. San Antonio also has terminal service for riders with access to Waymo there.

San Francisco offers a more limited model. Waymo serves the Rental Car Center and Grand Hyatt at SFO, where passengers connect to the terminals using AirTrain. Its guide still describes SFO access as limited to a subset of riders. Although it also appears that Waymo is testing curbside dropoff for employees.

So what is holding up LAX?

Even though Waymo is regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission, the commission explicitly requires separate authorization from the relevant airport authority.

In a February 18 report to the City Council, Los Angeles World Airports said it had been discussing access with Waymo but had no timeline for permitting autonomous vehicle operations. Before granting access, LAX said it needed to develop an autonomous vehicle licensing agreement and secure approval from the Board of Airport Commissioners.

The agreement would set fees, reporting requirements and operating rules. The airport also described coordination with first responders and consultations with other airports, existing transportation operators and the Teamsters.

There is another important question: if Waymo does get permission, where would passengers actually meet the car?

LAX already has a fragmented pickup system. UberX and Lyft riders are generally directed to take a shuttle to the LAX-it lot, while eligible Uber Black and Lyft Black vehicles can pick up curbside at the terminals.

LAX lists Uber, Lyft and Opoli as authorized ride app providers, with standard ride app pickups directed to LAX-it. Separately permitted charter-party operators can pick up at the terminals. But LAX makes clear that a state charter-party carrier license alone is insufficient: an airport permit is still required.

Waymo holds a charter-party carrier license, but that does not automatically give it the right to pick up or drop off passengers curbside. Even if Waymo receives permission to serve LAX, the airport would still need to determine where those rides can begin and end.

My Take

Waymo can already take me across most of Los Angeles. But it can’t take me to the place where a ride-hailing service is arguably most useful.

That feels increasingly hard to justify as Waymo expands across the region and other airports find ways to accommodate autonomous vehicles. At this point, the question isn’t whether Waymo can technically serve LAX. It’s when LAX will create a framework that allows it to.

Readers, what do you think? Is there any reason Waymo shouldn’t be allowed to operate at LAX?

-Harry

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Substack. Transcripts are also available by clicking on the “transcripts” button in the top right corner of this post on the app/web version. You can also access them from the email version by clicking here.

In today’s episode, The Driverless Digest Editor Ben Hubbard speaks with Augustin Friedel, an expert in software-defined vehicles (SDV) and AI-enabled mobility. Augustin shares his background in the industry and examines Europe’s autonomous vehicle landscape, including how it compares with the rest of the world and what it will take to move from pilots to commercial deployments.

They take a closer look at the Uber-Verne-Pony.ai pilot in Zagreb, Uber’s role in accelerating autonomous vehicle deployment, and Bolt’s position in the European robotaxi market. Augustin also discusses whether Europe’s autonomous vehicle demonstrations can become scalable businesses and the concerns surrounding partnerships with Chinese developers.

Finally, they explore the infrastructure needed to support robotaxi fleets, including the challenges of finding suitable sites in cities like London. They discuss where the real value lies in the robotaxi business, from technology and fleet operations to customer demand, before closing with Augustin’s outlook for Europe’s progress over the next year.

Chapters

• (00:00) Introduction to Augustin Friedel

• (01:32) Augustin’s background in the mobility/autonomy space

• (04:51) The autonomy landscape in Europe and how it compares to the rest of the world

• (06:46) The Uber-Verne-Pony.ai AV pilot in Zagreb and the state of AV pilots/deployments in Europe

• (09:51) What’s needed to scale AV deployments in Europe

• (11:20) Can European AV demos become scalable businesses?

• (14:02) Uber’s role in accelerating AV deployment in Europe

• (16:00) Bolt’s position in the European robotaxi landscape

• (17:50) Is Europe at risk of becoming a market for boring AV technology?

• (20:41) Are there concerns about partnering with Chinese AV companies?

• (21:59) The state of the European AV infrastructure landscape and how it could evolve

• (26:40) Realities and challenges of siting AV infrastructure in European cities like London

• (30:54) Where the real value lies in the robotaxi business: fleet operations, demand, tech, etc.

• (35:00) What progress can Europe make over the next year?

• (36:38) Conclusions and final thoughts

Notes/Links:

• You can find Augustin on Linkedin.

• Check out our previous guest podcast with Augustin and Daniel (link).

Top Story of the Week

DoorDash reveals launch timeframe for delivery drones in Northern California (link).

Trial runs of the drone deliveries will begin in the coming months in Northern California in partnership with national restaurant brands including Chipotle and Popeyes. The drone delivery program aims to combat the hardest part of autonomous delivery: the first and last ten feet. Picking up an order from a kitchen and laying it safely on the customer’s doorstep are the most challenging steps in the food delivery process, according to DoorDash.

Related: Drone Delivery Is Finally Starting To Scale. Who Is Best Positioned To Win? (link).

Other Stuff

Stellantis and Wayve to show hands-free Fiat and Maserati (link).

Stellantis has fitted Wayve’s AI driving software to development versions of the Fiat 500e and the Maserati Grecale, which will give hands-free demonstration rides at the Wave by Vento event in Turin from 7 to 9 October 2026

Related: Wayve CEO Alex Kendall: Building Scalable, Mapless and End to End AI (link).

Robotaxi operators will face fines for blocking first responders (link). Thirty minutes feels like a pretty generous window if an AV is actually blocking police, fire or EMS. The remote driver provision is also narrower than it sounds: it only applies when a human can directly control the vehicle from afar. Waymo says its remote staff provide assistance while the AV system stays in control, so its overseas remote assistance teams wouldn’t appear to be affected by this requirement.

California’s new law will allow AV operators to be fined if a vehicle blocks first responders for more than 30 minutes, although the DMV can set shorter response-time requirements. Under the law, AV developers can also only employ remote drivers who are based in the United States and hold a U.S. driver’s license. The requirement is aimed at concerns around how companies use remote operations when autonomous vehicles run into trouble.

‘A buddy of mine just FaceTimed me from inside an Aurora autonomous truck, completely alone with no Aurora rep onboard, and says it’s been doing a great job so far.’ (link).

Frey vetoes Minneapolis ordinance that would have required human drivers in driverless vehicles (link, no paywall).

Frey said in a statement he is ready to work with the council on an ordinance that addresses safety concerns for autonomous vehicles, but felt the measure passed by council, “cancels out the benefits for riders who prefer a driverless vehicle for safety and accountability.”

Kodiak Picks Dallas-Houston For Driverless Long-Haul Launch (link).

Kodiak said it is now consistently completing end-to-end freight runs between its Lancaster, Texas, hub and Houston without human intervention, while continuing to target an unsupervised long-haul launch by the end of 2026.

Related: IKEA Picks Kodiak for Driverless Freight Rollout (link).

By the numbers: Waymo logs big miles in Philadelphia (link).

Aurora CFO says 30,000 driverless trucks by 2030 isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds (link). I’ll take the under on that one.

Aurora told investors last week that it expects to have more than 30,000 self-driving trucks on the road generating $5 billion in annual revenue by the end of 2030 — an audacious plan considering it expects to end 2026 with just 200 driverless trucks and an $80 million revenue run rate.

Powering the Future of Autonomous Mobility for Cities and Businesses, Today

MOIA America develops autonomous mobility solutions designed to help transform how people move through cities and communities. The MOIA brand’s turnkey autonomous mobility platform combines a purpose-built autonomous vehicle, an integrated self-driving hardware and software system, and a Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform that enables operators to launch and scale autonomous transportation services. MOIA America is currently testing in U.S. markets, including Los Angeles, Austin, and Orlando.

‘Waymo just registered 21 more autonomous vehicles with the Texas DMV—1,154 now on the state registry, up from 1,133’ (link).

‘Rivian gave a clearer look at its robotaxi business model: Uber and other rideshare partners would buy the R2s, then pay Rivian an ongoing software licensing fee tied to vehicle usage. The Uber deal is also non-exclusive, meaning Rivian could license its autonomy stack to other rideshare or OEM partners too’ (link).

‘As a self styled unpaid Waymo influencer… I was very excited to get my first ojai - excellent!’ (link).

Related: Why Waymo Replaces Nannies and Parents, Not Uber Drivers - Sam Lessin (link).

Robotaxi Firms Are Buying Up the Garages Before the Votes (link).

Chinese software firm Momenta wins Peugeot and Jeep deal (link).

‘Wow. I spent the entire weekend obsessing over this paper. It’s the closest analysis I’ve seen to the Aseon thesis. In a modelled fleet of 1,700 robotaxis in SF, each vehicle spends 4hrs/day idle on the curb’ (link).

Verne CEO Marko Pejković: It was great spending some time with Dara, Andrew and the whole Uber team so they could experience what we’re building in Verne with our partners Pony.ai (link).

What else we're reading/listening to

Drone Delivery Is Finally Starting To Scale. Who Is Best Positioned To Win? (link). Our latest guest article from Eduardo Rojas, a former founding member of Uber’s Autonomous Mobility & Delivery team, breaks down who’s leading today, why Amazon and Walmart have an advantage, and what it will take to get drone deliveries under $4 and to your door in 20 minutes.

From Trucks to Robotaxis: Waabi’s One Driver with CEO Raquel Urtasun (link). My latest podcast where we discussed Waabi’s path to fully driverless trucking, how its technology transfers across vehicle platforms, its partnership with Volvo, and its plans to deploy robotaxis with Uber, among other topics.

The AV Market Strategist by : Waymo’s 54% Fleet Growth in Texas & Wayve signs Mercedes-Benz (link).

Farzad podcast featuring Dave Lee: Tesla’s Dumbest Decision Might Be Its Best (link).

AV Events

TaskUs: We’re excited to join Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association’s Autonomy Summit 26 [October 7, 2026 - Austin Texas] to discuss how regulatory frameworks, safety innovation and operational efficiency come together to scale autonomous fleets safely (link).

‘We’re pleased to announce our first lineup of speakers who will be featured at the Autonomous Vehicle (AV) Workforce Summit, taking place on Monday, October 19, in Columbus, Ohio!’ (link).

The Austin edition of our Urban Autonomy Summit is only two weeks away! Join us October 14 for an afternoon of panels, drinks and conversations with the people building the future of autonomy. Space is limited, so apply to attend here.

AVs/Humans behaving badly

‘Zoox in Las Vegas had troubles crossing the intersection and when it stood there stopped, it got rear ended by a distracted human driver. The distracted driver ended up in the hospital’ (link).

Shout-outs

Big thanks to TDD readers at Matter and to Legouix J for referring new subscribers. If there’s someone you think would enjoy TDD, feel free to forward this email or use the referral button below, and we’ll make sure to shout out your company.

Refer a friend

Neat Jobs

2027 Summer Intern, MS/PhD, AI-driven ML Performance Engineering Intern at Waymo (link) via Yongming Shen.

Director, Autonomous Vehicle Partnerships at Moove (link) via Arun Victor.

Principal Software Engineer Team Lead - Partner Systems & Integrations at Motional (link) via Ping Seng N.

Research Scientist, World Model Post-Training at Waymo (link) via Brandyn White.

Validation Engineer, Feature Integration at Zoox (link) via Rigo Rodriguez.

Autonomous Vehicle Operations Manager at Moove (link) via Tim Blackwell.

Site Reliability Engineering, Technical Lead Manager at Waymo (link) via Duncan Winn.

Job Moves

Emanuele M: Woven by Toyota -> Applied Intuition (link).

Yusuf Emre Samur: Mercedes-Benz AG -> Wayve (link).

Jerry A. Zhao: Bonsai Robotics -> Bedrock Robotics (link).

Until next week :)

-Harry

Today’s guest post comes from Eduardo Rojas, a startup advisor and former founding member of Uber’s Autonomous Mobility & Delivery team.

2026 is shaping up to be drone delivery’s inflection point.

Amazon Prime Air said it is now completing thousands of drone deliveries per day. Walmart, meanwhile, has crossed one million cumulative drone deliveries through partners including Wing and Zipline, with 40% of that volume completed in the last quarter alone.

And the rollout is accelerating. Walmart and Wing plan to expand drone delivery to more than 270 locations by 2027.

The delivery platforms are moving too. DoorDash brought its in-house drone program out of stealth this summer with DoorDash Air and its own FAA Part 135 certification. Uber has invested in Zipline, and the two companies are targeting one million drone deliveries per day by the end of 2029.

For the first time, drone delivery is starting to look like a real market rather than a collection of pilots.

But replacing today’s delivery trips is only part of the opportunity.

The bigger opportunity Is Latent Demand

The easiest way to think about drone delivery is that it replaces an existing delivery trip: a DoorDash order, or a delivery from Amazon or Walmart.

But I think the more interesting opportunity comes from orders that aren’t being placed today because delivery takes too long.

You wake up and realize there are no eggs. You are halfway through cooking and are missing an ingredient. You need medicine, a charger or one thing from the store. At 45 minutes, you may work around it. At ten, you order… assuming it doesn’t cost much more.

I saw this firsthand with Rappi Turbo in Colombia. Once I could get groceries in under ten minutes at little to no incremental delivery cost, my behavior changed. I started ordering multiple times per week and sometimes more than once per day. That level of speed and low cost was partly enabled by the era’s aggressive growth-over-economics mindset, but it still gives us a useful window into what can happen when delivery is both fast and cheap.

And the behavior does not appear to be unique to me. Amazon says Prime members using Amazon Now in India, a ground-delivery service offering deliveries within 20 minutes, tripled their shopping frequency after adopting it. It is not drone delivery, but it is a useful proxy for what can happen when delivery times compress.

If that behavior translates to the U.S., faster and cheaper delivery could become another growth engine for delivery marketplaces. Ashu Rege from DoorDash Labs made an interesting point on The Driverless Digest: people only need to travel to so many places, but the number of things they can have delivered is much larger.

Drones could be one of the catalysts that pushes delivery closer to that ceiling.

So, who is best positioned today?

I try to answer that question from a business and deployability perspective. In other words: who has the clearest path to scale, not who has the most impressive aircraft or autonomy stack.

For simplicity, I focus on the U.S. market. Global operating history still matters, but I put more weight on what each company is actually proving in the U.S. and how quickly that position is developing.

I also care less about the technology in isolation. Good technology should ultimately show up in deployment speed, service quality and commercial traction.

Where the demand comes from is another useful signal of near-term scalability. I see two broad models.

The first is large, concentrated nodes: Walmart stores, Amazon facilities, healthcare networks and other major retail or logistics locations. The second is micro nodes: restaurants and smaller merchants reached through marketplaces like Uber Eats and DoorDash.

Today, I give more weight to the large-node model because it is already showing a clearer path to scale. Micro nodes may ultimately represent the larger opportunity, but the economics and operating model are still much less proven.

Today, Wing sits at the top of my ranking largely because of Walmart. That relationship gives them access to a large, concentrated source of demand, and the footprint is expanding quickly.

Zipline is a close second. They have the stronger historical operating record, but much of it was built outside the U.S. and under a different operating model. They also work with Walmart, although so far their U.S. retail footprint appears to be expanding more slowly than Wing’s.

Where Zipline gets particularly interesting is Uber. The two companies have said they are targeting one million drone deliveries per day by the end of 2029. It is a big ambition, and the demand potential is clearly there, but I want to see more traction before giving that model more weight. A lot depends on whether Zipline can make micro-node economics and operations work at scale.

Amazon ranks third because its current footprint is narrower. Structurally, though, they may have the cleanest model of all. They control the customer, inventory, fulfillment and delivery infrastructure, which gives them more control over the entire experience.

That is the ranking today, but it is still a snapshot. The bigger question is what determines who can actually scale from here. To me, it comes down to two things: speed and cost.

The Hurdle: $4 And 20 Minutes from order to door

For this analysis, I use two simple reference points: delivery should cost roughly $4 or less and take 20 minutes or less from order to door.

These are not industry standards, but they are useful reference points.

On cost, drone delivery should not be more expensive than delivery today. Gridwise’s 2025 data shows median Uber Eats courier compensation of $8.16 per delivery, including a $3.73 median tip. That leaves roughly $4.43 of driver compensation before tips.

Tips complicate the comparison because consumers do not necessarily view “no tip required” as the same thing as a cheaper delivery. So for drone delivery to create a clear cost advantage, I think the underlying delivery cost needs to get to roughly $4 or below.

It also needs to feel fast. If drones cost about the same as human delivery but take 40 minutes, there is little differentiation. If they arrive in ten minutes but cost $10, they remain a premium niche.

For drones to reach the mass market, they need to do both: feel materially faster and cost no more than delivery today.

Autonomy Meets Austin

We’re just two weeks away from the Austin edition of our Urban Autonomy Summit on Wednesday, October 14. This time, the conversation moves to Texas, where robotaxis, autonomous trucks, drones and more, are already on the road. Expect an afternoon of great discussions from all of the top executives building the technology, the fleet and infrastructure teams behind the scenes making it work, and the policymakers shaping what comes next. We’ll also be hosting a reception afterwards with drinks, bites, and plenty of time to connect. Space is limited, so apply to attend.

Speed Is Not About How Fast The Drone Flies

For the customer, there are only two timestamps that matter: when the order is placed and when it arrives. Everything in between is invisible. That is part of the magic of delivery: you place an order, and some time later a package appears at your door.

A six-minute flight does not necessarily mean a fast delivery. The order still has to be prepared, packed and loaded, which means the whole system has to be optimized:

Order → preparation or picking → packaging → loading → flight → delivery

This is where large and micro nodes start to diverge. Amazon and Walmart have enough volume at each node to dedicate labor, build SOPs and continuously improve the process. Restaurants on Uber Eats or DoorDash are much harder to standardize across thousands of locations. And for instant delivery, being fast only some of the time is not enough.

Cost Is A System Problem

The aircraft itself is only one part of the cost. A drone network at scale also needs infrastructure, real estate, loading labor, remote operations, maintenance, batteries, charging and customer support. Every one of those layers has to get cheaper as volume grows.

Loading shows how demanding the $4 hurdle is. Assume a fully loaded employee costs $20 per hour. At two loads per hour, labor alone adds $10 per delivery. At ten, it adds $2. To get that down to $1, the employee needs to handle 20 loads per hour, or 160 over an eight-hour shift. And that is before paying for the drone, batteries, infrastructure and everything else around the operation.

The same logic applies to physical infrastructure. The parking spaces used for launch pads have value, rooftops need permission, and equipment has to be installed and maintained. Then there is charging: today, each flight requires recharging before the next one.

Getting to $4/trip will require optimizing the entire system.

Large Demand Nodes Should Scale First

This is why Walmart and Amazon have a structural advantage.

Take a Walmart Supercenter. It already has significant order volume, enough demand to justify dedicated drone loading, and plenty of space for launch infrastructure. Most are also located in suburban areas, where drones can deliver to front or back yards without having to navigate dense urban building environments.

Amazon’s position is even cleaner. They have many of the same advantages as Walmart, but also control the technology, customer relationship and operations. More importantly, they have already shown they can optimize logistics at scale, so Prime Air is essentially another delivery mode they can plug into an existing system.

Large nodes make almost everything around flying easier and more predictable. That is why I expect them to scale first.

Micro Nodes Are The Harder Problem

Uber and DoorDash solve one side of the equation extremely well: demand. The challenge is that this demand is fragmented across thousands of locations, many with relatively low order volumes and little spare real estate.

Operators are trying to reduce that friction. Zipline’s Dropbox and Wing’s AutoLoader let employees load orders asynchronously, while Flytrex is using rooftop docks to position aircraft closer to restaurants. These systems help, but they still cost money, need to be installed somewhere and may require approval from both the restaurant and the property owner.

That likely means the first viable micro nodes will be the highest-volume locations: large QSRs, cloud kitchens, DashMarts, regional chains and high-volume local restaurants. They have enough order density to justify the infrastructure, but they also bring longer sales cycles, corporate negotiations and, in many cases, franchisee coordination.

There is also a consistency problem. Ultra-fast delivery only works if it is reliably fast. A service that takes 15 minutes one time and 25 the next starts to lose some of the magic, especially when much of that variability comes from a restaurant workflow the drone operator does not control.

This is where DoorDash has an interesting advantage with DashMart. They control the operation, which means they can design the workflow around the drone and manage speed much more tightly. DashMart could be a useful proving ground for the model before DoorDash tries to push it further into the long tail.

The near-term test is whether micro nodes work across hundreds or thousands of high-volume locations. The longer-term prize is restaurant number 8,742, where the Saturday-night employee has never thought about drone logistics.

How I Think The Market Converges By 2030

My view is that large nodes will remain the main driver of scale over the next four years, while the micro-node model continues to mature.

Amazon moves to the top of my list because they already have the demand and control the entire system. In the more bullish scenario, ultra-fast delivery becomes another reason for customers to use Amazon more often, which gives them even more incentive to keep investing in the platform.

Wing is well positioned for a similar reason. If they remain Walmart’s main drone partner, they have access to one of the best networks of concentrated retail demand in the U.S. The question is how deeply Wing can embed itself across that network, especially as Walmart works with multiple drone providers.

Zipline may have the most upside. They also work with Walmart, while Uber gives them access to a second, much broader demand pool. But that upside depends on solving the micro-node problem. Their target of one million deliveries per day by the end of 2029 is ambitious, but getting there will require a lot to go right commercially and operationally.

DoorDash has a different advantage. DashMart gives them a controlled environment where they can prove the model, optimize the workflow and build from there. I expect that to be their wedge before expanding further into third-party merchants.

The rest of the group can still build meaningful businesses, but today they lack one of the advantages the leaders have: their own demand, or a position as the primary partner to one of the existing demand leaders.

By 2030, I expect all of these companies to make significant progress and for drone delivery to become a common part of suburban logistics… at least in the suburbs.

For more from Eduardo, listen to our earlier podcast on Uber’s AV strategy (link) and read his earlier guest post on Waymo’s robotaxi lead (link).

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Substack. Transcripts are also available by clicking on the “transcripts” button in the top right corner of this post on the app/web version. You can also access them from the email version by clicking here.

In today’s episode, I’m speaking with Raquel Urtasun, Founder and CEO of Waabi. Raquel shares how she got into the self-driving field, why she left Uber to build Waabi, and what she believes sets the company apart. We also discuss Waabi’s current operations and footprint, its philosophy, and the three pillars Raquel sees as essential to commercial scale.

Raquel explains how much human supervision Waabi’s trucks require today and the final milestone before the company can operate without a driver. We dig into the metrics Waabi uses to measure progress, its hardware approach, and its partnership with Volvo Autonomous Solutions. She also discusses Waabi’s other truck manufacturer partnerships and how quickly the Waabi Driver can transfer between vehicle platforms.

The conversation then turns to how Waabi tests its claims about zero-shot transfer across truck platforms and why Raquel chose trucking as the company’s starting point. We compare trucking with other autonomous vehicle markets and discuss Waabi’s fundraising and its partnership with Uber to deploy robotaxis. Finally, Raquel shares her perspective on what it will take to bring autonomy to more vehicles at scale.

Chapters

• (00:00) Introduction to Raquel Urtasun

• (01:50) Raquel’s background and how she got into the self-driving field

• (04:35) Why Raquel Urtasun left Uber to build Waabi

• (07:20) How Waabi stands out from its competitors

• (09:20) Waabi’s current operations, footprint, and philosophy

• (11:30) Waabi’s three pillars for commercial scalability

• (16:07) What level of human supervision is involved in Waabi’s current product?

• (16:30) Waabi’s final milestone before full driverless operations

• (20:30) What drives Waabi’s scalability, and which KPIs does it track?

• (22:40) Waabi’s hardware and partnership with Volvo Autonomous Solutions

• (24:45) Waabi’s other OEM partnerships

• (25:35) How quickly the Waabi Driver transfers between vehicle platforms

• (28:30) How Waabi scientifically tests zero-shot transfer across OEM truck platforms

• (30:45) How Raquel ranks different autonomy verticals and why Waabi started with trucking

• (36:50) Waabi’s fundraising and their partnership with Uber to deploy robotaxis

• (40:45) Conclusion and final thoughts

Notes/Links:

• You can find Raquel Urtasun on LinkedIn/X.

• Waabi’s partnership with Volvo Autonomous Solutions, mentioned at the 22:40 timestamp (link).

• Waabi’s announcement of the Waabi Driver’s zero-shot transfer between truck platforms, mentioned at the 25:18 timestamp (link).

• Waabi’s latest fundraising and partnership with Uber, mentioned at the 36:48 timestamp (link).

• Waabi’s website (link).

-Harry

Top Story of the Week

Mercedes-Benz aims to close AI gap with China rivals through Wayve deal (link, no paywall). Wayve is building an impressive roster of major OEM partners, with Mercedes-Benz joining Nissan and Stellantis, and all three have now invested in the company too. That’s a pretty strong vote of confidence in Wayve’s approach, especially considering its technology hasn’t been deployed and validated at scale yet. Its end-to-end, mapless system is designed to generalize across different vehicles and geographies, so in theory, once the tech is ready, Wayve should be able to scale quickly across its OEM partners without having to map and engineer every new market from scratch.

Of course, there’s still a ways to go. Mercedes’ first product will be Level 2, Stellantis is targeting Level 2++ in 2028, and even Kendall acknowledges that getting from an impressive demo to a production-ready automotive product is a huge step. Still, Wayve is putting a lot of the right pieces in place and it’s impressive to watch.

Mercedes-Benz said it planned to integrate Wayve’s autonomous driving system into at least one model that it will deploy in the next two years, offering “advanced urban point-to-point driving assistance”.

Related: Wayve CEO Alex Kendall: Building Scalable, Mapless and End to End AI (link).

Other Stuff

Waymo’s driverless cars continue to crash less often than people (link, no paywall).

Waymo says after 271 million driverless miles, its vehicles were involved in 82 percent fewer injury-causing crashes as compared to human drivers.

‘Climate Week feels like the right moment to share where our impact stands. Here’s what the activity at Terawatt charging depots has added up to’ (link).

Waymo offers new incentives for commuters on public transit (link, no paywall).

It will start in Northern California and expand to other cities. Waymo employees will be the first to access the program. To earn ride credit, or Waymo Cash, customers will have to link their Visa card to the Waymo app and use it to take an autonomous trip and public transit within two hours of each other. For each connected trip on public transit, riders will earn $2.85 in Waymo Cash, which is the cost of transit fare in San Francisco.

MOIA America welcomes its first riders in autonomous ID. Buzz vehicles with Beep (link).

Invited riders can experience the service by requesting trips directly through the Beep mobile app and providing feedback to help inform future operations. They will board and depart self-driving ID. Buzz vehicles at dedicated pickup and drop-off locations along three planned routes within the Lake Nona community. During this phase, the vehicles will operate with highly trained onboard human operators.

Waymo expands Austin robotaxi service to area freeways (link).

Joby Aviation’s 3,100-mile autonomous flight signals its push beyond electric air taxis (link).

Joby Aviation said the cross-country trip, which it described as the “first-ever autonomous flight across the United States,” included autonomous taxiing, takeoffs, navigation, and landings. The aircraft was remotely supervised from Joby’s headquarters in California and Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina. A pilot was on board for compliance, but Joby said the aircraft performed the entire operation autonomously.

Waymo to launch robotaxis in Singapore, its first Southeast Asia market, by 2028 (link, no paywall).

Designing Charging Hubs for Autonomous Fleets

We are excited to partner with Terawatt this week, one of the leading charging infrastructure providers. To learn more about Terawatt’s nationwide real estate portfolio and track record of cutting cost per mile for AV fleet operators, reach out to Peter Cohen at peter@terawattinfrastructure.com

What to do when your Waymo holds up a Secret Service motorcade (link, no paywall).

The company’s press office later provided a more fulsome account of what went wrong. Apparently, the car had recognised and understood the officers’ hand gestures, but because the diversion required turning right across multiple lanes of traffic, it was programmed to wait for remote assistance. Said assistance was activated within seven seconds but was escalated to a team that deals with emergency personnel — hence the delay.

Hyundai Prepares to Supply Waymo Robotaxis This Year (link). Waymo’s fleet today is still mostly Jaguar I-PACEs, with Ojai starting to ramp, but the IONIQ 5 could eventually become one of its highest volume vehicles. And Waymo isn’t alone. Motional and Avride are also building robotaxis on the IONIQ 5, while Uber AV Labs is using 500 of them to collect AV training data.

As the IONIQ 5 becomes a go-to AV platform, the base vehicle itself becomes less of a differentiator. The real moat shifts toward the autonomous driving software and everything behind the scenes: safety, fleet operations, utilization, and ultimately the cost and ETA of the ride.

Nuro’s bet on becoming the “Android” for autonomous vehicles (link).

New Waymo swag has arrived! (link).

Zoox grounds Atlanta test fleet after workers report toxic gas exposure symptoms (link).

‘Great Waymo feature’ (link).

Einride to Build Next Autonomous Truck System on NVIDIA’s Hyperion (link).

Related: Einride’s Autonomous Freight Strategy with CTO Henrik Green (link).

Related: How NVIDIA Alpamayo Is Accelerating Autonomous Driving with Matt Cragun (link).

Waymo expands teen accounts to Nashville (link).

Amazon-owned Zoox’s 100-robotaxi limit in Nevada is about to disappear (link).

Waymo Co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana to Keynote at CES 2027 (link).

What else we're reading/listening to

The Robotaxi Curb Dilemma: Park, Cruise or Return to the Depot? (link). Our latest piece where interviews Michael Hyland, Associate Professor at UC Irvine, about a new study examining the impact of restricting robotaxi curb access in San Francisco. It raised a lot of good discussion on Ben’s Linkedin post also (link).

The Road to Driverless Robotaxis with Nuro Co-CEO Dave Ferguson (link). My latest podcast, where we discuss Nuro’s first decade, its partnership with Lucid and Uber, the uniqueness of their approach to autonomy, and how the Nuro Driver generalizes and transfers between different vehicle platforms, among other topics.

The “Waymo Will Make Transit Obsolete” Argument (link).

Autolane: Building Plaid for the Autonomy Economy (link).

AV Events

TaskUs: Our team is heading to the Urban Autonomy Summit in Austin. We’ll share real-world insights on how behind-the-scenes fleet operations keep autonomous vehicles running safely at scale. Planning to attend? Drop us a DM! (link).

‘Join us in San Francisco on Oct 6 for an exciting TECH WEEK by a16z event where US and Swedish transportation experts will discuss “Autonomous Vehicles and Public Transit: Bridging the Gap for Sustainable Urban Mobility” featuring William Riggs, Emily Warren, Suany Chough, Per Nyrenius, Hans Nordin and Sven Beiker’ (link).

IROS 2026 is coming to Pittsburgh Sept. 27–Oct. 1, and a few familiar AV names will be there. Nuro ML recruiter Vincent Bui says he’s attending, Motional will be at Booth 735, and Waymo’s Dr. Scott Schnelle will speak about AV safety at the PPNIV workshop on Sept. 27. Wayve’s Director of Robotics David Silver says he’ll be there too.

AVs/Humans behaving badly

‘Waymo vs water’ (link).

Related: Why Waymos Keep Driving Into Floods (link).

‘Zoox robotaxi crash caught on Tesla dashcam’ (link). Maybe not the best place to stop but it seemed like the human driver had plenty of time to stop.

‘Comma’s hands-off driving tech under investigation after 2 fatal crashes’ (link).I’ve been thinking about trying Comma’s product on my Rivian R1S, but might wait a bit now.

AV behaving “goodly” :)

Uber CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy says Motional is preparing to launch driverless rides on Uber in Las Vegas in Q4 (link). According to the executive, Motional is already testing without a safety driver in a limited part of the city; elsewhere in Las Vegas, its safety observer rides in the passenger seat. Krishnamurthy says he spent over an hour in Motional vehicles, including a fully driverless ride, with no interventions or issues. He didn’t specify whether the Uber launch will begin without a safety driver, but Motional appears to be getting close.

‘Fun new video from Alex Kendall & Wayve driving down SF’s famous Lombard Street fully autonomously’ (link).

Zoox: This is a scenario that might surprise human drivers, even in daylight. A wrong-way cyclist was barely visible, but our robotaxi saw them coming from a distance and veered smoothly to let them pass (link).

Shout-outs

Big thanks to TDD readers at L-Charge and to Pat O for referring new subscribers. If there’s someone you think would enjoy TDD, feel free to forward this email or use the referral button below, and we’ll make sure to shout out your company.

Refer a friend

Neat Jobs

Senior Global Experiential Marketing Manager at Waymo (link) via Kandra Lopez.

Multiple Safety roles at Atoms, via Offer Grembek.

2027 Summer Intern, BS/MS, Embedded, Software Engineer at Waymo (link) via Jason Cisneros Jr.

Technical Program Manager, Manufacturing at Zoox (link) via Harry Chang.

System Safety Engineer, Strategic Programs & Integration at Waymo (link) via Thomas Zipfel.

Staff Software Engineer / Technical Lead Manager at Waymo (link) via Iulia Ene.

Job Moves

David Damato: Lucid Motors -> Moove (link).

Nikolaos Sarafianos: Meta -> Waymo (link).

Gabe MacFarlane: IMMI -> Kodiak (link).

Pureun Kim: RideFlux -> Tesla (link).

Mwiti Murungi: Mercedes-Benz High-Power Charging -> Voltera (link).

Jingyu Qiao: Amazon -> Applied Intuition (link).

Vivian Luu: Forever Labs -> Atoms (link).

Until next week :)

-Harry

In a new study, Associate Professor Michael Hyland at UC Irvine explains why giving robotaxis somewhere to wait between rides could be crucial to avoiding unnecessary miles on city streets.

Where should a robotaxi go after dropping off a passenger?

It could wait at the curb, head back to a depot or it could simply keep moving.

A new study from researchers at UC Irvine and UC Berkeley examines what happens when shared autonomous vehicles are prevented from resting (otherwise known as staging) at the curb in San Francisco. The researchers simulated a fleet of 1,700 robotaxis serving 68,000 daily trips. In the no-staging scenario, the fleet traveled 564,650 kilometers per day. Allowing the vehicles to stage at the curb reduced daily vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by nearly 60%.

Michael Hyland, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Irvine and one of the researchers behind the study, spoke to The Driverless Digest Editor Ben Hubbard about why curb access matters for robotaxis, how cities should manage valuable curb space, and what the rise of personally owned driverless vehicles could mean for congestion.

The Driverless Digest: Tell us about your role?

Michael Hyland: My research is broadly on modeling and analyzing transportation systems. I tend to focus on innovations in the transportation space, such as driverless vehicles, both in terms of shared fleets and personally owned, but also technologies like e-scooters, e-bikes, ride-hailing and micro-transit. My work involves how to operate these systems efficiently, how to design them effectively, and then I also try to understand their impact on people living in cities.

You’ve recently conducted a pretty comprehensive study on managing curb usage. Can you explain the experiment and what you set out to understand?

The idea was to test the impact of banning shared automated vehicles from using the curb. So this is not when they pick up and drop off passengers, but for what we call staging or parking between one drop-off and the next pickup. Essentially, the time when the vehicle doesn’t have anything to do.

The main result, of course, is that it has pretty big implications on what these vehicles do with their time. When they can’t stage, they just circle around the transportation network. In this case, they dramatically increased vehicle miles traveled on the roadway network in San Francisco. We don’t model congestion in our study, but the implications for congestion, I think, are somewhat obvious directionally. It would make congestion worse, most likely in some of the most congested parts in San Francisco.

We ran some other scenarios related to weekends versus weekdays, preventing vehicles from staging at night versus only during the day. Most of the results were pretty similar. If you’re strategic with where you ban the robotaxis from using the curb, the size of the VMT impact is much smaller, but there still is an adverse impact.

Plenty of people have probably wondered where an AV goes after it has dropped off a passenger. Do they just drive around in circles? Do they wait? Could you explain how this study came about because I can imagine this is going to become a really important topic when AVs take off.

Yeah, that’s right. As there are more fleets, the impact will be much larger. The study actually came from Waymo reaching out to us here at UC Irvine via Susan Shaheen’s group at UC Berkeley. They knew we did modeling and they asked us to interview stakeholders in cities to understand how they’re thinking about regulating the curb and using the curb for not just robotaxis but also Uber and Lyft-type vehicles, and micromobility too.

They came to us and said, “Hey, we think it’s mutually beneficial for us at Waymo and for cities for our vehicles to be able to use the curb when we’re not serving passengers,” as opposed to just driving around or even going a long distance back to an off-street parking lot. We co-designed the experiments. We made the final choices, of course. That’s the backstory of how the study came to be.

So is it entirely independent? When a company like Waymo approaches a university to produce a study, there’s always a feeling that the results might be tailored in their favor.

I can see that’s the impression. The main thing Waymo was pushing back on when we were writing up the report was that they said: “Well, we didn’t give you any data, so don’t make it seem like we did give you any data.” All this data is synthetic. We got the parking data from INRIX. We got the ride-hailing trip data from a company called Replica. Waymo really didn’t give us any data, which was fine with us. They gave us order-of-magnitude information about their fleet size, which is publicly available.

As far as the results, I mean I hate to undercut our study, but the directional impact was kind of obvious going into the study. We knew that by banning these vehicles from using the curb, it was going to increase VMT. It was really the magnitude that was the interesting part. Was it going to be a 10% increase? 30%? We found a pretty large number, which was a 60% increase in total vehicle miles traveled with this policy. And that came directly from the results. We didn’t rerun any scenarios or rerun the experiments with Waymo’s input.

Where do all those extra miles come from?

There are all these peaks and valleys throughout the day in terms of the demand for robotaxis. Everyone knows when the big peaks are for regular travel, right? So the morning peak, and then you have the afternoon peak. But for a service like Uber, Lyft or Waymo, there’s even little peaks and valleys that occur throughout the day, and spatially these occur throughout different parts of the region.

But when you have these vehicles out on the road and you get a little bit of a dip in demand, there’s nowhere for them to go. They’re not serving passengers, so they need to find somewhere to go. And if you don’t allow them to use the curb, what the software we use does is just gives them short “fake” trips to take throughout the network, circling around where they expect the future demand to be. And that, as the results suggest, leads to a lot of cumulative extra miles traveled in the network.

Some observers might believe these vehicles would just go back to a depot. Did you measure that?

Unfortunately, we didn’t create scenarios around the vehicles going back to the depot. I wish we could have but we ran out of budget.

Given that there are relatively few Waymo depots across the entire 49-square-mile San Francisco area, I suspect this would reduce VMT somewhat, but probably not by much. I’m not sure exactly how many depots Waymo has, but let’s say somewhere between two and five. Whenever a vehicle became empty, it would likely have to travel a fairly long distance to reach a depot, perhaps a mile and a half on average. It would then have to travel another mile and a half or so to pick up customers once a new request came in. So I think there’d be a pretty negative impact if the vehicles were always returning to the depot as well. Maybe you could bring that 60% number down to like 40-45%.

To reduce the VMT, you’d need to have depots all over the city then?

Yeah, I don’t think they [Waymo] are really into real estate development. They could partner with other companies, though. One thing we learned throughout the study is that the price of off-street parking is clearly time-dependent. In some parts of the city, such as commercial districts, parking might be very cheap to access at night but very expensive during the day. In residential areas, it’s usually expensive no matter what, and there are rarely large enough areas for a depot to be set up.

Acquiring land is also expensive. I imagine they’re trying to minimize the amount of land they need to acquire and be strategic about where they park their vehicles. They’d have to consider both the location and whether they’d have to pay for parking there.

Were there any other major findings?

The other major finding, which Waymo liked a lot, was related to a metric we used called curb productivity.

We measure curb productivity as the number of passengers who move between the transportation system and their destination per unit of time a robotaxi occupies the curb, including time spent staging and picking up or dropping off travelers.

We found that robotaxis were about eight to ten times more productive than personal vehicles in terms of how they use the curb. A personal vehicle spends about one-and-a-half hours at the curb on average, whereas a robotaxi spends eight to ten times less time there, around eight minutes per ride served on average.

If you’re concerned about one of a city’s most valuable assets, the curb, it seems that robotaxis use that asset much more productively than personal vehicles do. Personal vehicles can simply park at the curb and stay there for a very long time. Obviously, people can get out and walk around and do many things while their vehicle is parked, but you still have a very valuable piece of land being occupied by a vehicle that isn’t actively serving passengers.

And I should say that buses are much more productive than robotaxis, which in turn are much more productive than personal vehicles. A bus is only at the curb for a very short period of time, but it can have many people getting on and off during that time.

What can cities do in terms of regulating the curb?

I’m not sure how many cities were considering banning robotaxis from using the curb, but if they were, I would say don’t do that. They might be increasing congestion a bit, but I think they’re providing valuable mobility to a large number of people in urban environments.

Moving beyond our study, I am generally in favor of having designated pick-up and drop-off zones where it is easy for robotaxi, ridehailing and taxi vehicles to get to the curb quickly, pick up a passenger quickly, and exit very quickly. So individual vehicles are not having to fight for curb space, and the vehicles are not spending much time at the curb at all. They’re just getting the passenger in the vehicle and moving away quickly.

I don’t think I’d be in favor of having designated staging locations for robotaxis or ride-hailing or taxi vehicles in general. But I think just allow these vehicles to use the curb for short-term parking, in the same way that private vehicles can.

What about personally owned driverless vehicles? What impact could they have on VMT?

That’s another area of research for my group. I’m not going to make a forecast as to when Waymo or Toyota or another company is going to be selling these vehicles to individual households. But let’s say in 10 to 15 years they do sell them to households. I think in that scenario, we have a lot of benefits to households in terms of mobility, but we have some very big potential implications for congestion and vehicle miles traveled.

What we’re seeing in our modeling results is that households absolutely will have the vehicle drop off one household member at work, drive home, pick up another household member, take them to an activity, whether that’s school or some after-school activity, and then drive back home empty again. In this case, a household might actually be able to own fewer vehicles because these vehicles can travel empty and deadhead back to the household. But that’s going to significantly increase VMT and congestion, unless of course there are some policies to make it more expensive to drive and make it more expensive to congest the roadways. So I think that’s a particularly important policy question for cities and states going forward.

This is like the Airbnb model for driverless taxis. We’re already sharing our homes, our parking spaces and if I buy an autonomous vehicle why would I let it sit in the car parking space when it could be out making me money, right?

We’re a little bit skeptical that people will be willing to give their $80,000 to $120,000 assets to strangers. But we do think there’s maybe an opportunity to get more use out of these valuable assets.

I’d be willing to lend my vehicle out occasionally or semi-occasionally to friends and family that live nearby, which maybe prevents them from buying a third vehicle or a second vehicle here in California. So I think there’s a nice opportunity there for some sharing of these personally owned driverless vehicles. But we’re a little bit skeptical of the model Tesla has discussed, where a Tesla owner lends their vehicle to a ridehailing fleet operator where anyone could be throwing up or using your vehicle for any type of purpose.

Yeah, you also have issues about cleanliness too. Any final thoughts?

I’ve been asked a number of times about whether cities should be charging robotaxis to use the curb and to drive around in urban areas and my answer is yes, but not just robotaxis. In my opinion, robotaxis should be subject to the same rules as all passenger vehicles in urban areas. If a passenger vehicle has to pay to park, a robotaxi should have to pay to park.

So, as a transportation analyst, I am in favor of congestion pricing. I think it’s worked very well in London. It worked very well in New York City. I think it can work in other large, dense areas, including Los Angeles and San Francisco. But I wouldn’t subject robotaxis to additional fees and additional taxes that you’re not subjecting personal vehicle owners to. If you actually want to reduce congestion, you need to charge all of the personal passenger vehicles for using very valuable space in urban areas.

Michael, it’s been a fascinating conversation. Thanks so much for coming on.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Substack. Transcripts are also available by clicking on the “transcripts” button in the top right corner of this post on the app/web version. You can also access them from the email version by clicking here.

In today’s episode, I’m speaking with Dave Ferguson, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Nuro. Dave reflects on Nuro’s first decade, what has kept him motivated through the AV industry’s ups and downs, and how Nuro’s co-CEO structure works in practice. We also discuss the differences between leading the technical and business sides of an AV company and how Dave’s role has evolved over time.

Dave explains what makes Nuro’s approach to autonomy unique and takes us inside the company’s partnership with Lucid and Uber. We explore the vehicle’s hardware stack, how Nuro plans to differentiate as AV hardware becomes cheaper, and the latest milestones on the path toward fully driverless testing/deployment. Dave also shares how the Nuro Driver can generalize across different vehicle platforms and draws on Nuro’s previous driverless deployments to explain Nuro’s driverless capabilities.

The conversation also examines whether the AV industry is moving toward full vertical integration or greater specialization, how building the software and hardware stacks compares, and how Nuro’s partnership with Uber could expand over time. Finally, Dave shares Nuro’s broader goals and what comes next for the company.

Chapters

• (00:00) Introduction to Dave Ferguson

• (01:30) Nuro’s past decade, and the experiences thus far

• (03:05) What keeps AV company execs motivated in the long run?

• (05:28) How Nuro’s Co-CEO setup works, including the advantages, disadvantages, and roles

• (10:10) Comparing the technical vs. business sides of running an AV company

• (12:30) What makes Nuro’s approach to autonomy unique, and the Nuro–Lucid–Uber partnership

• (14:45) The most compelling aspect of the Nuro–Lucid–Uber partnership

• (15:35) Is the AV industry moving toward full vertical integration or greater specialization and partnerships?

• (18:06) The software vs. hardware aspects of AV development

• (20:45) The hardware stack on the Nuro–Lucid–Uber robotaxi

• (22:50) How to stand out in the era of cheaper AV hardware

• (24:48) The latest milestones in the Nuro–Lucid–Uber partnership

• (27:32) What it’ll take to remove the safety driver, achieve fully driverless testing, and Nuro’s past driverless deployments

• (30:05) How the Nuro Driver generalizes and transfers between different vehicle platforms

• (33:50) Nuro’s relationship with Uber, how their partnership could evolve, and Nuro’s goals

• (37:30) Conclusion and final thoughts

Notes/Links:

• You can find Dave Ferguson on LinkedIn/X.

• My previous interview with Nuro’s COO Andrew Chapin, mentioned at the 12:32 timestamp (link).

• Nuro, Lucid, and Uber announced plans to launch their robotaxi service in Houston in mid-2027 (link, no paywall).

• Nuro’s website (link).

-Harry

Top Story of the Week

Lucid Motors has a potential robotaxi partner for Europe (link). Bolt is partnering with Lucid to develop and deploy at least 25,000 fully autonomous vehicles across multiple European cities and countries, as part of its broader goal of having 100,000 autonomous vehicles on its platform by 2035. The vehicles will be based on Lucid’s upcoming Midsize platform and use NVIDIA’s Hyperion autonomous driving hardware, while Bolt plans to own and operate the fleet.

There are still some important details missing though. Bolt hasn’t actually placed an order for 25,000 vehicles, no money has changed hands, and the companies haven’t announced a deployment timeline or most importantly, named the autonomous driving software provider.

Even with those questions unresolved, Bolt is clearly spending more time and money in the AV space, with Lucid now joining Stellantis and Pony.ai as major partners. It’s another sign that Bolt sees autonomous vehicles as an important part of its long-term ride-hailing strategy.

I’m excited to dig into this partnership and hear more about Bolt’s AV ambitions with their CEO on the podcast later this month. Stay tuned!

For Lucid, the robotaxi opportunity is also starting to look meaningful. Between this partnership and its separate agreement with Uber and Nuro for at least 35,000 vehicles in the U.S., Lucid now has potential robotaxi programs covering at least 60,000 vehicles.

Waymo Makin’ Moves

Waymo opens robotaxi service in Las Vegas (link).

The Alphabet-owned company said Monday it will invite public riders on a rolling basis, following a robotaxi launch playbook it has followed in 14 other cities. Waymo is starting with “dozens” of its new Ojai minivan robotaxis, which will serve an area of Las Vegas that includes the Strip south of Highway 589 and into Boulder Junction, according to a spokesperson.

Related: The fleet size at launch is “dozens” according to Waymo (link).

Waymo to Start Tokyo Robotaxi Service Next Year in Asia Push (link, no paywall).

Waymo will partner with Japanese taxi firms Go Inc. and Nihon Kotsu Co. to start a fully autonomous service in Tokyo in 2027, it said Tuesday. The companies expect to start with a small fleet and then expand gradually to 100 vehicles.

Waymo now testing fully autonomously in Pittsburgh with safety technician behind the wheel (link).

Waymo restarts San Antonio service 5 months after flooding troubles (link).

Other Stuff

Drone Startup Zipline in Talks on About $1 Billion Raise at $20 Billion Valuation (link, no paywall).

NHTSA orders Tesla to prove its Cybercab is legal to sell, under oath (link).

The agency issued a formal Special Order on September 10 demanding that the company show, under oath, how a vehicle with no steering wheel, no pedals, and no mirrors complies with federal safety standards written for human drivers. Tesla has until September 30 to respond.

May Mobility to go public in SPAC deal at $1.4B valuation (link). For smaller AV companies without Waymo or Zoox-level resources, this asset-light model may be the more realistic path to scale. Companies like May Mobility and Nuro are both increasingly focused on providing the autonomy stack while partners handle the vehicles and operations.

The transaction with ACP Holdings Acquisition Corp. implies a $1.4 billion pro forma enterprise value and could provide the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based AV startup with up to $337 million in gross proceeds. That includes $217 million from the SPAC’s trust, assuming no redemptions, plus a $120 million fully committed from private investors through a so-called PIPE financing.

Powering the Future of Autonomous Mobility for Cities and Businesses, Today

MOIA America develops autonomous mobility solutions designed to help transform how people move through cities and communities. The MOIA brand’s turnkey autonomous mobility platform combines a purpose-built autonomous vehicle, an integrated self-driving hardware and software system, and a Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform that enables operators to launch and scale autonomous transportation services. MOIA America is currently testing in U.S. markets, including Los Angeles, Austin, and Orlando.

Mayor Mamdani has announced more than 100 policies to make NYC streets safer over the next 10 years (link). AVs are notably absent from this list, but I think they should be pursued in parallel to everything the Mayor mentioned. Safer street design, lower speeds and better enforcement can affect every road user immediately, while AVs will take years to reach meaningful scale in New York, or really any city.

Riding a Pony.ai Fully Driverless Robotaxi in Croatia! (link). Impressive to see how smoothly it handled a wide variety of situations.

‘*No retrofitting required. Straight from Hyundai Motor Group Innovation Center Singapore (HMGICS) to Motional’s Las Vegas Technical Center! Arriving fully assembled from the production line, all the IONIQ 5 robotaxis need is Motional decals’ (link).

‘Waymo is hiring a Charging Automation Lead. Job is to build a “zero-touch” charging network for its AV fleet including robotic charging arms’ (link). Very cool, and I imagine they’re looking to partner with companies like Rocsys on the automation piece.

‘Two #robotaxi interviews landed in my inbox 48 hours apart. Different publications, different founders, same argument: the hard part of autonomy is no longer the driving’ (link).

Wayve brings a new approach to robotaxi race (link).

‘Another great conversation from the set of AV Weekly! We were thrilled to welcome Harry Campbell to the set of AV Weekly for a conversation about all things autonomous — from where the technology stands today to where autonomous mobility may be headed next’ (link). Had fun recording this episode for their AV Weekly series which premieres on September 22 (link).

Virginia Panel Recommends DMV-Run Pilot for Self-Driving Cars (link).

Beep closes Series B to accelerate commercial deployment of autonomous mobility networks (link).

Beep announced the close of a Series B funding round, bringing its total capital raised to approximately $130 million. The round was led by Mobileye with participation from existing investors.

‘As of mid-2026, over 60% of US warehouses had integrated some form of physical AI’ (link).

War over robotaxis in NYC heats up after retracted Waymo report and ‘Autokill’ novel (link).

‘This town ain’t big enough for the two of us’ (link).

What else we're reading/listening to

I Tried to Hail a Waymo on Lyft 16 Times in Nashville. Here’s What Happened (link). Our latest guest post from former lidar salesman and independent AV tester recounts his 16 failed attempts to hail a Waymo through Lyft, getting his account permanently disabled, and the late-night rides that finally made the ordeal worthwhile. It’s already getting some love on Reddit too (link).

Bringing Physical AI to a Billion Machines - Applied Intuition Co-founder Peter Ludwig (link). My latest podcast, where we discuss how physical AI differs from digital AI, Applied Intuition’s autonomous trucking vertical, the role of simulation in validating AV systems, and what it will take to move from safety-driver testing to fully driverless operations at scale.

ADSN by James Borow and Daniel Druger: 30 minutes: How 450K Dashcams Are Training the Future of Physical Al ft. Zach Greenberger (link).

Jason Calacanis on the Robotaxi Endgame (link). Good interview with Jason on all things AV, Uber x Waymo and Tesla. I don’t agree that Waymo will need to buy a car company if/when Alphabet spins it out. I think they’re more likely to keep partnering with multiple OEMs.

I do like his theory on Uber though. With more than $10B a year in free cash flow, they could absolutely go out and buy an AV operator. Investors clearly aren’t loving the near-term economics of the partnership strategy, so at some point it may make sense to own more of the stack.

Unsupervised with Dave Ferguson: Is E2E Safe for Self-Driving? With Aurora’s Chris Urmson (link). Cool to see two long time friends and leaders talk self driving.

AV Events

Autonomous Vehicle (AV) Workforce Summit, hosted by the US AV Jobs Coalition, is happening October 19, 2026 in Columbus, Ohio (link).

“Will Autonomous Vehicles Improve the Environment? A Skeptical Conversation” during Climate Week NYC, featuring Jeffrey Tumlin, on Wednesday, September 23, from 3:00–4:30 PM at 15 W 39th St, 10th Floor, NY (link).

Related: Robotaxi Lessons From San Francisco With Jeffrey Tumlin (link).

AVs/Humans behaving badly

Waymo pulls over, calls cops on juvenile riders who had ‘ghost gun,’ authorities say (link). There was a bit of controversy over this and the LA Times wrote, “This wasn’t the first time Waymo has tattled on alleged troublemakers.” But if there’s ever a good reason for a robotaxi to ‘tattle’ on its passengers, a loaded AR-style ghost gun seems like one of them.

Two young people riding in an autonomous vehicle were arrested in San Francisco after authorities allegedly found them in possession of an illegal “ghost gun”... The incident took place shortly before 4 a.m. on Sept. 3 in the city’s Richmond District, the Police Department said… Officers searched the car and discovered a loaded, AR-style assault rifle, as well as “suspected marijuana and mace spray,” authorities said in the statement.

‘Lousy place to do a pick up’ (link).

‘Good thing it doesn’t need to see through the windshield’ (link).

‘Two completely different drone delivery experiences in Arizona’ (link). Zipline takes the cake :)

‘Somebody pooped themselves in this Waymo’ (link). Customer service agent was speechless lol.

Neat Jobs

Our article on how to get hired at Waymo is now #WaymoCertified! Check it out here if you missed it (link).

Commercial Partnerships Team Lead at Moove AV, via Ming Maa (link).

Senior Technical Program Manager - Vehicle Platform & Autonomy Integration at Zoox (link) via Kaushik Raghu.

Strategy & BizOps Lead, Germany at Waymo (link) via Thomas Yao and Ben Loewenstein.

Manager, Resilience Risk at Waymo (link) via Piet van Os.

2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Safety Research, Human Behavior Analytics (link) via Azadeh Dinparastdjadid.

2027 Summer Intern, PhD, Machine Learning, Computer Vision (link) via Meng Wang.

Job Moves

Former Waymo CFO jumps to self-driving startup Wayve (link).

Lauren Svensson: Instacart -> Waymo (link).

Yeyan Shi: NovaWeg Consulting -> Lyft (link).

Alanna Iverson Simon: Dandy -> Waymo (link).

Hélène B: Uber AV Labs (link).

Neha Rao: Tesla -> Nuro (link).

Until next week :)

-Harry

Last week, on September 9th, Lyft announced that it would begin offering Waymo rides through the Lyft app in Nashville, Tennessee. Unlike the partnerships between Waymo and Uber in Austin, Texas and Atlanta, Georgia, this is not an exclusive arrangement where riders are required to use Uber to hail a Waymo. In Nashville, riders can use Lyft to get a Waymo while the regular Waymo app also remains available.

With this new partnership launching, I decided to drive to Nashville from Austin, Texas, where I had recently attended and covered the Tesla Cybercab launch press event on September 3rd. I arrived in Nashville late Thursday evening on September 10th and immediately wanted to see how the new Lyft integration worked for myself. Riders in Nashville have already been able to hail a Waymo directly from the Waymo app but I specifically wanted to test out the Waymo on Lyft experience.

As soon as I reached the downtown area, I opened the Lyft app and was greeted with a pop up allowing me to opt into receiving autonomous rides through the platform. That part of the experience was convenient and made it clear that Waymo vehicles were now officially part of the available Lyft ride options in Nashville.

The press release states, “Riders requesting a Standard, Priority Pickup, Wait & Save, or Extra Comfort ride within central Nashville will begin to be matched with a Waymo vehicle at no additional cost through the Lyft app. To be eligible for matching, the route must start and end within the Waymo service area on Lyft covering Downtown/Broadway, North Nashville/Germantown, East Nashville, Midtown, and South Nashville”

This is where the story gets interesting.

Between 11:12 PM that evening and 11:56 PM, I booked 14 different rides through the Lyft app and was matched with a human driver all 14 times rather than a Waymo. I experimented with multiple pickup locations, multiple destinations, and all four of the available booking categories. Since I had my own vehicle with me, I was extremely flexible about where I could start and end each trip. Despite everything I tried, I had zero luck getting matched with a Waymo.

Then I suddenly found myself logged out of the Lyft app and received the message, “Your account has been disabled. Please contact support for more information.”

That was obviously frustrating. I was doing my best not to inconvenience Lyft drivers by canceling within approximately 10 seconds whenever I was matched with a human driven vehicle. I also had about seven years of ride history with Lyft, an active Lyft Pink membership, and was being charged $2 cancellation fees, which I was willingly paying while trying to get matched with the specific type of ride I had traveled to Nashville to experience.

I posted about the situation on my X account, and Lyft replied asking me to send them a direct message with my information. I also contacted Lyft Support through its 24 hour online chat. Through that conversation, I learned that my account had actually been permanently disabled because of my repeated attempts to hail my preferred type of ride.

At that point, I mostly found the entire outcome hilarious. I shared a screenshot of what happened with Waymo engineer Reed Morse, @Reed, who I had followed on X for a while but had never personally messaged before. I assumed that would probably be the conclusion of my Nashville Waymo experiment.

Instead, Reed went out of his way to make some magic happen. He contacted the right person at Waymo, who then communicated with Lyft, and somehow they were able to get my Lyft account restored.

So I went back out very late Friday evening to try again.

At around 1:30 AM, I started requesting rides. After two more unsuccessful attempts, I changed locations again and headed to the Barstool Bar parking lot in downtown Nashville. Finally, at 2:05 AM, I requested an Extra Comfort ride to a nearby downtown hotel about 10 minutes away and successfully got matched with a Waymo.

The Lyft app informed me that I had been paired with a Waymo and asked me to confirm that I was comfortable taking an autonomous vehicle. It also gave me the option to decline and receive a human driven ride instead.

After I accepted, the Waymo arrived in well under five minutes. Once the vehicle arrived, the Lyft app gave me the ability to unlock the vehicle or open the trunk. Interestingly, opening the trunk also unlocked the rest of the vehicle, which was a nice touch.

The ride itself was extremely smooth and was probably my best Waymo experience to date. I have previously ridden in Waymo vehicles in Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, and Dallas. I still would not put the driving experience quite on the same level as the Tesla Cybercab, but it was definitely excellent.

When I reached my destination and opened the passenger door, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the trunk had automatically opened as well.

I then needed to return to my own vehicle, so I booked another Extra Comfort ride. This time I was instantly paired with the exact same Waymo. It appeared to have simply circled the block before returning, and once again it arrived in well under five minutes.

The second ride was another positive experience. During the trip, we encountered emergency vehicles passing nearby. The Waymo recognized what was happening, moved over appropriately, and ultimately did everything it was supposed to do. The reaction was slightly jerky, but from a safety and decision making standpoint, it handled the situation correctly.

Overall, the actual Waymo rides were great and felt safe, smooth, and polished. The process of trying to book one through Lyft, however, was a completely different story.

If your main goal is simply to ride in a Waymo while visiting Nashville, I would definitely recommend using the Waymo app instead. Still, after everything that happened, from 16 failed attempts and getting permanently disabled by Lyft to eventually having my account restored and finally getting two Waymo rides back to back at 2 AM, the entire experience turned into a pretty fun memory.

You can watch both of my rides in full, completely unedited and back to back, on my YouTube channel @DavidMossAI today.

-David Moss

Listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Substack. Transcripts are also available by clicking on the “transcripts” button in the top right corner of this post on the app/web version. You can also access them from the email version by clicking here.

In today’s episode, I’m speaking with Peter Ludwig, co-founder and CTO of Applied Intuition. Peter shares how the company has evolved since its founding, the idea behind it, and its mission to accelerate the adoption of safe and intelligent machines worldwide. We also explore physical AI, how it differs from digital AI, and Applied Intuition’s partnership with HUMAIN.

Peter breaks down Applied Intuition’s work in autonomous trucking, including its partnerships, current deployments, plans for global scale, and what it will take to remove the safety driver and achieve fully driverless operations. He also explains the most common causes of failure in autonomous vehicle deployments, the role simulation plays in safely validating AV systems, and how much technology can transfer between different autonomous driving applications, such as trucks and robotaxis.

The conversation also covers end-to-end AI, Applied Intuition’s approach to commercializing and deploying the technology, and how the company works with partners to bring consumer products to market. Finally, Peter explains closed-loop simulation with reinforcement learning, reflects on lessons from nearly a decade in the industry, and shares his outlook on the future of autonomous vehicles.

Chapters

• (00:00) Introduction to Peter Ludwig

• (01:19) How the vision and operations at Applied Intuition have evolved from inception to today

• (03:54) Applied Intuition’s global footprint

• (04:16) Peter’s past work experience and the idea behind Applied Intuition

• (06:17) Applied Intuition’s mission

• (07:32) What is physical AI, and how does it compare to digital AI?

• (09:20) Applied Intuition’s partnership with HUMAIN

• (10:41) Details of Applied Intuition’s trucking vertical and how it will scale globally

• (14:00) Applied Intuition’s trucking partnerships and deployments

• (16:20) What it’ll take to remove the safety driver and achieve fully driverless operations

• (18:37) The most common causes of failure in AV deployments

• (20:25) The role of simulation in safely deploying AV systems

• (23:20) How much technology can transfer between different autonomous modalities, like trucking and robotaxis

• (26:50) Lessons learned from nearly 10 years of operations

• (29:12) End-to-end AI and Applied Intuition’s approach to commercializing and deploying it

• (31:09) Applied Intuition’s B2C approach and how it collaborates with partners to launch consumer products

• (33:15) Applied Intuition’s future plans and Peter’s outlook on the future of AVs

• (35:40) What is closed-loop simulation with reinforcement learning?

• (37:23) Conclusion and final thoughts

Notes/Links:

• You can find Peter Ludwig on LinkedIn.

• Applied Intuition’s website (link).

• Applied Intuition’s partnerships mentioned in the episode:

  • HUMAIN, mentioned at the 9:20 timestamp (link, no paywall).

  • Isuzu Motors, mentioned at the 14:14 timestamp (link).

  • Stellantis, mentioned at the 31:17 timestamp (link).

    • This partnership was extended in May 2026 (link).

• Applied Intuition’s SDS for Automotive, mentioned at the 29:51 timestamp (link).

-Harry

Top Story of the Week

Lyft riders can now hail Waymo robotaxis in Nashville (link, no paywall).

Through the partnership, Lyft customers may be matched at no additional cost with a Waymo autonomous vehicle when they order a regular ride. In order for a match to happen, the desired route must start and end within Waymo’s existing service area. Users can decline a driverless ride or opt out entirely.

I’m bullish on this model. Waymo can keep serving customers who specifically want a Waymo and may be willing to wait longer or pay more for the experience, while still tapping into Lyft’s larger customer base during lower-demand periods. That feels like a win-win, and it solves a lot of the issues we’ve highlighted with the “Waymo on Uber” model.

The main downside for Lyft though is what I like to call the Trojan horse problem: a Lyft customer gets matched with a Waymo, has a great experience, and then decides to start booking directly through Waymo instead.

But I think that’s a risk Uber and Lyft are going to have to live with. It’s tough for them to compete with Waymo on the actual ride experience, so their advantage needs to come from lower prices, shorter ETAs and better reliability.

Other Stuff

Self-Driving Firm PlusAl to Go Public Via Yorkville SPAC Merger (link, no paywall).

The transaction values Santa Clara, California-based PlusAI at $800 million on an equity basis before the merger with the SPAC, Texas Ventures Acquisition III Corp… The deal is expected to provide up to about $300 million in capital, mostly from the SPAC’s trust of about $236 million. The deal also includes more than $60 million of fully committed financing.

Tesla is asking people if they want to buy and run Cybercab fleets (link).

The robotaxi interest form, which was released ahead of the company’s Cybercab event in Austin, is not definitive proof that Tesla will sell its autonomous vehicles to third-party operators. But it’s certainly an indicator of where the company’s longer-term plans lie. Tesla wants to scale and it doesn’t seem to want to do it alone.

‘Unfinished business’: Travis Kalanick revisits robotaxis with new start-up (link, no paywall).

Pony.ai and Verne Kick Off Fully Driverless Robotaxi Test Rides in Zagreb (link, no paywall). This is a nice step up from their initial launch, where they still had a safety driver onboard. And it’s a meaningful milestone now that the vehicles are operating fully driverless, a first for Europe. But the deployment still looks more like a limited-corridor robotaxi service than a true citywide deployment.

One framework I’ve been thinking about for AV launches is whether the main barrier is technological or regulatory. In Europe’s case, this increasingly looks like a regulatory challenge. We already know Pony.ai’s technology can operate driverlessly from its operations in China, so the question is less whether the system can drive and more how quickly regulators will allow that capability to be deployed more broadly.

The test rides take place along a 22-kilometer route linking Verne's headquarters and one of Zagreb's main business districts with Franjo Tuđman Airport Zagreb. The fully driverless routes will be further expanded in the next few months, with the aim to cover the whole operating area in Zagreb.

Related: INTERVIEW With Pony AI CEO James Peng: “In two years, we’ll be bigger than Waymo on fleet size” (link).

Poseidon Aerospace lands $60M ahead of first pilotless test flight (link). I’ve always been skeptical of the economics of autonomous aircraft since pilots are only a small portion of airline costs. But Poseidon’s thesis is broader: going pilotless can improve utilization, eliminate crew constraints, reduce aircraft weight by removing the cockpit and life support systems, and make it easier to operate in higher-risk environments where you may not want to put a pilot in harm’s way.

The startup is embracing autonomy and remote piloting, but it’s not bothering with the vertical takeoff and landing tech that is de rigueur among so many aviation startups. There’s also no hydrogen or electric powertrain to be found. Egret and its seaplane variant, Heron, are fixed-wing aircraft powered by regular old combustion engines.

Related: Morgan Barrett interviews Sam Rohr of JAWS, one of Poseidon Aerospace’s new investors (link).

Faster Data Off the Vehicle—Faster AI on the Road

Virewirx’s VX60 High Performance Wireless System has piqued our interest—that’s why we’re partnering with them this week to share their unique millimeter wave system built to move massive AV fleet data quickly and reliably. Reach out to Brian Lee at info@virewirx.com to learn more.

Minneapolis may require driverless vehicles to have someone in the driver’s seat (link, no paywall). Not a big surprise here. Minneapolis has a large and well-organized rideshare driver community, including many immigrant drivers, and the city and state have already been at the forefront of pushing for higher pay and stronger protections for Uber and Lyft drivers.

WeRide, Uber Win Spain’s First L4 Permit for 20-Vehicle Madrid Fleet (link).

The companies target commercial robotaxi service on the Uber app by the end of 2026, which depends on further regulatory and operational milestones the permit does not itself grant. Vehicles will carry an in-car specialist during the initial phase. Mapping, route validation, and operational readiness testing begin immediately.

Can Zoox’s ‘Toaster on Wheels’ Conquer the Self-Driving Car Capital of America? (link, no paywall).

‘One side says Tesla will kill Uber. The other says Uber owns the customer relationship and can just aggregate competing robotaxi fleets. I think both miss what changes when you remove the human driver’ (link).

‘Waymo is changing multi-stop behavior. Now when you make stops, you can only chill for 5 minutes, and then must continue’ (link). Waymo’s stop product works fine if you’re picking someone up or dropping someone off. But if you’re riding solo and want to make a quick stop, you can’t really use it that way. If you get out of the vehicle, the car leaves, and you have to request another Waymo when you’re ready to continue.

That always felt like a strange product experience to me. If I add a stop, I’d expect the same car to wait for a few minutes while I run inside somewhere. A five-minute limit seems totally reasonable, but the product should actually let solo riders use those five minutes. And I’d be happy to pay for the waiting time too. I wouldn’t expect the car to sit there for free.

Tesla Cybercab doesn’t have any manual controls — but it does have a virtual joystick (link, no paywall). This could be a good solution for first responders who need to move the vehicles out of the way although it sounds like they already have some concerns.

Related: Tesla Cybercab draws concern from Texas fire department over lack of steering wheel (link, no paywall).

‘Wayve doing testing in downtown San Jose tonight at 10:13pm’ (link).

‘Younger bro follows Big bro’ (link).

What else we’re reading/listening to

How to Get Hired at Waymo (link). Our latest piece where we put together a practical guide to finding the right role, getting noticed, networking with employees and making it through the interview process at Waymo. This was a lot of fun to write and a Waymo employee already told me “building something definitely stands out”.

Building and Scaling AV Depots with Voltera CEO Frank Reig (link). My latest podcast where we discuss what actually goes into setting up an AV depot, the potential challenges in AV depot operations, and how Voltera is building the infrastructure needed to support AV fleets at scale, among other things.

AV Events

-1 to Waymo with Dmitri Dolgov, presented by South Park Commons. Happening on Monday, September 21 in San Francisco (link).

AVs behaving badly

‘Tesla Cybercab injures passenger, and then drops them off at wrong location’ (link). Obviously not a great experience, but I’ve been surprised by how few videos we’ve seen so far of Cybercabs behaving badly. There have been some awkward drop-offs and other quirks, but given how closely these vehicles are being watched, the relative lack of major incidents caught on video feels like a mildly positive signal.

Still early and purely anecdotal though.

Shout-outs

Big thanks to TDD readers David C and Micah for referring new subscribers. If there’s someone you think would enjoy TDD, feel free to forward this email or use the referral button below, and we’ll make sure to shout out your company.

Refer a friend

Neat Jobs

Multiple roles at Rocsys (link) via Rombout Heesterman.

Senior Software Engineer - Mapping Web at Zoox (link) via Cameron Drake.

Field Support Operations Launch Lead, AV CommOps at Uber (link) via Adriana Peth.

Staff Software Engineer, Fleet Optimization at Waymo (link) via Jamelia Quiet.

Job Moves

Christian Potthast: Woven by Toyota -> Neros Technologies (link).

Maoz Friedman: Rivian -> Bedrock Robotics (link).

Until next week :)

-Harry