Welcome to the Ride AI Newsletter, your weekly digest of important events and new developments at the intersection of technology and transportation.

📍 Last week we announced the first-ever Ride AI summit will be hosted in LA on April 2, 2025. Our goal is to bring together an intimate group of CEOs and industry leaders for an exclusive day of meaningful programming delving into the advancements and challenges of autonomous tech. Our program directors, Timothy B. Lee and Edward Niedermeyer, each wrote a bit about what they hope to achieve with this new event, here and here. We’ve excerpted a portion of Ed’s blog post below.

We hope you will join us on this journey. We are proud to have Waymo as our launch partner, and plan to announce more speakers and partners soon. Early Access tickets are available for $500; we anticipate there will be a waitlist later on. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out.

Today, the reality of truly driverless vehicles is here. Every day, thousands of Americans will ride in completely autonomous vehicles, and that number grows all the time. With this critical barrier now crossed, it is imperative that we take a moment to re-align perception with reality. No longer must we craft our perceptions of autonomous vehicles from informed extrapolation or science fiction tropes; now reality can inform our understanding of what works and what doesn’t in driving automation.

That’s why this is the perfect moment to reboot our public conversations about the current reality and future potential of one of the most important technologies of the 21st Century. Now, with nearly a decade of success and failure to learn from, we can move past the cycle of hype and disillusionment that have defined this space for too long, and enter a new period where we climb the “slope of enlightenment.” In doing so, this critical sector has the opportunity to reboot its relationship with its stakeholders: investors, the public sector, the media, and everyone who shares the roads with this technology.

I’m proud to announce that on April 2, 2025 we will embark on this project of realigning the perception of autonomous vehicles with its reality, at the exclusive Ride AI Summit in Southern California. Together with Timothy B. Lee of the brilliant Understanding AI newsletter, and the organizers of the excellent Micromobility conferences that I have attended for years, the Ride AI summit will bring together the elite of driving automation and AI-powered hardtech for a series of conversations we hope will radiate out into the public discourse. Together, as a community of shared values, the companies doing real things in this exciting space will generate a new, more sustainable sense of excitement for this critical technology, based on substance and not just hype.

What You Need to Know Today

Waymo’s latest $5.6B funding round pushes its valuation above $45B. The Alphabet-backed company announced this week it’s exploring using Google’s MLLM Gemini to train its robotaxis. The new end-to-end model, known as EMMA, shows promise in handling complex driving scenarios, such as encountering animals or construction sites, but currently cannot incorporate 3D sensor inputs from radar and lidar.

Waymo’s experiment with end-to-end AI is reminiscent of how Tesla’s self-driving system works. Christopher Mims offers a useful primer on how the two companies’ approaches have traditionally differed: “In the simplest possible terms, Musk’s vision for Tesla is about an AI system that learns by watching people drive. Waymo and others are teaching their vehicles by correcting them as they do the driving themselves.”

Zoox says it will start rolling out its custom-built robotaxis—which feature neither steering wheels nor pedals—in San Francisco and Las Vegas in the coming weeks. How the Amazon-owned AV company plans to get around federal safety laws requiring vehicles to have traditional controls, nobody knows. Are they counting on NHTSA to grant an exemption?

Aurora is delaying commercial truck operations until 2025. The company, which had hoped to deploy self-driving trucks before the end of 2024, said it was now targeting next April instead, while hinting at promising progress. “As of the end of the third quarter, the Aurora Driver was delivering commercial loads without the support of a remote human 80% of the time, which is up from 75% in the second quarter. The goal is to reach 90% by commercial launch in the spring.”

Mitsubishi and Nissan are establishing a joint venture on L4 autonomous driving.

Chinese ADAS startup DeepRoute has raised $100M from Great Wall Motor. The company, which is looking to bolster adoption before Tesla’s FSD can gain a foothold in China, says it expects there will be 200,000 vehicles equipped with its driver-assist technology on Chinese roads by the end of 2025.

Waymo is working on scheduled rides.

Beijing-based AV trucking startup Autra.tech is winding down operations in the face of financial challenges and potential US sanctions.

And Skydio, the US’s largest drone maker, is facing a supply chain crisis after being hit by sanctions by China over Taiwan sales.

British startup Oxa demonstrated its retrofittable self-driving system on Ford E-Transit vans.

Auto supplier Denso has signed an agreement with startup Quadric to develop AI semiconductors.

Avride is retooling its sidewalk delivery robots to handle higher speeds and sharper turns so your burrito can get to you even faster.

Third Wave Automation has banked a $27M Series C round to scale autonomous forklifts. Led by Woven Capital.

Musk acknowledges that Tesla’s hardware 3 (H3) will likely not support unsupervised self-driving.

Related: Of Tesla’s scrapped affordable EV project, Musk says making a $25,000 car would be “pointless” unless it can drive itself.

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