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Ep #24 I Chef Paul Iglesias, From Dominos Delivery To Michelin Recognition In Oakland
Oakland chef and owner Paul Iglesias ( Parche , Jaji ) discusses the future of intentional hospitality, the realities of running modern restaurants, and his culturally rooted menu design.
Paul walks us through industry pressures like rising labor costs and delivery margins while showing how Oakland's energy, influences his concepts. He also shares insights into menu design as cultural translation, the storytelling power of small plates, and what it takes to keep full-service dining sustainable.
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Ep #23I Alex Norman, The First Fifty Feet of Drone Delivery with Matternet
Most people picture drone delivery as the flight. Alex Norman, COO of Matternet, says the hardest part happens before takeoff, when an order has to get from the kitchen into the drone.
Alex went from aerospace engineering in Austria and big aircraft at Airbus to one of the earliest drone delivery companies. Matternet started out flying medical samples between hospitals in Switzerland. It now operates in the US, Switzerland and the UK, and works with partners like UPS. Food is quickly becoming its biggest source of volume.
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Ep #22I Chef Nelson German, From Nightclub Dreams to Culinary Triumphs
What started as a joke about opening a nightclub turned into a career in the kitchen. Chef Nelson German, the chef behind alaMar and Sobre Mesa in Oakland and Meski in San Francisco, joins The Last 50 Ft to talk about the night at the Copacabana that sent him to culinary school, how Top Chef Season 18 reconnected him with his roots, and the Afro-Latino flavors that define his restaurants.
We get into opening Sobre Mesa just ten days before the pandemic shut everything down, partnering with World Central Kitchen to feed laid-off hospitality workers, and why his team is everything. Nelson also shares his new book, Caribbean Cocktails, and what it takes to get great food from his kitchen to your door.
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Ep #21 I Hamei Hamedi, From Restaurant Owner With Mini Donkeys, to Autonomous Delivery
Before Autolane, Hamei spent 15 years in hospitality and ran his own restaurant. In this episode he talks about what delivery apps did to restaurant margins, how COVID changed what customers expect, and why autonomous delivery gives operators, big and small, control of the last 50 feet again.
He also covers why people skills still matter most, the time autonomy frees up for operators, and advice for owners weighing new tech. Plus celebrity visits, favorite shift meals, and why a cold burrito can ruin the experience.
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Ep #20 I David Richer, CEO of Orbital Kitchens: Sold 70,000 Chicken Wings in Six Hours. One Bad Payment Made Him Build His Own Delivery Fleet
David Richer, founder of Orbital Kitchens, joined Ben and Cam this week. While most pandemic-era ghost kitchens collapsed, Richer's flagship Union Square location in New York does a reported $30 million a year out of a single kitchen, and his in-house fleet delivers at more than double the industry's rate. He gets into the missed payment that forced him to build that fleet overnight, what he thinks everyone else got wrong about scaling a virtual brand too fast, and the bowl-building robot already running in one of his kitchens.
🏁 goautolane.com I orbitalkitchens.com
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Ep #19 I Garrett McCurrach, Founder of Pipedream Labs: Why Your Next Delivery Comes From Underground
Garrett McCurrach, founder of Pipedream Labs, joins the show to talk about the underground pipe network he's building to move food and packages straight to the curb, no roads required. We get into how the system actually works, what it took to get real pipes running under drive-thrus in Texas and Georgia, and what property operators stand to gain once the last 50 feet moves below ground. If you've ever wondered what's happening beneath the sidewalk, this one's for you.
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Ep #18I Van Tucker From CMG And Ai Wrangler, How a Cowboy Entrepreneur Built AI Tools From The Frontier
Van Tucker has spent over two decades at the intersection of technology, creativity, and commerce. He's helped brands like Nike and Disney and is currently head of AI at CMG. He is helping businesses adopt AI through his venture, AI Wrangler.
In this episode, Van traces his path from building his first website in middle school (to promote BMX biking) to creating a locker ecosystem with Harbor Lockers. He worked to bring locker networks to U.S. cities to help emerging business. Van also shares how AI Wrangler started as a joke on Linkedin and turned into a real business after people kept asking how he was actually using AI.
Tune in for a conversation about entrepreneurship, reinventing yourself, and where AI is headed next.
🏁 goautolane.com
https://vantucker.com
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Ep #17 | Angell Tsang, Co-Founder of Tso Chinese: Customers Over Clicks, Eliminating Spreadsheets, and Going Live After Skepticism
Angell Tsang is the Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer of Tso Chinese Takeout and Delivery, Autolane's first autonomous delivery partner in Austin. He is also the reason this episode has an unusual number of accidental puns.
Angell did not start in restaurants. He started in software QA, ran engineering teams across startups, and in 2016 was eating dinner at his friend Min's restaurant when Min said he had a dumb idea. That idea became Tso Chinese, a delivery first Chinese food brand built from scratch in a converted pizza restaurant in Austin's Cherrywood neighborhood. No sit down dining. Just code they wrote themselves, a scratch kitchen, and a very bright wrapped delivery car that people still remember today.
Ten years later Tso has five locations across Austin, investors including the former co-CEO of Whole Foods, the former CEO of Wendy's, and the founder of Bonobos, and a partnership with Autolane that Angell never saw coming.
He walked past Autolane's Tesla at ShopTalk in March. He thought autonomous delivery was five years away. He moved on. Then Cam followed up. Then a Slack channel happened. Then they went live and the rest is history.
This episode covers how Tso built their own restaurant operating system because Shopify does not ship Chinese food on demand. Why W2 drivers never stole their food but 1099 contractors have a statistic that is higher than zero percent. Why the Tesla will never eat your pot stickers...yet? What happens to Chinese American cuisine when the 65 plus generation of mom and pop owners retires over the next decade. And why Angell's entire philosophy as Chief AI Officer comes down to three words: customers over clicks.
Oh and he named all his AI agents with Tso puns. TSophie. TSora. TSolomon.
🏁 goautolane.com | tsochinese.com
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Ep #16 | Michelle Kwok, Partner at Draper VC: Bag of Organs, Kazoo Guitar Duets, and Why She Bet on Autolane When Nobody Else Got It
Fair warning. This one goes places.
Michelle Kwok is a partner at Draper VC and one of Autolane's earliest investors. She led the pre-seed round when most VCs could not even fathom what Ben was building. Her portfolio includes artificial womb technology, limb regeneration using bioelectric signals, scarless skin healing, and a company they affectionately call bag of organs at the office. She is also funding the infrastructure for the internet in space. Just in case anyone needed that.
She is also the very first female guest on The Last 50 Ft. Producer Kyle led the conversation alongside Ben for this one and the energy was immediately different. Michelle plays piano, violin, guitar, and drums by ear. And the kazoo simultaneously with guitar. She can learn any pop song in five minutes flat without sheet music. Her favorite movie is Meet the Robinsons. Her favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla. Ben and Kyle had thoughts on this.
The conversation covers how Michelle knew Autolane was onto something when other VCs could not even understand the premise. What it is like being a woman in VC and how those rooms are slowly changing.
Then Ben goes on one of his most expansive philosophical runs yet about what a 90 percent reduction in delivery cost means for libraries, food banks, farms, meals on wheels, and basically the entire structure of how human beings access goods and services.
Oh and an ice cream delivery showed up mid-recording. Completely unplanned. Absolutely perfect timing. Although the flavor was vanilla - this episode was anything but.
🏁 goautolane.com | draper.vc
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Ep #15 | Producer Kyle Takes the Mic: The Tso Launch Breakdown, the Georgia Food Tampering Bill, and Why Women Are Autonomous Delivery's Earliest Adopters
Cam is on a ferry somewhere in the San Juan Islands celebrating his anniversary. So this week it is just Ben and Producer Kyle, and it might be the most honest episode yet.
Kyle steps out from behind the scenes for the first time to co-host with Ben, and the conversation goes places the pod has never gone before.
Ben walks through exactly how the Tso Chinese Takeout & Delivery autonomous delivery launch works end to end. A customer orders on the Tso Chinese website. The order flows into Nash. Autolane bids as a delivery provider. If they win, the customer gets a text: reply Y for autonomous, reply N for a regular human delivery. If they say yes, the Tesla drives itself to their address, the customer gets a tracking link, walks out to the curb, presses open trunk, grabs their order, and the car drives away. Nobody touches your food. No interaction and no special app downloaded.
Then Ben shares an insight from the first week of live operations that neither of them expected. The same reason women loved Waymo from day one is showing up in autonomous delivery. And it has nothing to do with cost savings or no-tip delivery or any of the reasons the industry talks about. It is safety. Not road safety. Safety from the driver.
Kyle talks about traveling alone at 27, getting off planes in cities she did not know, and always hoping the person in the Uber was safe. She talks about being home alone now as a mom and not loving when an unmarked vehicle pulls into her driveway at night with a stranger inside.
Ben calls it the most important emerging insight from the first week of live operations.
They also get into the Georgia Senate bill about delivery driver food tampering, why DoorDash and Uber can never legally solve this problem because their drivers are 1099 contractors and not W2 employees, and why that structural gap is exactly what Autolane is built to fill.
Oh and Ben promises to have Claude count how many times he said so/Tso in this episode. The results are not being shared.
🏁 goautolane.com | tsochinese.com
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Ep #14.5 | Shane Feldberg, Founder of Feld Ventures: First Check Into Autolane, the Shirky Principle, and Why Whoever Passes Is an Idiot
Shane Feldberg was the very first person to ask for allocation in Autolane. Shane runs Feld Ventures, a fund he built over six years from a network he developed at ClearBank, a fintech company that built the 20-minute term sheet using machine learning before machine learning was cool. They took it to a $2.5 billion valuation. Shane then left to back the founders he met along the way. Fifty plus portfolio companies. Eight figures deployed and climbing toward nine.
He believes startups are the way out. Not just for returns, for cancer, for diabetes, but for every problem humanity has not solved yet. He thinks one way to unlock the compute needed to get there is solar-powered data centers in space. He's not joking.
On this episode Ben, Cam and Shane get into why contrarian thinking is the only way to be good at early stage investing. Why Autolane could be Shane's best investment despite having some of the top 30 companies in the world in his portfolio. The Shirky Principle and why institutions will always try to preserve the problems they were designed to solve. Why personal injury lawyers lobbying against autonomous vehicles might be one of the most genuinely evil things happening in America right now. And why 40,000 people dying in cars every year while the technology to prevent it exists is something that keeps everyone of them up at night.
Ben and Cam also report back from Austin where they took 10 unsupervised Tesla Robotaxi rides in Model Ys identical to Autolane's fleet. Ben's verdict: the technology is absolutely here. It is just a matter of when Tesla decides to push it to consumer cars.
Oh and Shane is Canadian. He says PROcess and the very Canadian way of sorry. He was given allocation anyway.
🏁 goautolane.com | feldventures.com
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Ep #14 | Ming Maa, Co-Founder and CEO of Moove AV: The Man Who Scaled Grab to 500 Cities Says the Car Is Only 30% of the AV Cost
Ming Maa started his career at Goldman Sachs. Then he went to SoftBank where he sat alongside Masa Son and ran every major ride share investment globally before the Vision Fund even existed. Then he became President of Grab and scaled it across eight countries and more than 500 cities before taking it public.
Then he decided investing was not enough. He wanted to build.
Ming is now Co-Founder and CEO of Moove AV, the world's largest dedicated infrastructure provider for autonomous vehicles. Moove operates the entire Waymo fleet in Phoenix and Miami with zero Waymo employees on the ground. London is next. They handle everything from 40-megawatt charging infrastructure across multiple sites to managing haboobs, the massive rolling dust storms that engulf Phoenix and require a full fleet recall in minutes.
And Ming drops the number that reframes the entire autonomous vehicle investment thesis: the car itself is only 30 to 40 percent of the total cost of commercializing autonomous vehicles. The other 60 to 70 percent is fleet operations. Charging. Cleaning. Maintenance. Infrastructure. People. The moat in autonomy is not the vehicle. It is everything that happens after it rolls out of the factory.
Ming also identifies the two things every city needs to unlock before AVs can truly scale. One of them is curbside infrastructure. The other is PUDO zone coordination at airports, malls, and stadiums.
Which is exactly what Autolane builds.
Ben announces on the pod that three of Phoenix's largest shopping centers are coming onto the Autolane platform next week. The first city where Moove AV and Autolane will converge. And Austin direct delivery went live this week.
🏁 goautolane.com | moove.io
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Ep #13 | Alex Roy, Host of Autonocast: Autolane Is Built to Win, the 1946 Elevator Strike, and Austin Goes Live
Alex Roy has been covering autonomous vehicles longer than almost anyone. Ten years hosting the Autonocast, widely regarded as the top podcast in autonomy. Former Director of Special Operations at Argo AI, where he spent years putting autonomous vehicles on the streets of Miami and meeting with everyone from local elected officials to VIP riders. He is on his fifth Tesla. He ran the cannonball record on 100% FSD earlier this year. And he is an official Autolane advisor.
He also thinks Autolane is a great candidate to scale or for acquisition. His words.
Ben, Cam and Alex get into the AV 1.0 to 2.0 transition and why neural networks changed everything. The political orphan problem of autonomy and why neither the left nor the right has fully embraced it despite the technology being demonstrably safer than human drivers.
And the most compelling job displacement analogy we have heard on this podcast: the New York City elevator operator strike of 1946, which brought the city's economy to a standstill, forced every building to upgrade to automated elevators, and resulted in the total number of people employed by the elevator industry growing tenfold over the next 25 years.
Ben also makes two announcements on the pod. Austin direct delivery launches next week. And Autolane is coming to Scottsdale Fashion Square and the Phoenix market.
Alex's prediction on when private Tesla owners get unsupervised FSD: 24 months, pre-selected by Tesla Insurance based on your driving risk profile. If you are David Moss or Alex Roy, you are not getting it first.
And he closes with a 1970 film recommendation that he says Elon Musk has clearly seen and everyone in AI and autonomy should watch immediately.
🏁 goautolane.com | autonocast.com
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Ep #12 | Harry Campbell, Host of the Driverless Digest: The Rideshare Guy Got in a Waymo and Everything Changed
Harry Campbell has spent over a decade as the most trusted voice for Uber and Lyft drivers. He built The Rideshare Guy into a media brand reaching millions of drivers every month. He published a book. He launched courses, a podcast, a YouTube channel, and a live show. He has interviewed Uber's CEO. He knows the gig economy better than almost anyone alive.
Then he got into a Waymo in Los Angeles. His reaction: dude, this is awesome.
That single ride sparked the Driverless Digest, a weekly newsletter covering the intersection of autonomy and rideshare. It sparked Curbivore, his annual conference in LA on the future of mobility. And it sparked the Urban Autonomy Summit, a quarterly pop-up event bringing together AV industry leaders in cities across the country. Autolane will be joining Harry in Austin on October 14th.
Harry joins Ben and Cam for one of the most honest conversations on the pod yet. What do ride share drivers actually think about autonomous vehicles? The data might surprise you. In AV cities, human driver earnings have declined by only 3 to 5%. That is less than the impact of high gas prices. But the fear is real.
They also get into Ben's UberEats and FSD experiment, why using Tesla FSD as a rideshare driver might actually be the best strategy in the industry right now, and the awkward gray area when a passenger realizes the driver is not really driving.
And then there is the number that reframes everything. Waymo is doing 500,000 rides per week globally. New York City alone does 700,000 Uber and Lyft trips every single day.
The transition is real. It is just earlier than the headlines suggest.
🏁 goautolane.com | thedriverlessdigest.com
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Ep #11 | Jonas Lamis, Founder of Remount: Tesla Is Producing 50 Cybercabs a Day, Regular People Can Now Own a Fleet, and a Salt Lamp Is on the Line
Jonas Lamis has spent 20 years building on the frontier. First in AI data analysis. Then in web3. Now he is six weeks into Remount, a platform designed to let regular people own, operate, and profit from the coming wave of autonomous vehicles. Think of it as a REIT for robot fleets.
Jonas joins Ben and Cam from his home in suburban Palo Alto, literally one mile from Google's X Labs in one direction and Tesla's design center in the other. He has been watching autonomous vehicles circle his neighborhood for a decade. He finally decided to do something about it.
Ben makes the case for why a company like Remount may be the most important piece of infrastructure nobody is talking about yet. The autonomous commerce demand is coming. The Autolane platform is ready. But if the vehicle supply cannot scale fast enough to meet that demand the whole industry stalls. Jonas is building the capital layer that could prevent that.
They also get into the numbers. Tesla is now producing as many as 50 Cybercabs per day at Giga Texas. 150 were spotted in the outbound lot in a single photo posted this week. Cybercabs have been seen in 23 cities across the country. Jonas thinks reservations open in late Q3.
Then comes the bet. Ben, Cam, and Jonas each pick the week they think a Cybercab completes its first unsupervised commercial ride. The wager is a salt lamp and a 3D sculpture Jonas refuses to part with. Cam picks his own birthday. Ben takes second week of July. Jonas goes late August. Only one of them can be right.
🏁 goautolane.com | remount.co
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Ep #10 | David Moss, Coast to Coast FSD Driver: The Man Who Drove Coast to Coast on 100% Tesla FSD, Called Live from a Supercharger in Wyoming
We did not plan for this one to start from a supercharger in Rawlings, Wyoming in the middle of nowhere. David Moss did not plan for any of this either.
David is 29 years old. He drives roughly 50,000 miles a year for work. Last December he became the first person to drive coast to coast across the United States on 100% full self driving, not touching the steering wheel, the accelerator, or the brake for a single inch of the 2,730 miles from the Tesla Diner in Hollywood to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. 67 hours. Elon Musk reposted it. The head of Tesla AI congratulated him. Kathy Wood from ARK Investing shared it. The story hit over 100 million combined views overnight.
Then he drove across Canada. 3,760 miles in four days and twenty one hours. Through construction zones. Through flaggers in the middle of the night. Through 50 miles of unmarked highway in Quebec with no lane lines whatsoever. Tesla threw him a party in Halifax when he finished.
He also sells lidar for a living. Make of that what you will.
Ben asks him the question every person building in autonomous commerce wants answered right now. If Tesla beamed unsupervised FSD to your car today, would you go sit in the back seat? David's answer and his prediction for when the first customer car receives unsupervised FSD are both worth the listen alone.
He also talks about his father, who is completely blind and has lost all independence. And why that story is the real reason any of this matters.
🏁 goautolane.com
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Ep #9 | Jeremy McCool, Founder and CEO of HEVO: Killing the Plug, Wireless EV Charging, $132K in Savings Per Vehicle, and Autolane's Austin Launch
Joining the conversation is Jeremy McCool, founder and CEO of HEVO. Jeremy and his Brooklyn-based team have spent more than a decade making wireless EV charging real, and they are now Autolane's chosen charging partner for the Austin pilot.
Ben and Cam unpack what wireless charging actually means for an autonomous fleet, why a plug becomes the bottleneck the moment you remove the human driver, and how HEVO's wireless pad works at the same efficiency and price as plug-in charging today.
Then Jeremy drops the number that changes the conversation. Over a 10-year period, plug-in charging operations average $171,000 per vehicle. Wireless charging operations average $39,000 over the same period. Five times cheaper. Tens of thousands in savings per vehicle. Multiplied across a fleet.
They also get into the HEVO and Beam Global partnership for solar-charged wireless stations that can drop into a single parking space and deliver 100 plus miles of range per day. The Cybercab being built as wireless-first from the factory. And what happens when an autonomous vehicle can drive itself into a depot, charge itself, get washed, and roll back out without a single human in the loop.
Oh and.. Big news drops first on this one. Ben confirms it on the pod. 14 brand new Tesla Model Ys are heading to Austin for Autolane's first commercial delivery operations starting July 1st.
🏁 goautolane.com
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Ep #8 | ICSC Recap, The Locker Goes Live, and the Cybercab Stat That Will Blow Your Mind
A quick but loaded one this week.
Ben and Cam just got back from ICSC Las Vegas and they are still buzzing. Ben recaps his panel on The Self-Driving Economy alongside Amy Alyeshmerni from Federal Realty and Jay Richard-Yu from Jamestown at the largest commercial real estate trade show in the world. The Super Bowl of real estate, as they call it. And the room was full of property operators asking the exact right questions about autonomous vehicles and their properties.
Then there is the locker. The Autolane Smart Locker debuted on the ICSC showroom floor and the response from the logistics and real estate community was everything the team hoped for. Kyle calls it as a self-proclaimed germaphobe her favorite Autolane product yet. No touch. No confusion. No one taking your take out.
Then Ben drops a number that changes the entire conversation about the economics of autonomous delivery.
The Cybercab runs at 40% greater efficiency than the Model Y. The equivalent of 204 miles per gallon. Tesla's target cost per mile is 20 cents. Today's Uber ride costs three to four dollars per mile. Six orders in a Cybercab with a smart locker running at 20 cents per mile.
Do the math yourself.
🏁 goautolane.com
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Ep #7 | Brittain Ladd, Former Amazon Executive: The Smart Locker Debut, Austin Delivery This Summer, and the Man Who Predicted It All
We recorded this one live from the ICSC showroom floor in Las Vegas before the expo hall even opened. No studio. No chairs. Just Ben, Cam, and a very special guest standing next to a Tesla trunk full of something nobody has seen before.
Brittain Ladd is a former Amazon executive, supply chain and logistics expert, and one of the most widely followed voices in autonomous commerce on LinkedIn. Nearly a year ago he wrote a post challenging Tesla to partner with a company to build a locker system for its vehicles. He had no idea Autolane was already building it.
Today it is real. Ben debuts the Autolane Smart Locker live on the pod for the first time. Six configurable compartments. Bluetooth remote controlled. Temperature controlled hot and cold. A sub-freezer for frozen delivery. Built specifically for the back of a 2026 Tesla Model Y. And designed to do something the entire delivery industry has been missing since the beginning: a mechanism for commerce that allows one autonomous vehicle to pick up multiple orders from multiple businesses and deliver them to multiple customers on a single run.
Then Ben drops the news: this summer Autolane is putting 15 Teslas into the field in Austin for supervised autonomous delivery in partnership with unnamed retailers and QSRs. The future is not coming. It is here.
Brittain calls it one of the biggest moments in retail that has ever occurred. Ben calls it the thing that breaks the classic cost-quality trade-off forever. We will let you decide.
🏁 goautolane.com
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Ep #6 | Waymo and Uber - Beefing? Here's What the Numbers Actually Tell You.
Uber just reported 3.6 billion rides in Q1 at a $160 billion market cap. Waymo is valued at $125 billion doing 2 million rides a month. Those two numbers are very close together. The gap between them tells you everything about where this industry is going.
Ben and Cam break down what is really happening between Waymo and Uber. Last year they launched Austin and Atlanta together. Since then Waymo has opened Miami, Nashville, Orlando, Houston, and San Antonio without Uber. Not a single new city together. The partnership that the entire AV industry assumed would define autonomous rideshare is quietly on ice. Ben explains why, and what it means for both companies.
They also get into Uber's bet-on-everyone strategy. Thirty-plus AV partners. Hertz for fleet management. Lucid and Nuro vehicles coming by end of year. Avis in Dallas. A patchwork of providers across every city. Then they compare it to what Tesla is doing. One company. One supply chain. Cars designed, built, insured, and operated end to end by the same team. Ben makes the case for why vertical integration wins on price and quality every time. And why rushing to scale with 30 partners might look smart in 2026 and very messy by 2028.
As Cam put it to close out the episode: today's price is not today's price.
🏁 goautolane.com
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Ep #5 | Emergency at Lenox Square: Waymo Chaos
Simon Property Group reached out to Autolane in a panic. Waymos were flooding the valet lanes at Lenox Square in Buckhead, Atlanta, one of the most valuable retail destinations in the Southeast. Thirty to forty autonomous vehicles per day were blocking the main entrance, backing up valet lines, and sending shoppers to turn around and leave. Simon had tried everything. They called the mayor of Atlanta. They contacted Waymo directly. Nobody could solve it. Nobody even called back.
Ben and Cam walk through the full before and after. What the chaos actually looked like. How Autolane went in, assessed the property, and built a new transportation plan for autonomous vehicles. And what happened after the Smart Curbside Signs went live. Spoiler: 30 to 40 disruptions per day dropped to 1 to 2 incidents every few weeks. A 95% improvement.
Ben makes another bet. Miami as the most active AV city on the eastern seaboard in 12 months. He is not worried.
🏁 goautolane.com
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Ep #4 | Ethan McKenna, Creator of RobotaxiTracker.com: The 18-Year-Old Who Knows More About Tesla's Robotaxi Fleet Than Tesla Will Admit
What happens when an 18-year-old Austin native gets obsessed with autonomous vehicles and decides to build the most accurate robotaxi tracking system in the country? You get Ethan McKanna and robotaxitracker.com.
Ben, Cam, and Ethan get into how the tracker works, what the data actually shows vs what companies are saying publicly, why Waymo is about to expand into West Austin, and what the AV industry looks like in five years including which cities might ban human driving entirely and why it will create a political divide unlike anything we have seen.
The generational split is coming. The question is which side of it your business is on.
🏁 goautolane.com
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Ep #3 | Tesla's Wolf Is Here: Cybercab, FSD, and What the Q1 Earnings Call Really Means
Hot off the Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call, Ben and Cam break down what actually matters for the future of autonomous commerce. FSD subscriptions hit 1.3 million, up 18% quarter over quarter. Cybercab just entered mass production. Houston and Dallas launched unsupervised robotaxi operations overnight with zero incidents. And Elon confirmed unsupervised FSD is coming to consumer vehicles in Q4 2026, starting in the cities where robotaxi is already running.
Ben and Cam get into what all of this means for retailers, property operators, and brands trying to figure out where to place their bets right now. Plus a shoutout to Ethan McKenna, the 18-year-old behind robotaxitracker.com, and a very real mustache bet about which state Tesla expands to next.
Autolane is live at Santana Row in San Jose and just launched at Lenox Square and West Side Provisions District in Atlanta. The last 50 feet just got a lot busier.
goautolane.com
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Ep. #1 | Why We Started Autolane
Autonomous vehicles are already on the roads. But what happens when they arrive? In this intro episode, Autolane co-founder & CEO Ben Seidl sits down with Head of Growth Cam Hering to share why Autolane was built, the infrastructure layer making autonomous delivery, pickup, and rideshare actually work at the curb.
This is The Last 50 Ft. A podcast about the business of autonomous commerce, the operators building it, and the last 50 feet that make or break every autonomous transaction.
Want to see Autolane in action? Request a demo at goautolane.com.
Want to join the conversation or be a guest on the show? Reach out to kyle@goautolane.com, cam@goautolane.com or ben@goautolane.com
Want to know if your city or property has autonomous vehicle coverage? Check coverage.goautolane.com.
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Ep. #2 | Sam Lerdahl, Co-Founder of Buncha: Why Grocery Delivery Is Harder Than Amazon Made It Look
Amazon built a warehouse and changed the rules. Now every grocery store, retailer, and QSR is scrambling to catch up — and the last 50 feet is where it gets complicated.
In our debut episode, Buncha founder Sam Lerdahl breaks down why fulfilling a grocery order isn't just a logistics problem — it's a produce problem, a regulation problem, and a cost problem all at once. He also shares a quietly brilliant idea hiding in the future of autonomous delivery: what if the brands whose products end up in your basket helped pay for the delivery itself?
Sam's been building at the intersection of retail, robotics, and real-world ops long enough to know where the hype ends and the hard work begins. This is that conversation.
No vaporware. No lab demos. Just the people making it real.
The Last 50 Ft is brought to you by Autolane — coordinating autonomous vehicles and robotics on private property, one zone at a time.