THE BIG STORY: Tesla's Cybercab- “Look Ma No Hands!”

Tesla is finally sending the Cybercab into real traffic. No steering wheel means no hands, or brakes needed. Employee testing has moved from private roads at Giga Texas to public ones, the last step before customers get a seat. On top of that, Tesla just leased a facility on St Elmo Road for eighty wireless chargers to support the fleet. None of that looks like a company still deciding on a launch.

What's really interesting is the FSD software already running in the new Model 3 and Model Y is a compressed version of the same models built for Cybercab. That means every advance made for the cybercab eventually flows into the consumer's Tesla FSD. That part has us at Autolane genuinely excited. That means the same pipeline upgrading a consumer Model Y is the one that will eventually let an owner send their car out on its own to run errands like curbside pick up at locations that have Autolane integration. In other words, being able to send your car to get frozen yogurt while you catch the end of your favorite show, is getting closer to reality. 

‍Businesses running an Autolane Zone in Austin already know exactly what pulls up to their curb today, supervised or not, so when Cybercabs start showing up in that same lot, they're not scrambling to figure out what just arrived.

Image Source: Tesla.com

AV ROUND UP

Einride Just Tripled Its Tesla Semi Fleet, Betting Big On Tesla's Trucks Instead Of Its Own. Einride agreed to add 500 Tesla Semis over the next 24 months, growing its roughly 200-truck operation to around 700 vehicles. They are chasing roughly $800 million in potential long-term revenue. Freight is a different curb than retail, but it's the same signal property operators are seeing everywhere: Tesla's hardware is becoming the default other companies build their autonomy business on top of.

‍Uber Eats Just Signed Zipline To Chase A Million Drone Deliveries A Day. Uber is adding Zipline's delivery drones to the Eats network, targeting a million drone deliveries daily by 2029, its second delivery modality bet in two weeks after committing ten billion dollars toward ground robotaxis. Retailers who've only planned for cars and sidewalk bots at their curb now have a third kind of arrival to plan around, and it’s coming from above.

Zoox Published The Exact Math It Used To Decide Its Robotaxi Was Safe. Amazon's Zoox released its safety case framework this week, showing how it benchmarks its steering-wheel-free robotaxi against human crash rates using simulation and roughly three million miles of real driving data instead of the millions of supervised miles Waymo has logged. Giving regulators something concrete to examine is a real step, even if a company grading its own homework isn't the same as independent verification.

‍

THIS WEEK ON LINKEDIN: A Mobility Strategist Mapped Every Company Betting On Autonomous Driving, And The Curb Wasn't On The Chart

Augustin Friedel, a mobility strategist widely followed for tracking this industry, mapped the companies betting on autonomous driving into four camps, split between purpose-built vehicles and adapted ones, and between owned autonomy software and bought-in stacks. Check out his insightful graph, thoughts and what others have to say on his post.

Read Augustin Friedel's post on LinkedIn

‍

THE LAST 50 FT

Ben and Cam are off the mic this week, so there's no new episode of The Last 50 Ft to share. However, now is a perfect time to listen to Ep #11 and find out why as of this week they now owe Jonas Lamis a salt lamp. Listen to Jonas Lamis talk about his company Remount, a service that empowers individual owners to manage and monetize their own fleets as the autonomous revolution arrives. 

Listen on Spotify | Listen on YouTube | Listen on Apple Podcasts

‍

THE AUTOCOMM BRIEF TAKE

This week was proof that the timeline everyone in this industry keeps talking about just got shorter. A car with no steering wheel is about to drive itself onto the same streets Autolane already runs on, drones are entering the same airspace as ground deliveries, and two different manufacturing strategies are racing to see which one scales faster. None of that is a reason to wait and see. It's the clearest signal yet that the properties getting ready now, not the ones waiting for a headline to force their hand, are the ones who get to run this smoothly instead of scrambling to catch up.

The retailers and REITs who treat this as already here are going to have a much easier time than the ones treating it as someday.

The lane is changing. Let's make sure it leads somewhere worth going. 🏁

coverage.goautolane.com
Subscribe to the Autonomous Commerce Brief: goautolane.com/newsletter-signup