Autonomous Delivery Is the Hot Podcast Topic Now

Most AV coverage this year has been about the car. Whether it can see, whether it can decide, whether the regulator will let it operate in a city. This week the conversation moved somewhere else. On Autonomy Markets, Grayson Brulte's markets show alongside his flagship Road to Autonomy podcast, Jason Calacanis brought up a problem most software people never think about: what happens in the ninety seconds after the car actually shows up.

Two days later, Autolane CEO Ben Seidl sat down as a guest on The Road to Autonomy. Not staged, not planned around each other, just two conversations, on two shows under the same host, that landed on the same point from opposite directions.

Here is why that matters if you're a retailer, grocer, or QSR. One of the biggest voices in tech and startup media is not talking about lidar range or disengagement rates anymore. He is talking about the curb. The place where the car meets your customer, your staff, your parking lot.

For years the industry's attention lived entirely upstream, in the vehicle. What changed is that the vehicles are working well enough, and often enough, that the conversation has nowhere left to go but the last fifty feet. A retailer or a QSR brand watching this unfold does not need to wait for a trend report to confirm it. It is happening right now, in the open, with two of the loudest names in tech commentary saying it out loud within 48 hours of each other.

Autonomous delivery is coming to your property. Autolane can help you get it right when it does. Let's talk.

Image source: www.roadtoautonomy.com

AV Round Up

Volkswagen can't find an outside investor for its robotaxi arm. MOIA needs more than a billion euros to reach commercial viability, and both Uber and Lyft have now walked away from investment talks, even though Uber is still the platform partner for MOIA's Austin and Los Angeles rollout. They could not agree on how VW gets paid, which vehicles make the cut, or how much more of its own money VW has to put in. VW is reportedly weighing a tech partner instead, or simply selling MOIA to Uber outright.

MIT builds an early warning system for AV mistakes. Researchers there unveiled a system this month that flags the moments a self driving car is most likely to get something wrong, before it happens rather than after. It is built for human safety drivers and remote operators, not passengers. It is also a reminder that the industry still treats prediction, not perfection, as the near term goal.

Oakland gets its robotaxi moment. Oakland is set to become the newest overlap point for Waymo and Tesla's Cybercab, according to local reporting this month, putting a dense Bay Area retail corridor in the path of two fleets at once. It is a preview of what a lot of mid sized cities are about to go through. Planning for both fleets rather than betting on one is what separates the operators who stay ahead from the ones playing catch up.

The Last 50 Ft

This week on The Last 50 Ft, Cam Herring and Ben Seidl sit down with David Richer, founder and CEO of Orbital Kitchens. His single Union Square location reportedly moved 70,000 chicken wings in six hours. Find out how one bad payment early on changed the way he ran delivery for good. He tells Cam and Ben exactly what happened and why he would never go back.

There is also a robot running in his kitchen right now doing something most operators have not even considered yet, plus the real reason so many virtual restaurant brands scaled fast and disappeared just as fast. Hit play to hear it straight from him.

Listen on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts. 📍

This Week on LinkedIn

This week on LinkedIn, we came across Kyle Levy's  on Tesla and the Cybertruck. He's onto something with the idea that an idle AV doesn't have to sit around waiting for its next passenger, it can become an on demand asset for whatever job needs doing, moving furniture included. It's the same puzzle we work on at the curb every single day.  An asset only earns its keep when it has somewhere useful to go.

Read Kyle's post here

The AutoComm Brief Take

None of this week's news changes what you already know about your own curb. It just adds a few more people saying it out loud, from a podcast host with one of the biggest audiences in the space to two robotaxi fleets now converging on the same city blocks. The property operators who come out ahead are not the ones waiting for a single moment of proof. They are the ones who already treat the curb as infrastructure, not an afterthought.

That is the whole bet we are making, and it is already paying off for the operators willing to make it with us.

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

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