The Self-Driving Industry Could Be Turning a Corner

In the late 2010s, the self-driving world summited the peak of inflated expectations and quickly spiraled into the trough of disillusionment. Now, we’re seeing cautious optimism that reminds us of a more realistic version of the mood a few years ago.

All in the last month...

Let’s start smol. Chipotle invested in Nuro, which also launched a delivery pilot with Domino’s in Houston, TX. AutoX, a Chinese startup, announced a development partnership with Honda. Huawei revealed that it’s working on a self-driving car.

Going bigger—Walmart took part in Cruise’s $2.75 billion funding round, which values the self-driving company at $30 billion. GM is the majority owner of Cruise, a Y Combinator alum that also counts Microsoft and Honda as investors.

Autonomous trucking company TuSimple went public, becoming the first pure-play, publicly traded AV company. “We’ve got a long way to go,” TuSimple CFO Pat Dillon told the Brew, “but I do think it’s important that we’re generating revenue.”

• TuSimple made $1.8 million in 2020—and lost $177.9 million—but Dillon said revenue will grow “substantially” in the coming years through its retrofitted fleet of 70 robo-trucks, an autonomous freight network, and eventually, purpose-built vehicles.

Delivery startup Udelv announced that it will deploy 35,000 “Transporters” between 2023–2028. Udelv said it’s already received a pre-order of 1,000 Transporters, which are compact AVs that will run on Intel’s Mobileye Drive.

The middle ground

Intel, which acquired Mobileye for $15.3 billion in 2017, considers its advanced driver assist systems (ADAS) business as the perfect hedge against the uncertainty of fully driverless tech.

• Mobileye sells to customers like VW, Nissan, and BMW. It also offers white-label ADAS systems to automakers.
• Mobileye has effectively crowdsourced mapping the world to auto customers—it collects 8 million kilometers (nearly 5 million miles) of data a day, Intel Fellow and Mobileye VP Jack Weast told the Brew.

“We have a very healthy business with driver assistance, so we can cash-flow the investment in a driverless future,” Weast said.

Weast foresees a future where driver assistance systems are going to be almost as capable as a driverless vehicle. These features will still require a driver in the loop for liability and regulatory reasons.

Big picture: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If recent news is anything to go off, some version of at-scale autonomy is nigh. Though we’ve heard this story before, we see indicators that it’s more realistic this time.

But, but but...Let’s assume self-driving technology is perfected (which it isn’t). There are still other pieces of the puzzle: 1) laws/regulation 2) the creation of a self-driving supply chain 3) mass production 4) consumer trust. —RD