Best of LinkedIn: Autonomous & Mobility Markets CW 43/ 44

00:00:00:

00:00:22: Today's deep dive covers the top autonomous and mobility markets trends across LinkedIn.

00:00:29: I gotta say, things are shifting incredibly fast right now.

00:00:32: Yeah they really are and if you're working in the mobility space You know exactly how noisy these conversations get your busy.

00:00:39: so we Are basically cutting through The noise of calendar weeks.

00:00:42: forty three and forty four.

00:00:43: We want to show you Exactly How autonomous technology is.

00:00:47: well it's finally Shifting from just pure hype too Actual operational reality exactly.

00:00:52: and then on the flip side.

00:00:53: We'll look at how micro mobility is just actively reshaping The streets that you live on.

00:00:58: yeah,

00:00:58: the shift is massive.

00:00:59: I mean we have officially graduated from those You know carefully controlled hyper limited pilot programs?

00:01:05: We're talking about genuine street level scale now

00:01:07: real scale right.

00:01:09: Just look what's happening with Waymo's global playbook.

00:01:11: Timothy Papandreo brought this up recently.

00:01:13: Waymo just secured five billion dollars in debt financing and they are officially targeting a launch in Madrid by twenty-twenty seven.

00:01:21: Wait, Madrid?

00:01:22: Yeah!

00:01:22: Madrid which highlights completely new technical hurdle for them

00:01:26: Because I mean... Madrid is definitely not the American Southwest

00:01:29: Far from it.

00:01:31: It's not as simple predictable grid like Phoenix.

00:01:33: Waymo's perception stack The software and sensors interpreting world Is going to have master multi lane roundabouts.

00:01:40: Are the Glorietas.

00:01:41: Yes exactly, the Gloriates Not just the chaotic swarms of delivery mopeds everywhere.

00:01:47: But well, Waymo is sort of planting flags globally.

00:01:51: The ground war for market share is incredibly fierce right here in the US

00:01:55: specifically and Texas Right?

00:01:57: Yeah, Texas because the volume there is just staggering.

00:02:00: Alvin Foo was tracking the numbers And he noted that Tesla recently hit four hundred and thirty eight thousand weekly robo taxi rides in Austin alone.

00:02:09: That's

00:02:09: huge

00:02:10: It is.

00:02:11: And that narrowly edges past.

00:02:12: Waymo's reported four hundred and six thousand weekly average in the same area, it's basically a full blown arms race for dominance down there really yes?

00:02:21: You know with that kind of rapid scale comes an absolute ocean Of data particularly safety data which as we know has been the industry's biggest bottleneck.

00:02:30: right.

00:02:31: Tom Cohen provided A really clear statistical breakdown of Tesla's new Robo taxi Safety report.

00:02:36: That kinda puts this all on perspective.

00:02:39: so they logged two point nine five million miles driven in Texas with zero airbag deploying crashes.

00:02:46: Yeah, I saw that breakdown and the math behind why that zero actually matters is pretty compelling.

00:02:52: Oh totally

00:02:52: Cohen explains it using this thing statisticians call The Rule of Three.

00:02:56: basically if you look at Texas police data human drivers covering That exact same to point nine Five million mile stretch would have statistically speaking triggered their Airbags about four times right

00:03:08: for crashes.

00:03:08: exactly Because human drivers would have had four crashes and Tesla has zero, that zero actually means something mathematically.

00:03:16: It beats the human average for fender vendors in moderate collisions.

00:03:19: It does but there is a really crucial caveat out here we need to mention it doesn't pass that same mathematical rule of fatalities.

00:03:27: yet because human drivers are quite good at avoiding fatal crashes We averaged one fatality every ninety million miles.

00:03:34: Two point.

00:03:36: nine five million miles without a fatality is like only about one percent of the way toward Proving, this system Is definitively safer on The absolute worst edge cases.

00:03:44: well i have to play devil's advocate On safety data.

00:03:47: anyway regardless Of the rule of three.

00:03:49: go

00:03:49: for

00:03:49: it.

00:03:49: think About It Like A rookie athlete.

00:03:51: Like A Rookie Quarterback Stepping Into The Professional League and Throwing A perfect game on his very first Sunday.

00:03:57: okay see where you're going

00:03:57: Right.

00:03:58: The stats for that one game look incredible, flawless even.

00:04:01: but would you really price a multi-million dollar contract or in our case a massive insurance policy on the robotaxi fleet based on Rookie's first few games?

00:04:11: You just don't have long term data.

00:04:13: Exactly We have no idea how these systems degrade over decade of bizarre totally unpredictable situations.

00:04:19: That

00:04:19: is completely fair challenge.

00:04:21: You're talking about the street smarts deficit.

00:04:23: These vehicles might have lightning fast reaction times, but they still lack human intuition and reasoning.

00:04:28: very much so And we see this play out on the streets constantly.

00:04:32: Pedro Pacheco recently highlighted this wild standoff caught on video.

00:04:35: It was a Waymo Azuc's in a park.

00:04:37: Tesla all deadlocked completely blocking a road.

00:04:40: Oh man A total robot traffic jam.

00:04:42: literally None of the AI systems could figure out how to resolve the situation.

00:04:47: at one point The Zooks even started reversing blindly toward a human driven car, which caused the panic.

00:04:53: Because a human driver in that situation would just you know make eye contact wave someone through or maybe pull slightly onto the grass to break the deadlock?

00:05:01: Exactly they bring through rules slightly to solve the problem.

00:05:03: Right...the AI gets trapped into logic loop and honestly it's not always complex multi-car standoff sometimes its fundamental routing logic failing in spectacular way.

00:05:14: Joe Stam documented a scenario where his Tesla took a thirty-five minute detour for a simple one mile trip down the street.

00:05:21: Thirty five minutes, per one mile?

00:05:23: Yeah.

00:05:24: And when he escalated it to support He was basically told that the car chooses its own route based on its parameters and nothing could be done to overwrite It.

00:05:32: Wow Well this actually brings up the elephant in the room.

00:05:36: how these systems actually perceive their environment in the first place.

00:05:39: Elon Musk recently cited quote gray kittens on grey tarmac as the primary reason for late-night robotaxi delays in Austin.

00:05:47: Gray kittens

00:05:48: Yep, and Paul Perrone jumped right on this.

00:05:51: He argued it perfectly exposes the fatal flaw in camera only systems.

00:05:55: I mean human eyes struggle to see gray objects on grey roads in the dark

00:05:58: Right?

00:05:59: Sure Standard cameras have that exact same physical limitation.

00:06:03: If the goal is super human safety, Prone argues that you absolutely need thermal cameras and LiDAR.

00:06:08: Because of heat signatures?

00:06:09: Exactly!

00:06:10: A thermal camera will pick up the signature of a kitten or deer in pitch blackness long before visual camera even registers changing pixels which

00:06:19: really raises kind like bigger question about who these vehicles are actually being designed for.

00:06:25: right we're obsessing over sensors and cameras but there's massive human oversight happening now this rapid expansion.

00:06:31: Oh, the accessibility issue?

00:06:33: Yes.

00:06:33: Right.

00:06:34: So Kelsey Marine Brickle filed a formal NHTSA complaint recently regarding Waymo's Accessibility.

00:06:41: so she uses power wheelchair complex power wheel chair and She pointed out that way.

00:06:45: most current vehicles simply cannot accommodate people who must remain seated in their chairs.

00:06:49: Wow yeah Yeah

00:06:50: okay.

00:06:51: And the implication there is severe.

00:06:53: Think about it as robo-taxis flood the streets and capture all the lucrative fares that currently keep traditional wheelchair accessible human taxis afloat.

00:07:02: We could see a complete collapse of accessible transportation

00:07:05: Exactly, A total collapse of that infrastructure.

00:07:08: Because

00:07:09: scaling technology doesn't automatically mean equitable scaling.

00:07:13: if you don't build in from day one You end up just breaking this city for really vulnerable population.

00:07:18: And that tension right between The Technology itself In the physical environment it operates in is where this gets really complex.

00:07:27: You can't just drop thousands of robotaxis into a city and expect to function smoothly,

00:07:31: right?

00:07:32: You

00:07:32: have to address the hidden bottlenecks that physical infrastructure and the pure unit economics.

00:07:38: well let me pause us for one quick second before we get into the economics.

00:07:41: if you are finding the steep dive useful for your own work in mobility space make sure to subscribe.

00:07:46: so catch our future editions every two weeks.

00:07:49: Okay, so let's dive into those unit economics because the numbers are shifting aggressively.

00:07:54: Frederick A shared a cost breakdown.

00:07:56: that really explains.

00:07:57: A lot of the current momentum we're seeing.

00:07:59: okay What do the number is looking

00:08:00: like?

00:08:00: Well back in twenty-twenty building a single robot taxi and The US required about a million dollars in capital expenditure just for one prototype.

00:08:07: Wow a million yeah.

00:08:09: But today Chinese manufacturers have driven those build costs down to under fifty thousand dollars.

00:08:14: Under fifty thousand right.

00:08:15: That's insane.

00:08:17: And because the initial capital requirement is so incredibly low now, it changes the pricing model entirely.

00:08:23: you can Now take a robo taxi ride in some Chinese cities for roughly thirty five to seventy Yuan which has only about five to ten US dollars.

00:08:31: and that massive drop In hardware cost trickles all the way down To software platforms we use every day too.

00:08:36: Ryan Green ran an analysis on uber and lifts margin structures.

00:08:39: Oh this

00:08:39: was fascinating.

00:08:40: Yeah From Q two, twenty-twenty four to q two.

00:08:44: Twenty twenty six platform fee rates fell in every single autonomous vehicle city they studied.

00:08:49: take San Francisco for example.

00:08:51: the median platform fee rate dropped from nineteen percent down to ten point.

00:08:55: two percent

00:08:56: almost cut in half right.

00:08:58: and in cities without autonomous vehicles those fees actually rose

00:09:02: because autonomous fleet supply just fundamentally alters the leverage in the whole ride hailing market.

00:09:09: But you know, while the cars themselves are getting cheaper to build The physical reality of storing and managing them is becoming astronomically expensive.

00:09:18: Oh!

00:09:19: The parking issue?

00:09:20: Yeah Greg Bessoni pointed out a fascinating negotiation happening right now.

00:09:24: Zooks is trying to secure a five hundred thousand dollar-a year deal with the city of Santa Monica

00:09:30: And the kicker is that half a million dollars isn't for state-of-the art charging depot or fancy maintenance garage.

00:09:36: It's purely municipal parking and staging, they just need physical space to simply sit between rides.

00:09:46: It really forces us to confront the fact vehicles still occupy geometry.

00:09:51: in real

00:09:51: world.

00:09:52: They don't disappear into cloud.

00:09:54: I look at the robo taxi industry right now.

00:09:59: Okay, how so?

00:10:00: Well the general public and media constantly obsess over planes themselves.

00:10:05: We debate aerodynamics, engines camera vs LiDAR systems on cars.

00:10:10: But if you run an airline You know the actual bottleneck dictating your profit & success is securing gates at airport And navigating air traffic control.

00:10:19: That's a great point.

00:10:20: The vehicles are just the highly visible tip of a massive hidden infrastructure iceberg.

00:10:26: If you don't control the gates, or in this case the parking staging areas and a dense city your multi-million dollar tech is essentially useless.

00:10:33: That's a phenomenal way to frame it.

00:10:36: And if want see an industry that understands that infrastructure first mindset perfectly look at autonomous trucking.

00:10:43: Oh they get it

00:10:43: They do!

00:10:48: Michael Wiesinger announced that Kodiak just secured the industry's first binding agreement for a driver-as-a-service model.

00:10:54: Binding being an operative word there, not another fluffy letter of intent.

00:11:00: Precisely!

00:11:01: This is a definitive deployment of seventy five driverless trucks in partnership with DTL Transport and it works because it operates at highly controlled environments.

00:11:09: Boss Van Dohepel made this exact point on a recent Swiss logistics event.

00:11:14: What did he say?

00:11:15: He noted that automated logistics scale fastest when a single party owns the entire operational ecosystem.

00:11:20: Think about hub-to-hub highway depots, one company controls the loading dock The highway route is completely predictable and they control the unloading facility.

00:11:30: It's closed loop?

00:11:31: Exactly

00:11:32: Trying to rely on fragmented unpredictable city infrastructure for last mile delivery To your front door Is an absolute nightmare by comparison

00:11:41: Which creates really fascinating contrast Because we have autonomous vehicles twisting themselves into knots trying to figure out how does seamlessly fit in a legacy car infrastructure?

00:11:51: But on the other side of the mobility coin Micro-mobility isn't trying to fit it at all.

00:11:55: No, It's fundamentally rewriting The rules of the city

00:11:59: exactly

00:11:59: and its proving To be highly profitable while doing that which is the wild part.

00:12:03: We see this heavily in the data from calendar weeks.

00:12:06: forty three and forty four e scooters And e bikes Have completely grown up.

00:12:11: they really have.

00:12:12: Hans Bjorn Wago reported that Void just closed their strongest quarter in history.

00:12:17: We're talking eighty-eight million euros a net revenue, thirty one million an adjusted EBITDA and fifty three million rides in Just A Three Month Window.

00:12:26: And That Adjusted EBITTA is critical metric there because it means they are actually generating positive cash flow from operations before you even factor into heavy accounting maneuvers.

00:12:35: Right

00:12:35: It proves the business works!

00:12:37: It proves unit economics work at scale.

00:12:40: And they are doing it while dropping their emission intensity, too.

00:12:43: Osa Christyander noted that their emissions per ride dropped eighty-three percent since twenty nineteen even as the total ride volume exploded.

00:12:51: So its no longer just a reckless venture capital experiment burning cash to acquire users?

00:12:56: Not at all

00:12:57: Proben.

00:12:57: Joel Jones analyzed ride technology, another shared operator.

00:13:01: They jumped from ten million euros in revenue to seventy five point five million and just two years.

00:13:06: And they are operating at a twenty three percent EBITDA margin.

00:13:10: I mean the twenty-three percent operating profit margin In hardware.

00:13:13: heavy highly operational business is almost unheard of

00:13:16: Right.

00:13:17: How did they manage it?

00:13:18: By entirely ignoring The Silicon Valley playbook Of growth At all costs.

00:13:23: They stayed incredibly disciplined.

00:13:25: The guru exclusively within Nordic region where policy and infrastructure actively supported them.

00:13:31: Ah, so they didn't overextend

00:13:32: Exactly!

00:13:33: They proved that mobility operators don't need a sprawling unprofitable global footprint to build a highly lucrative business.

00:13:40: But the shared fleets are just part of the story, really.

00:13:43: Personal ownership is reaching a massive tipping point.

00:13:46: Oh yeah Richard Buening shared a massive study out of Queensland Australia.

00:13:50: They now have over one million privately owned e-mobility devices in this state.

00:13:54: One and three households owns one And sixty one percent of those are E bikes.

00:13:58: That's huge adoption

00:14:00: totally mainstream.

00:14:01: E-mobility has fully crossed into mainstream consumer behavior, to the point where a quarter of users surveyed stated that their only alternative is a private car.

00:14:10: And THAT IS THE DEFINING SHIFT!

00:14:13: They aren't replacing walking... they are directly replacing car trips.

00:14:17: You know I've started viewing micro mobility today the exact same way i viewed smartphones in…..

00:14:22: really?

00:14:23: How so?

00:14:24: Well, in the early days we treated smartphones as novelties.

00:14:27: Right?

00:14:27: We downloaded the app that looked like a pint of beer...

00:14:30: Oh yeah!

00:14:30: I remember that

00:14:31: one.

00:14:31: But now they are essential infrastructure for navigating modern life.

00:14:35: e-bikes and scooters have crossed that exact same threshold.

00:14:38: They ARE essential urban infrastructure.

00:14:43: The problem is our cities still running on legacy software

00:14:47: Legacy software.

00:14:48: Yeah, street designs that are optimized entirely for a four thousand pound metal box.

00:14:53: Oh absolutely The physical space is lagging way behind the behavioral shift But policy is finally starting to catch up and crack open the door.

00:15:02: Damian Yo analyzed a major paradigm shift happening with New Zealand's new road rules right now.

00:15:08: oh what Are they doing?

00:15:10: They are intentionally rewriting traffic laws To prioritize What he calls person throughput rather than vehicle throughput.

00:15:18: Okay, give me a concrete example of how that actually changes the street?

00:15:22: So under the new rules private vehicles are legally required to give way to public buses leaving stops if a car carrying one single person has to tap the brakes and lose five seconds.

00:15:33: That is considered a perfectly acceptable trade-off.

00:15:36: If it allows a bus carrying forty people to smoothly reenter traffic

00:15:39: That makes total sense.

00:15:41: Right, the policy mathematically optimizes The street for moving the maximum number of humans rather than just keeping the maximum Number of metal boxes flowing without interruption.

00:15:50: and at the local level cities are getting Incredibly creative about how they manage this new density Of small vehicles because you know You can't just leave a thousand scooters scattered randomly across A sidewalk

00:16:01: right.

00:16:01: that's been the big complaint

00:16:02: Exactly.

00:16:03: Hannah Dos Santos detailed an initiative in Raleigh, North Carolina.

00:16:07: They analyzed parking density across two hundred and twenty nine downtown intersections And they rolled out over seventy artistic heavily marked bike and scooter corrals.

00:16:17: But the hardware only works if behavior actually changes.

00:16:20: Which is why Ralehi instituted a one-hundred meter rule.

00:16:24: If you end your trip within a ninety second walk of these corrals The app physically forces to park inside it.

00:16:30: That's smart.

00:16:31: It completely solves the massive friction point of blocked sidewalks for pedestrians and wheelchair users while still keeping overall convenience pretty high.

00:16:39: Yeah, it all comes down to a battle over reallocating public space And this entire struggle is captured so beautifully in really poignant essay by urban planner Rena Mahajan.

00:16:50: She points out fundamental almost philosophical conflict on our urban design.

00:16:55: The car...and tree are forced to compete with exact same square foot

00:17:00: And they require completely opposite conditions to survive.

00:17:04: Exactly, I mean think about it.

00:17:05: a tree needs living uncompacted soil.

00:17:09: It needs roots that can spread and need space in.

00:17:11: it needs time.

00:17:12: Right.

00:17:13: A car needs hard dead heavily compacted ground buried under layers of asphalt.

00:17:19: For the last century we have basically systematically engineered nature out of our streets simply to store idle depreciating vehicles.

00:17:27: She used this incredible historical analogy from nineteenth-century German forestry.

00:17:32: that absolutely blew my mind.

00:17:34: Oh, the normal bound?

00:17:35: Yes!

00:17:36: The concept of the Normal Bound or the Normal Tree.

00:17:38: So foresters wanted to make timber yields predictable and highly efficient so they went into these diverse messy old growth forests cut everything down And replanted the forest in perfectly straight uniform rows.

00:17:53: just a single fast growing species.

00:17:56: And it was brilliantly efficient for a few decades.

00:17:58: Right, until it completely collapsed because they removed the diversity The soil died pests wiped out the single species and the entire ecosystem became incredibly fragile.

00:18:08: Mahajan argues that we did the exact same thing to our city streets.

00:18:12: We really did!

00:18:13: We took a vibrant chaotic Ecosystem where people walked vendors worked in children played...and we clear cut it.

00:18:20: We basically turned our streets into a sterile monoculture, optimized solely for moving and storing cars.

00:18:26: Yes you're right that she didn't fully realize the depth of this until she became apparent She was pushing a pram around Montevideo And suddenly the hostility to the city's design Was just glaringly obvious.

00:18:38: Blocked pavements high curbs dangerous crossings everywhere.

00:18:42: It changes your perspective entirely.

00:18:44: it does is what psychologists are now calling Moto normativity.

00:18:49: As a society, we accept the level of danger pollution and just space hoarding for cars that would never tolerate in any other context.

00:18:58: We gave up our public living rooms basically to run asphalt cables between buildings

00:19:04: Which leaves you with a massive question as you watch this industry evolve As robotaxies potentially eliminate the need for massive downtown parking structures by constantly staying in motion, and as micro-mobility successfully reclaims the edges of our streets.

00:19:20: What will you do with a mass amounts of newly freed public space your city?

00:19:25: It is big question

00:19:26: Will we simply fill it more concrete commerce or actually take opportunity to return nature and community connection?

00:19:34: It's choice.

00:19:35: haven't had luxury making over century The technology simply giving us the blank canvas

00:19:54: back.