Our Vision

Waymo provides over half a million paid rides a week, and on its most mature deployments the safety data is extraordinary, roughly an order of magnitude fewer injuries per mile than human drivers. Tesla's FSD fleet logs twenty million miles a day. Aurora, Kodiak, and Waabi are running driverless trucks on commercial routes, with hundreds more headed to the Sun Belt by year's end. And the next horizon is bigger still. Wayve will put its AI driver into mass-produced Mercedes, Nissan, and Stellantis cars next year, opening a market that, as CEO Alex Kendall told the Ride AI stage, is orders of magnitude larger than robotaxis, as evidenced by the 100 million cars produced every year against fewer than 10,000 robotaxis on the road today.

And yet, two-thirds of Americans still say they are afraid to ride in autonomous vehicles.

For more than a decade, the existential question around autonomous vehicles has been a technological one. The next frontier is cultural, in the broadest sense of that word.

Plenty of hard engineering remains. Scaling the operational side of AVs means solving depot economics, fleet utilization, and the long tail of edge cases that only emerge at societal scale. We will cover the builders working on those problems as much as we do the headline players.

But the gating question is no longer whether the cars can drive. It is whether cities, regulators, ordinary people, and ultimately capital markets, will let them.

Furthermore, AVs are arriving in the middle of a much larger contested public reckoning with AI, and the same skepticism dragging down trust in the foundation model is bleeding into the cars that use them. The world's most powerful AI companies have failed to craft a coherent narrative about how AI improves the quotidian lives of everyday people. To further scale AVs, our industry may well have to carry that torch.

Ride AI is the executive community where all these stories get told. Across our flagship newsletter, podcast, original research, and events, we exist to inform, inspire, and connect all of the professionals building the autonomous future. We will cover the space critically and thoughtfully, with zero tolerance for grift, vaporware, or unbridled hype that has cost the industry credibility it cannot afford to lose.

But, make no mistake, we are not neutral observers. We believe autonomous vehicles are among the most positive-sum technologies being developed in the world today. Every year, forty thousand Americans and over a million people worldwide die in car crashes. Most of those deaths are preventable. The fastest path to preventing those deaths has largely been built, and we are rooting — openly and unapologetically — for the industry to solve the problems that get more AVs on the road.

Eventually, a technology matures to the point that it's no longer held back by its capability but by its story. We look forward to telling the story of an autonomous future together.