This week’s newsletter will be a little bit different: It’s written by me, Sophia Tung. Hello!

I’m a content creator, YouTuber, startup founder, code dabbler, and general technology enthusiast who loves to get into the weeds on emerging technology. I hope to bring a little nuance, analysis, and humor to this newsletter. By the way, if you see anything you’d like me to cover, give me a shout on Threads.

Oh, and catch me at the Ride AI summit in Los Angeles on April 2nd. It’s an exclusive gathering for AV leaders to learn and share cutting-edge insights (check out the program here). Ticket prices are increasing by 10% every Friday until the event, so if you plan to join us, definitely book now. Space is extremely limited.

Get Your Ride AI Tickets

Now, Here’s What’s Happening.

VW’s Moia has begun testing its autonomous ID.Buzz in snowy Oslo. Moia is a less reported-on division of the Volkswagen group focused on “mobility.” It launched back in 2016 at TechCrunch Disrupt London, and is aiming to deploy a commercial robotaxi service in Hamburg next year. However, a robotaxi service that only runs when it’s bright and sunny out isn’t really a viable business. Thus, Moia is testing in some of the iciest, snowiest, most climatically godforsaken areas of civilization: Norway.

I think we will see in the next few years that snow and inclement weather will be the next frontier for AVs. Currently, Moia is also testing in Austin, Munich, and Hamburg, which tend to be warm and sunny most of the year, although they can get some light snow during winter. With this move, the VW-backed company is definitely planning ahead for service availability, as significant parts of Europe do get heavier snow for longer periods throughout the year. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen AVs testing in inclement weather, however. Waymo has been very public about testing in heavy snow, and has previously talked about denoising LiDAR input.

Today’s Reddit AMA

Later today (3/11) at 10a Pacific / 1p Eastern, Ed Niedermeyer is hosting a Reddit AMA to talk about the staggering AV advances of the last few months and where the road potentially extends next for mobility innovation within the automotive industry. Bring your most pressing questions and Ed will try to answer at r/SelfDrivingCars.

In more VW news, the German automaker unveiled the ID EVERY1, its cheapest/smallest EV yet. The ID EVERY1 will be first to have Rivian software and hardware inside. It is expected to go into production for the 2027 model year, with a starting price of $21,500, but will unfortunately only be available in Europe to start. There’s only one question on my mind however… will it will have Rivian’s previously announced hands-off/eyes off ADAS capabilities baked in as well? Likely not at first if it’s only available in Europe.

This week in Waymo news, Waymo’s autonomous Jaguar I-Pace avoided a 70mph oncoming car swerving into its lane in 25mph tunnel in LA. This encounter highlights one of the major benefits of a predictive robot driven vehicle: the ability to see faster and farther than humans, and react significantly earlier than a human can.

In my opinion, Waymo PR needs to post more of these videos. A large part of the animosity towards autonomous vehicles comes from a fundamental misunderstanding that they are less safe than human drivers. Statistics have repeatedly shown this not to be the case. However, people don’t always respond to statistics. They do, however, respond to videos… particularly of incidents that can go viral.

By now we’ve all been seen spy shots of Waymo’s new Zeekr-built robotaxi puttering around metros like San Francisco, myself included.

They even seem to be carrying employees as passengers…

However, it’s only recently that the Zeekr ride vehicle has been spotted without camo. This is great news, as it seems Zeekr RT development is trucking right along (Waymo Via pun unintended) and may be close to having these out in public service!

Last piece of Waymo news: Scheduled rides have finally launched in the app! While I haven’t tried the feature myself, it seems to be a relatively streamlined experience, with Live Activities and everything. That being said, some people online have reported having issues with the car showing up too early. Nothing I’m sure Waymo can’t sort out relatively quickly.

Uber’s new product chief Sachin Kansal questions what it actually means to “integrate robotaxis with the Uber platform”. This is an interesting question coming from an interesting person, as Kansal regularly dogfoods the Uber platform himself.

Uber’s current approach to autonomous vehicles relies on partnerships with third-party companies like Waymo to provide driverless rides. However, this implementation has revealed significant user experience challenges. In Austin, where Uber and Waymo operate together, riders currently can’t choose whether they’re picked up by a human driver or robotaxi. Instead, Uber’s algorithm makes this decision based on availability, demand, and probably other factors.

This limitation became especially apparent this week during SXSW, when many attendees specifically wanted to experience Waymo rides but found themselves unable to specify this preference in the Uber app.

The current approach represents a careful balancing act for Uber. The company faces two competing priorities:

1. Driver Relations: Enabling explicit robotaxi selection could potentially alienate human drivers by shifting demand away from them.
2. Fleet Management: With limited autonomous vehicles available, allowing all users to select robotaxis would create immediate supply shortages and degraded experiences (as seen in areas like LA).

Uber’s random assignment system offers a strategic middle ground, keeping human drivers in the ride pool while managing capacity constraints for their nascent autonomous fleet. This approach protects operational efficiency, but at the expense of user choice and transparency.

I have to imagine that Uber’s long term plan does involve splitting out AVs into their own category when demand levels out or when Uber gets more Waymos, similar to UberX and Uber Black. But only time will tell…

In Other News…

• Leapmotor bets big on LiDAR, brings it to its new $15,000 SUV.
• Wayve demonstrates that its AV2.0 foundation model can adapt to new vehicles and left/right hand environments with just 100 hours of training data
• Britain thwarts Tesla’s FSD launch in the country
• Waymo can now climb 32% grades, making SF’s steepest streets accessible to AVs.

One last thing…

Reilly Brennan, a VC in the transportation space, has a piece out on Ridehailing vs AV Ridehailing. The article posits that AVs could break traditional ridehailing’s dynamic supply issue by introducing fixed-cost automated vehicles onto the network, but human drivers could make up for the increased demand during peak hours. Brennan calls this scenario “Robot Base, Human Peak.” He also points out that while this balance could be workable in the short term, in the long term it would probably result in many human drivers leaving the driving pool as gig work becomes no longer profitable for them. I think this is important to acknowledge as this is basically what I believe could happen with Uber integrating AVs into their ridehailing service.

The piece also brings up Tesla’s “Dynamic Ownership” model as a third option, in which Tesla owns a base fleet of Tesla robotaxis, but allows Tesla robotaxis owned by private individuals to enter the network to make up for demand during peak hours.

I think this assumption could be valid. Ridehailing drivers of today would become the robot-minders of tomorrow, and if Tesla locks robotaxi operation to their own network, this could eat into traditional ridehailing services’ Tesla driverbase significantly.

However, I think this assumption ignores a bunch of other factors. Besides the fact that a lot of Teslas on Uber and Lyft’s networks are actually rented specifically for ridehail driving, the majority of Tesla owners-cum-roboteers would also need to get somewhere themselves during those peak times, and so wouldn’t be able to send their cars out to do work. Of course, Tesla could come up with incentives to get owners to rearrange their schedules and send their cars out for ridehailing service instead on Tesla’s network. If the incentives are strong enough, Tesla could even convince owners to purchase another car to mainly run as a robotaxi. However, the incentives would need to be so powerful that it covers possible financing, insurance, maintenance, and upkeep on the second vehicle, while earning the owner a profit. At what point does it stop making sense for Tesla to pay those incentives, and instead to just increase their base fleet?

In a similar vein, if you assume that instead of owners we’re talking about operators with small fleets, then you could assume the operator would want their vehicles operating 24/7 instead of just at peak hours to make more money, which would only contribute to the robot base, not the robot peak, and thus would increase the number of cars on the road, translating into increased deadheaded miles. Uber and Lyft’s current human driver peak demand model works because the drivers have nowhere else to be. For many, this is their full-time job.

How this will all shake out remains to be seen as AVs become more and more mainstream, but that’s it from me… until next week!

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