Mobileye is now a public company, under the symbol MBLY. Perhaps the high water mark of autonomous vehicle funding was Intel’s $15 billion acquisition of Mobileye in 2017. Other transactions were more speculative, like GM’s $600 million acquisition of Cruise, or Uber’s comparable acquisition of Otto, or Ford’s investment in…

Aurora has a great blog post up about their upcoming Aurora Horizon service, which will operate with their upcoming self-driving trucks. In particular, the post features a great graphic describing “the middle mile” of autonomous trucking. “…our customers will drop off and pick up their trailers at our terminals, which…

Waymo posted on their blog today that they’ll be opening a self-driving service in Los Angeles. We’ve gotten to know many LA neighborhoods, including Downtown and Miracle Mile, Koreatown, Santa Monica, Westwood and West Hollywood, and we’ll begin driving autonomously in several central districts over the coming months as we…

Kodiak just signed a deal to haul freight for IKEA in our self-driving trucks! At Forbes, Ed Garsten has a great article situating this latest news in the context of Kodiak’s ever-expanding commercial business, hauling freight coast-to-coast. Kodiak has been on a roll. One of the overlooked aspects of a big win like this is just how much it says about Kodiak’s ability to work with large multinational corporations. Companies like IKEA take their responsibilities to stakeholders — workers, communities, vendors — seriously. These companies typically have a deep set of partner requirements that new partners like Kodiak must meet. Kodiak’s ability to qualify to carry freight for IKEA speaks volumes about the robustness of our performance.

You may see it in San Francisco! Our purpose-built AV, the Origin, is on track for production! While we eagerly await its arrival for commercial use in the coming months, you may see a human-operated Origin prototype driving on the streets of SF. 👀 I worked on the Origin…

Crunchbase is out today with a writeup of the dim performance of all of the 2020–2021 self-driving SPACs and IPOs: “Self-Driving Tech Startups Are Driving Off A Cliff On Public Markets.” The article features a table of 14 self-driving-related companies that went public, ranging from Quanergy (down 99% since listing)…

I just watched this terrific tech talk from Lucid Motors CEO Peter Rawlinson. He does a great job explaining both the basics of electric vehicle battery packs and also some of the tricks Lucid has turned in order to push the technology forward. Rawlinson incorporates just enough basic physics to ground the explanations in reality. I really appreciated that he took time to explain different approaches to battery pack configuration, what the trade-offs were between approaches, and why Lucid took the approach they did.

Kodiak Partners with Werner. The latest in a series of partnerships Kodiak has signed to haul freight for major industry shippers. CEO Don Burnette in the New York Times. Don discusses where Kodiak is on the road to autonomy, and why trucking is such a good domain for driverless automation. …

Bloomberg reports the demise of Amazon Scout, the delightfully-shaped last-mile sidewalk delivery robot. Amazon spokesperson Alisa Carroll said the Scout team was being disbanded and would be offered new jobs in the organization. About 400 people were working on the project globally, according to the person, who requested anonymity to…