According to TechCrunch, their Disrupt 2025 conference featured major transportation announcements including Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana stating the public would accept robotaxi fatalities for greater safety, while the company rejects “overly broad” government video requests. Uber revealed plans for a 2026 premium robotaxi service in San Francisco using Lucid Gravity SUVs with Nuro’s technology, directly competing with Waymo despite existing partnerships elsewhere. Nvidia announced a partnership with Stellantis, Uber, and Foxconn to develop autonomous vehicles using its new Drive AGX Hyperion 10 platform, with Uber targeting 100,000 autonomous vehicles by 2027. Funding highlights included i6’s $20 million Series B for aviation fuel management, IntrCity SmartBus’s $30 million Series D at a $140 million valuation, and Ridepanda’s $12.6 million Series A for corporate e-bike subscriptions.
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The Dangerous Calculus of Public Acceptance
Mawakana’s assertion that the public would accept autonomous vehicle fatalities represents a fundamental shift in industry messaging that carries significant risk. Historically, autonomous vehicle companies have emphasized perfect safety records and zero-fatality goals. This new framing suggests companies are preparing the public for inevitable accidents while positioning themselves as statistically safer than human drivers. The problem with this approach is that public perception of autonomous vehicle safety isn’t purely rational—people react differently to algorithmic failures versus human error. The first high-profile autonomous vehicle fatality could trigger regulatory backlash that sets the entire industry back years, regardless of statistical safety improvements.
The Coming Platform Wars
Nvidia’s Hyperion platform emerging as a potential industry standard, with backing from Uber and Wayve, signals the beginning of autonomous vehicle platform wars similar to smartphone operating systems. Just as Apple’s iOS competes with Google’s Android, we’re seeing the early formation of competing autonomous stacks where hardware, software, and service providers align around different architectures. The Nvidia-Uber partnership specifically targets scaling to 100,000 vehicles, suggesting they’re betting on network effects where more vehicles using the same platform accelerates development and reduces costs. However, this creates vendor lock-in risks for automakers who may find themselves dependent on Nvidia’s ecosystem, much like smartphone manufacturers became dependent on Google’s Android.
Funding Reality Versus Operational Scale
While the funding announcements sound impressive—$20 million for i6, $30 million for IntrCity, $12.6 million for Ridepanda—these amounts are barely sufficient to achieve meaningful scale in capital-intensive transportation sectors. Ridepanda’s $12.6 million Series A, for instance, might fund a few thousand e-bikes but won’t support nationwide corporate fleet deployment. The transportation sector has consistently underestimated the capital required to achieve profitability, with companies like Bird and Lime burning through billions while struggling with unit economics. These funding rounds suggest investors are taking smaller, more cautious bets rather than the massive funding rounds we saw during the mobility boom of 2018-2021.
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The Inevitable Regulatory Showdown
Waymo’s admission that they’re rejecting government requests for vehicle video footage represents a looming constitutional and regulatory battle. As autonomous vehicles become more prevalent, law enforcement will increasingly seek access to their extensive sensor data for criminal investigations, traffic monitoring, and public safety. Companies arguing this constitutes proprietary technology or privacy violations will face pushback from municipalities that see autonomous vehicles as mobile surveillance platforms. San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s welcoming attitude toward testing may change quickly when cities realize they’re getting limited access to the data these vehicles collect on public infrastructure.
The Fragility of Competitive Partnerships
Uber’s complex web of partnerships—working with Waymo in some cities while preparing to compete with them in San Francisco using Nuro technology—highlights the strategic uncertainty in the autonomous vehicle space. This “co-opetition” model creates inherent conflicts where companies simultaneously collaborate and compete. The Stellantis-Nvidia-Uber-Foxconn collaboration demonstrates how traditional automakers are hedging their bets by working with multiple technology providers. However, this fragmentation risks creating incompatible systems that slow industry-wide progress, similar to the early days of electric vehicle charging standards.
Slate’s Risky Open Ecosystem Bet
Slate’s plan to release accessory design data for customer 3D printing represents an interesting experiment in open-source hardware, but it’s fraught with liability and quality control issues. While creating an ecosystem where customers can design and sell accessories sounds innovative, it transfers significant responsibility to end-users for product safety and compatibility. If a 3D-printed accessory fails and causes an accident, the legal liability could extend back to Slate for enabling the ecosystem. This approach also risks cannibalizing their own accessory revenue if third-party options become preferred, creating a business model contradiction they haven’t fully resolved.
