Vegas Field Report and Autonomous Trucking Earnings

This week on Autonomy Markets, Grayson Brulte and Walter Piecyk discuss Grayson’s Las Vegas field work riding in Zoox and Motional robotaxis, Uber’s earnings and the path to driver-out, and autonomous trucking earnings.

The first thing Grayson did when he landed in Vegas was try to order a Zoox, but the service was not available until 11 AM and when it finally came online shortly after 11 AM, the wait time for the vehicle to arrive was 67 minutes.

So he opened the Uber app and tried to order a Motional robotaxi, where he was paired with a Motional in under five minutes. During the one hour and seven minute Zoox wait time, he was able to ride down and back in two different Motional vehicles between Resorts World and the Luxor, arriving back with 21 minutes to spare.

While he was in town, Grayson conducted field work at the Zoox depot where he counted more Toyota Highlander test vehicles than purpose-built Zoox robotaxis coming out of the depot. He also visited with the Nuro team at their test track at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

While Grayson was busy conducting field work, Tesla crossed 10 billion FSD Supervised miles, while Uber’s autonomy overhang continues as the benchmark for deploying robotaxis is driver-out, not with safety attendants.

Wrapping up the conversation, Grayson and Walt discussed the latest earnings from Aurora and Kodiak and what Grayson learned at the ACT Expo in Las Vegas.

Episode Chapters

• 00:00 Field Work: Motional, Zoox and Las Vegas
• 20:57 Uber’s Autonomy Overhang
• 23:50 Discounting Uber’s Partnership with Waymo
• 26:44 Nuro and Lucid Prepare to Scale
• 32:52 Autonomous Trucking’s Presence at the ACT Expo
• 34:41 Aurora, Kodiak Updates from Earnings
• 37:13 Politics and Autonomous Trucking in California
• 39:01 The No Safety Attendant Bar for Autonomous Trucking
• 44:10 Next Week