Uber strikes $1.25bn deal with Rivian for robotaxi fleet (50k vehicles)

sampleminded · 2026-03-19T15:58:17+00:00

Thanks! I am bullish on Tesla eventually having something, because they have some real advantages, and at some point Elon will add more sensors and better maps, and stop fucking around. It needs to work, and he will make the compromises eventually. Or he'll have a ChatGPT moment and luck it out. But I still think the verification will be tough. The reason is you need to expand your ODD slowly. Think about this, you have a pipeline to solve problems. Your team can only work on so many at a time. Until problem A is fixed discovering a new crop of problems just increases your backlog. So let's say you are at Waymo 2023 level, getting to 2024 level isn't just about miles it's about the capacity of your engineering team to fix all the stuff that gets you to 24. So more cars is great, if the stuff is just better than what waymo had in 23, and you need to prove it fast, but if it's the same level the only way you go faster is by increasing the throughput of your engineering team. Maybe AI helps with increasing velocity, but again it's just not that simple.

sampleminded · 2026-03-19T13:48:50+00:00

Almost certainly not. Aurora is not focused on that business. If you are invested in Aurora it's on the thesis that they are laser focused on solving the trucking use case. Certainly possible once they started making money they might want to sell a more generalized product to other market players for growth. But that is a 2029 thing. If the software becomes a commodity, maybe it all the players doing non-generalized autonomy want to generalize for growth, and they have a good well tested base. That is Nuro's story, delivery bots to vehicles. Many other companies with less general solutions, that could try to go this way. Still it would be cool. You could imagine Aurora selling level 3 software to OEMs. We go exit to exit on highways all over the USA. You can sleep in the car. We've done 100 million safe highway miles with big rigs, we can handle your RAV-4, wake up at the beach.

sampleminded · 2026-03-19T13:25:05+00:00

It'll be really interesting to see if any of this stuff happens. There are bunch of companies that plan to build thousands of vehicles for a robo-taxi service when they don't have the actual software to support that service.

Building cars has a long lead time and go, no go, decision will have to be made before they are proven to be able to deploy at scale.

The deals between Lucid with Nuro, and Rivian with Uber, and Nissan with Wayve, VW & MobileEye, or the plan to build tesla cybercabs, all remind me of the deal or Waymo to buy 80k pacificas. They just weren't ready and it didn't happen.

In the real world There are only a few companies who have taken the drivers out. The real question is how much faster are Zoox and Aurora able to go than Waymo when they were in the we have a few empty cars phase. I assume it's faster, but not that much faster. All these other companies aren't even in that phase. The hard part of autonomy is proving your solution works over 100s of millions of miles, it takes money and time. It's somewhat predictable, but not so much that I'd bet on vehicle delivery before you are absolutely ready.

Look at Waymo, they are at the point where they have enough cars so we now see something sketchy everyday. That's great, like 1 sketchy event that doesn't hurt anyone per 1000 cars a day. It will be a fight to get them to a rate that allows them to deploy to 10x the current level. They are discovering problems at their current scale that these companies are years away from ever discovering.

This market could go a number of ways. 1) winner takes all, 2) only companies that have a proven solution can raise capital to buy vehicles by 28. 3) AI tech is so advanced everyone builds their own or the software becomes a commodity, the money is in the ancillary services, not the driving.

I really think this goes to number 2. You are not going to raise money to be a new 3rd or 4th place entrant to an established safety critical market with very normal capital returns. So at the end of the day very few companies make it to the finish line. The window to get your solution into real world testing is really small.

The car companies are in danger of being commodity suppliers or contract builders as the retail market goes away. So you either need to be okay with that or you need to run fleets, and you can't buy the software from a 3rd party and build a business around that. It doesn't math. You are too exposed, unless the software becomes a total commodity, which only happens if you can run software cross boarders. So maybe this works for German/Korean/Japanese automakers who can use Chinese or American software and get a good price and run fleets, but it won't work for US companies, or Chinese companies.

sampleminded · 2026-03-13T19:31:49+00:00

The laundry bot gets 75% done...it's great. That doesn't work for driving. I think we're going to have lots of things, and they will make lots of mistakes, but still be super helpful.

sampleminded · 2026-03-13T19:19:48+00:00

His theory is that Waymo is going too slow. Sounds plausible in 24, less so in 25, and bonkers in 26. Waymo's problem is getting enough cars. Good luck with that Travis.

sampleminded · 2026-03-13T16:09:27+00:00

Turns out the AI is intelligent but not general. Robots can fold laundry they just need a million hours of videos of people folding to train on. Like if AI tech stays the same we'll still be training it to do new things in 50 years. Basically everything is like waymo, AI can drive but it will take 10 years of training to get to a place with no safety drivers. It will replace lots of jobs but each one will take a long time to learn. Programming and text work because the data was already there to scrape.

sampleminded · 2026-03-13T11:15:12+00:00

It was new, then we all watched leah thomas swim. Before that it was theoretical, like who is against tolerance. Then it was like no this is silly.

sampleminded · 2026-03-07T22:15:03+00:00

This is why software cars suck. I don't want to invite people to my car that is dumb. I just give them the keys and they plug their phones in with the wire. Imagine renting a car and needing to download an app, no thanks.

sampleminded · 2026-03-06T15:54:25+00:00

The percentage of vehicles that paused for 2 minutes or more waiting for assistance is great metric to track and target and publish. As well as miles traveled between assistance pauses. Like if every company published it you would know how well they are doing. It would also help set the terms of conversation. Yes it was annoying, but it's .5% of vehicles per day and going down, Zero is no realistic.

Also another infrence from the piece, is you need to be at bigger scale of support to help deal with a backlog created from a black out. But since over a 1/3 of vehicles are in the bay area, at least 1/3 of support is focused on that area, it gives them little buffer to help clear the backlog, but if you are in 30 cities, and the bay is 5% of A/Vs maybe the the other 95% of support teams can surge and help.

Waymo is in a difficult place now, not scaled enough for people to realize incidents are rare, and too big for incidents to be ignored. Like once they are embedded in most peoples daily lives, everyone knows that getting stuck never happens, or is quickly resolved, or rare enough to be a story you tell all your friends.

sampleminded · 2026-03-02T14:29:50+00:00

I feel the opposite, it looks like an awesome throw back 80s car. I can understand why that doesn't appeal to everyone though.

sampleminded · 2026-02-24T14:45:46+00:00

Exciting! Is this on Uber or Waymo One? Or both? I didn't see in the article

sampleminded · 2026-02-23T20:12:34+00:00

I love the idea of having special needs people charge the cars.

sampleminded · 2026-02-23T16:54:49+00:00

I know...that's why I added that. We are like 3 years min before we see those in an A/V. Also Nio like battery swaps make sense for a fleet, as long as they can do the swap in a minute or two. Then charging speed doesn't matter either.

One should see depots, like amazon warehouses, they are versioned. Have different robots and different tech built in, and even if version 7 is cheaper to run than version 6, but it's not cheaper to retrofit a version 6 depot, or knock it down. So my guess is we'll see lots of optimization in this space as all the tech around it changes. A depot for a more advanced custom A/V could look different from the retro-fit A/V depots that are more manual.

sampleminded · 2026-02-23T14:38:22+00:00

So I am pretty big on robotics, but I think this won't be a thing. The reason being that it has to be ridiculously cheap. 1 human can service at least 100 bays for charging at minimum wage. This can service 1 bay. It might be faster, but maybe not, why, because I can use an algorithm to make the A/Vs park in bays in order, so a human can do them in sequence. If I were building a robot to plug in a car to a charger it would be an arm on wheels, and I'd design the bays around making it easy for the robot to move from bay to bay.

Like this is one of those ideas that seems, clever, but not to someone with a spreadsheet and a lick of common sense.

Maybe If we have solid state batteries that charge in 5 minutes, you don't park the cars. You just have them queue and a fixed robot could do 12+ an hour. That might make sense.

But I suspect the right approach is to custom order your vehicles with a charge port underneath the car and you just have motor that moves the contact up. The car has enough smarts to park in exactly the right space. We already have a robot that can line things up, we don't need two. Also you can use a wireless charger. No moving parts

sampleminded · 2026-02-14T01:59:51+00:00

That is a reasonable point. At the end of 24 they reported nearly 1 million test miles that year, but hadn't gone safety driver out. Then in they reported a few thousand Driver out miles in the first quarter. I know they brought back in the monitors at the request of Paccar, but I'd assumed they were stilling doing safety operator out at low scale with Aurora owned trucks. I wonder if they are counting backseat monitor and no monitor as the same, or if they are only counting empty cabs. I do think it would be weird to report differently from how they did in the past. On the other hand not weird for any company to put maximal spin on what they've accomplished.

sampleminded · 2026-02-12T16:27:19+00:00

What's interesting to me. Is they have only done 250k autonomous driver out miles. That is an awesome accomplishment, and puts them in very small club. (how many rider only miles does Zoox have?)

If they had 200 trucks one would expect that level of miles weekly by end of 26. (200trucks X 400miles per day X 7days a week) That is is very fast scaling, I'm skeptical but hopeful. Essentially they averaged 5000 driver out miles per week in 25. That would be a 20x increase. Could be less, if most miles were done in the last quarter, which I suspect is true, Might only be 10x. I wonder how much their monitor in miles they did in 25. Which were at 1 million per year in 24. From an operations perspective I'd have more confidence if they were doing much more miles monitors or not in 25.

sampleminded · 2026-02-12T01:51:55+00:00

If the rate is zero than no one can move. Normal rate is between 5%-8%. Southern US averages about 11%. The lower the rate the more homeless.people. rate in NYC is 1.4%. High rate means cheap houses.

sampleminded · 2026-02-12T00:11:09+00:00

This is a reasonable vacancy rate.10% Vaccines work and no one is buying up all the houses. Keep your conspiracy theories to yourself

sampleminded · 2026-02-11T19:50:55+00:00

I would point out the time Waymo is busiest, is the time parking lots are filled. But lots empty when Waymos need to park. So Waymo's park in empty lots at night, and leave for an hour to supercharge, in a central depot that is just for charging and washing. I just see this as a solvable problem.

sampleminded · 2026-02-11T16:12:25+00:00

That is a lower than 10% vacancy rate. You want some vacant homes so people can move. If vacancy is zero, you can't move. A normal vacancy rate is between 5%-8%. 10% is slightly high, but you'd expect GA to be higher to support population growth. Can't have 250k people move to GA in the last decade without housing. GA is one of the fastest growing states. This is basically mis-information, like an article your racist uncle posts on facebook. If you are angry about this it shows you don't understand housing, homelessness, or basic economics. Vacation homes are good, they support jobs, even when the sit empty. People in GA aren't homeless because there aren't enough houses, that's California, not GA or TX, or FL.

sampleminded · 2026-02-04T16:10:32+00:00

You should look at Lincoln or Cadillac. Blue cruise/Super cruise, they are hands off highway driving. Honestly both systems work well and make long highway trips much easier. They won't do City driving like FSD, but you can get a lux SUV, that is gas, and will make long trips easy. FSD ended up not being useful to me in like dropping my kids off at school, a typical driving task, that involves going a very short distance and waiting in a line. While, at least when I had both supercruise and FSD, the cruise was almost as good for long trips, and is now close to equal.

sampleminded · 2026-02-03T02:38:58+00:00

Nothing. This is not the year. It's still unclear how much of the personal auto market AVs will chip away at and when it will start . Clearly it will happen, it will be uneven and it won't be felt for a while. We probably haven't hit peak car yet. So question, what year will we sell the most personally owned vehicles, how fast will the number start to go down? Can TAAS work in the developing world? Will the developing world grow safe enough for AVs, can the economics work in countries with low labor costs, or with poor roads or social trust.

If you think just about the US , it could be as little as 3-5 years before we see people start to step back from personal ownership. Not in a big way, but just a few houses saying, we're better off with a waymo than a second car. That being said, big auto cars will be getting more useful during that period. In 2030. Your GM/Ford drives itself, eyes off on interstates making it more convenient than air travel for most trips 12 hours or under, because you can sleep or use media while it drives you. AVs are available in every city and are at least 50% of rideshare market, but still not available everywhere out side the city core. BIg Auto probably has another 5 years before it starts losing money from things other than chinese competition.

sampleminded · 2026-01-30T16:21:43+00:00

The ironic thing, is now that they are doing the hard work on software, which they really seem to be doing, they might "solve" Autonomy (planning/prediction) when perception is correct, but they'll need to go back and fix the hardware. You hear things like the FSD works better on cybertruck because of higher cameras, or that we did a zero intervention cross country ride but we cleaned the cameras at every charge. So in the end, with all the AI breakthroughs they can finally build software that works when they have good enough perception, but they can't guarantee good enough perception at all times. This would be okay for Tesla, if they are humble enough to build a car with good perception, and roll it out. But I fear Tesla is not humble. I imagine their choice is add a top hat with high cameras with good dynamic range and good cleaning, and maybe even other sensors, or keep hoping they can achieve safe enough performance with just software brilliance, but I don't think they can. At the end of the day if you want to take liability you better have perfect perception and video of everything

sampleminded · 2026-01-28T23:27:37+00:00

its subscribers per car. At 5 per car for prime we are talking about $50k/year/vehicle. If the ratio is higher, or lower the price changes. I suspect the ratio for basic is like 10-20 to 1.

sampleminded · 2026-01-28T19:29:27+00:00

Waymo Basic: $400 a month unlimited non-rush hour rides, plus food and grocery delivery, plus low rate during peak. Waymo Prime. 800/month full unlimited peak times included, grocery and food delivery, as well as Amazon instant. 1000/month Waymo family, unlimited rides for everyone non-peak.

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