Autonomy Insiders

The autonomous driving industry has mostly converged on one architecture: a single, monolithic end-to-end model trained to handle the entire driving task. Igal Raichelgauz, founder and CEO of Autobrains, argues that approach hits a wall on edge cases and compute cost. His alternative is "agentic AI." Driving is broken into a large but finite set of specialized agents, each an expert in a specific...

Driverless cars can pass every safety test and still lose the passenger — because trust, not technology, decides whether robotaxis actually scale. Dr. Clare Mutzenich on the human factors inside the autonomous vehicle almost no one is designing for. Most coverage of autonomous driving is about the driving. This conversation is about everything else — what happens inside the cabin of an empty robot...

Europe has no autonomous driving champion. Luca Foresti wants to change that, without copying the American robotaxi. Daniel sits down with Luca Foresti, CEO and founder of Niulinx, a Politecnico di Milano spin-off that just raised 38 million euros, the largest autonomous driving round in Italy to date. Instead of chasing a full robotaxi, Niulinx is building "Robosharing": you call a car with an ap...

Almost nobody in Brussels is against autonomous driving. That is not the problem. The problem is that most policymakers treat it as a distant future, not a present priority. So the agenda slips while the US and China move. Pierfrancesco Maran is trying to change that. He is the newly elected chair of the European Parliament's ENVI Committee, and before Brussels he spent thirteen years running mobi...

Everyone in autonomous driving asks when the technology will work. William "Billy" Riggs asks the harder question: what happens after it does, when you have to fit it into a city that wasn't built for it? Daniel sits down with William, professor at the University of San Francisco and Director of the Autonomous Vehicles and the City Initiative, to challenge ten years of industry narrative. His thes...

Robotaxis dominate the autonomous driving conversation. Urban goods delivery rarely gets mentioned. Yet Europe has roughly 30 million light commercial vehicles doing last-mile and middle-mile work every day, and almost no one is building Level 4 autonomy for them. In this episode, recorded live at the Automated Mobility Summit in Zurich, Daniel sits down with Amin Amini, co-founder and CEO of Loxo...

Everyone in autonomous driving argues about software stacks, sensors, and miles driven. Almost nobody talks about what happens when the robotaxi pulls into the depot. And that is where autonomy quietly stops. A self-driving car cannot plug itself in. It cannot clean or inspect itself. Today, a human walks over and does it. At fleet scale, that single manual step breaks the economics. In Episode 12...

The Uber-Waymo partnership has shifted from strategic alliance to transactional relationship. And transactional relationships have shorter expiration dates. Waymo on Uber, where riders can only book a Waymo through the Uber app, exists in exactly two cities: Austin and Atlanta. Since those launches, Waymo has announced close to a dozen new markets. None with Uber. Nashville went to Lyft. In this e...

You can build the safest autonomous vehicle in the world, but without insurance, it doesn't go on the road. In Episode 10 of Autonomy Insiders, host Daniel Abreu Marques sits down with Chris Moore, President of Apollo ibott (Lloyd's Syndicate 1971), to unpack why insurance is the unsung gatekeeper of AV deployment and why most insurers are still sitting on the sidelines while autonomy scales. Chri...

When people talk about Lyft's autonomous strategy, the conversation usually starts and ends with Waymo. Underneath that headline sits FlexDrive, Lyft's wholly owned fleet management subsidiary and one of the most underestimated assets in the AV industry today. In Episode 9 of Autonomy Insiders, Daniel Abreu Marques sits down with John Parks, CEO of FlexDrive, to unpack how Lyft is quietly building...

Germany has one company building a full Level 4 autonomous driving stack from scratch. Not an ADAS feature. Not a highway assist. A complete autonomous driver, developed in-house in Berlin. That company is MOTOR Ai, and it is pursuing EU type approval with 20 million euros in seed funding. In Episode 8 of Autonomy Insiders, Daniel sits down with Roy Uhlmann, CEO of MOTOR Ai to unpack what it actua...

Everyone talks about the sensors, the software, and the regulation behind autonomous vehicles. But almost nobody talks about where these fleets actually charge. In Episode 7 of Autonomy Insiders, host Daniel Abreu Marques sits down with Peter Cohen, General Manager for Autonomous Vehicles and Rideshare at Terawatt Infrastructure, a company that has raised over $1 billion to build fleet charging hu...

In this episode, Daniel sits down with Rainer Becker, Director of Business Development at MOIA, the autonomous mobility arm of VW, to unpack how MOIA is building Europe's most ambitious autonomous ride-pooling operation. They cover: MOIA's turnkey solution model with its three pillars (autonomous vehicle, fleet management platform, and operator enablement), how the autonomous ID Buzz AD is built o...

In this episode, Daniel sits down with Martin Neubauer, Head of Autonomous Mobility at PostAuto AG, to unpack how Switzerland's largest public transport operator is deploying autonomous vehicles in rural and alpine regions where traditional bus services are becoming unsustainable. They cover: Why PostAuto chose Baidu Apollo as its autonomous driving partner, how the AmiGo project works with 25 Lev...

In this episode, Daniel sits down with Oliver Nahon, Director of Operations at the Swiss Association for Autonomous Mobility (SAAM), to break down what's really happening on the ground in Switzerland's fast-moving autonomous driving ecosystem. They cover: Switzerland's new ordinance on automated driving (Level 3 and Level 4), the three conditions for driverless vehicle deployment, why remote super...

AI is leaving the screen and entering the real world. In this episode, Martyn Briggs, Director at Bank of America Global Research, breaks down what "Physical AI" actually means, why $41 billion was invested in it last year, and what comes next. We cover: World models and the shift from generative AI to physical AI Why vehicles are being redesigned as robotic platforms, not mechanical ones The 158+...

Most automakers are racing to master the most critical component of autonomous driving: the semiconductor. Augustin Friedel, Associated Partner at MHP and an expert in software-defined vehicles, advanced driver assistance systems, and AI-enabled mobility, exposes how industry giants like Tesla, Rivian, and Chinese OEMs are not just buying chips—they’re designing their own to unlock better performa...

Charlotte Eisner, Head of Commercialization and Partnerships at Bolt, joined Daniel Abreu Marques on Autonomy Insiders to discuss Bolt's autonomous strategy, strategic partnerships with Pony AI and Stellantis, and their ambitious plan to deploy 100,000 autonomous vehicles across Europe by 2035. The operational backbone of Bolt’s strategy is leveraging strategic partnerships and policy expertise to...

Welcome to Autonomy Insiders! Autonomy Insiders goes behind the headlines of the autonomous vehicle industry. Your Host Daniel Abreu Marques talks to the leaders shaping AV, with a special focus on the markets most media ignores.