The Road to Autonomy

This week on Autonomy Signals presented by KPMG Grayson Brulte and Rob Grant discuss Tesla’s Unsupervised Robotaxi launch in Miami, Waymo’s July 4th stumble in San Francisco, and Momenta’s oversubscribed IPO on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. On July 5, 2026, Tesla launched Unsupervised Robotaxi service in Miami, its first unsupervised market outside of Texas, with retrofitted Model Ys operating thr...

Brett Suma , President and COO of Bot Auto , joined Grayson Brulte on The Road to Autonomy podcast to discuss Bot Auto’s playbook for autonomously driving one billion autonomous miles in four years. On April 29th by completing its first humanless run from Houston to Dallas. To achieve long-term growth and commercial success, Bot Auto is rejecting the standard driver-as-a-service intermediary model...

This week on Autonomy Markets , Grayson Brulte and Walter Piecyk discuss the end of Waymo and Uber's partnership in Phoenix, Tesla's Cybercab hitting the streets of Austin branded for America 250 and Waymo's "Because they're everything" World Cup campaign. As Tesla gets closer and closer to putting the Cybercab into service, the U.S. Government is inching toward a national framework that would all...

This week on Autonomy Signals , Grayson Brulte and Rob Grant discuss the pending Uber-Waymo divorce, Agility Robotics’ $2.5 billion SPAC merger with Churchill Capital XI, and the launch of The Road to Autonomy Confidence Indices . As of May, Waymo and Uber concluded their robotaxi partnership in Phoenix after roughly 948 days, with Waymo going exclusively direct-to-consumer in that market and Uber...

Ali Kashani , Co-Founder and CEO of Serve Robotics , joined Grayson Brulte on The Road to Autonomy podcast to discuss how Serve Robotics scaled its delivery fleet into an operating layer for physical AI. Over the past year, Serve Robotics has grown from roughly 50 robots to 2,000, and in Q1 2026 the company reported $3 million in revenue with 45% coming from recurring software licenses. To achieve...

This week on Autonomy Markets , Grayson Brulte and Walter Piecyk discuss Qualcomm and Mobileye ‘s differing robotaxi strategies, NHTSA removing the physical brake requirement for autonomous vehicles and the New York State Legislature failing to advance an autonomous driving bill. As Congress moves on the Build America 250 Act to legalize autonomous trucking and advances a national framework for au...

This week on Autonomy Signals , Grayson Brulte and Rob Grant are joined by David Moss , Devin Olsen , and Spencer to break down the first-ever FSD coast-to-coast drive across Canada with no interventions and what 3,782 miles exposed the limits of the Tesla's current consumer hardware. For their journey across The Great White North, the team used a Tesla Model 3 running FSD 14.3 on a journey that t...

Matt Soule , Founder and CEO of Parallel Systems , joined Grayson Brulte on The Road to Autonomy podcast to discuss how Parallel Systems is building the internet of freight by combing autonomy and rail. To date the company has raised nearly $100 million and secured Federal Railroad Administration clearance to test its autonomous rail vehicles on 160 miles of track in Georgia. Parallel’s technology...

This week on Autonomy Signals , Grayson Brulte and Rob Grant discussed the launch of The Road to Autonomy Indices and break down Mobileye's pivot from licensor to robotaxi operator. The Road to Autonomy Indices score 38 companies on commercialization, deployment, and operational maturity across robotaxi, autonomous driving licensing, autonomous trucks, and delivery bots. Built with OMEGA on public...

Zach Harrell , Director of Insights and Analysis, Army Applications Laboratory , joined Grayson Brulte on The Road to Autonomy podcast to discuss how the U.S. Army acquires autonomy and brings cutting-edge technology into the hands of soldiers as fast as possible. The bottleneck in defense autonomy is rarely the technology. It is the acquisition process, the decades of requirements documents and p...

This week on Autonomy Markets , Grayson Brulte and Walter Piecyk discuss autonomous trucking reaching an inflection point, Waymo acquiring Apple's Arizona proving ground and Tesla filing for a robotaxi permit in Las Vegas. As Gatik expands its middle-mile freight operations with PepsiCo across Texas, Arizona and Arkansas, Volvo Autonomous Solutions told investors it is targeting $3 billion in auto...

This week on Autonomy Signals , Grayson Brulte and Rob Grant discuss Tesla’s application to operate up to 5,000 robotaxis in Las Vegas, Waymo’s $220 million purchase of Apple’s former proving grounds, and Neolix’s partnership with Quickbot to solve the last 50 meters of autonomous delivery. On June 3rd, Tesla expanded their unsupervised robotaxi geofence to cover the entire 245 square mile Austin...

Gil West , CEO of Hertz , joined Grayson Brulte on The Road to Autonomy podcast to discuss the launch of Oro Mobility and how a century of fleet operations is helping robotaxis to scale. A robotaxi parked is a depreciating asset, and the attention goes to the driving while the margin hides everywhere else. Cleaning, charging, maintaining, and positioning the vehicle is the part nobody wants and th...

This week on Autonomy Markets , Grayson Brulte and Walter Piecyk discuss WeRide trying to catch up to Waymo globally, Waymo preparing to deploy Chinese-made robotaxis in Texas and the CEO of FedEx Freight's open embracement of autonomous trucking. As WeRide and Uber continue to expand throughout Europe and the Middle East together, Waymo continues to work towards deploying the Chinese-made Zeekr r...

This week on Autonomy Signals , Grayson Brulte and Rob Grant discuss Uber's OEM-agnostic robotaxi strategy in Europe, FedEx Freight CEO's declaration that autonomous trucks are ready for prime time, and the AUKUS alliance accelerating undersea autonomy. At GTC Taipei, Uber, Autobrains, and NVIDIA announced a strategic collaboration to launch a robotaxi program in Munich, pending regulatory approva...

Ryan Joyce , Co-Founder and CEO, GenLogs joined Grayson Brulte on The Road to Autonomy podcast to discuss how the intelligence community’s playbook is being applied to trucking, building a ground truth layer for freight. For nearly two decades, Ryan recruited assets inside terrorist networks as a CIA case officer, validating in the physical world what sources claimed in the digital one. The trucki...

This week on Autonomy Markets , Grayson Brulte and Walter Piecyk discuss Waymo’s widening lead, the Ojai (Chinese-made Zeekr robotaxi) rollout’s political fault lines, and the new Texas autonomous vehicle and truck database. Waymo is actively preparing to deploy a fleet of Chinese-made Zeekrs across California and Arizona, now renamed Ojai, in blue and purple states, not a red state, at least not...

This week on Autonomy Signals presented by KPMG Grayson Brulte and Rob Grant discuss Figure AI’s first commercial humanoid deployment with Catalyst Brands, Stellantis L2++ partnership with Wayve , and Starship Technologies surpassing 10 million autonomous deliveries. Figure AI recently signed a commercial agreement with Catalyst Brands to deploy humanoid robots at a JCPenney distribution center in...

Michael Brandt , Co-Founder and CEO, RC Mowers joined Grayson Brulte on The Road to Autonomy podcast to discuss autonomous mowers and how they unlock scale for an industry that is labor constrained. In the landscape industry, turnover is structural, the work is hard, and skilled employees tend to stay away, making this an ideal industry to deploy autonomy that unlocks scale and frees up human reso...

This week on Autonomy Markets , Grayson Brulte and Walter Piecyk discuss Waymo’s undisputed global lead, the growing consumer-driven shift toward supervised ADAS (Level 2++), and autonomous trucking’s inflection point. After spending the week in Silicon Valley, Walt shared his on the ground observations amidst the backdrop of Waymo’s noisy week where the company paused service in several cities an...

This week on Autonomy Signals , Grayson Brulte and Rob Grant discuss the BUILD America 250 Act, XPeng’s mass-produced pure vision robotaxi , and the ESA-China SMILE mission reaching orbit. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Sam Graves and Ranking Member Rick Larsen released the text of the BUILD America 250 Act, a bipartisan five-year surface transportation reauthorization...

This week on Autonomy Markets , Grayson Brulte and Walter Piecyk discuss Waymo’s newly announced expansion ahead of the World Cup, the suddenly accelerating deterioration of the Uber/Waymo relationship, and the partnerships that actually matter for Uber’s autonomous future. As Waymo expanded their U.S. service area by 1,400 square miles across 11 cities, Uber continued to amplify both their direct...

This week on  Autonomy Signals presented by KPMG, Grayson Brulte  and  Rob Grant  discuss Uber’s policy play to slow the deployment of robotaxis, BYD’s costly market share gain, and Unitree going sci-fi with a production-ready Mecha robot. Uber  recently released a policy paper titled  Unlocking the Promise of Autonomy  that emphasized that the transition to auto...

Angus Pacala , Co-Founder and CEO,  Ouster  joined  Grayson Brulte  to discuss the launch of the native color REV8 LiDAR and how Ouster is positioning itself as the foundational sensing and perception layer for the physical AI economy. The  LiDAR industry  is currently undergoing a continual thinning out as the market shakes out and separates companies with strong mar...

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 fi...