Trucks | Future of Transportation for 2026.09.08
FoT is the intelligence arm of Trucks Venture Capital

Notable

Tesla announced its Cybercab would begin paid public service, starting in Austin, and the opening of potential 3rd party sales to fleets (link, link to recording of event). Tesla fans contend this is the death of Waymo, while the response from skeptics ranged from commentary on the scissor doors to an overall shrug. I perceive there's less overall excitement around this because although AVs aren't everywhere, they are somewhere and increasingly a lot of somewheres. Tesla's launch might feel a bit underwhelming (not even Musk was in attendance) because a version of this future already arrived a few years ago. The more important part of Cybercab story is that the world's most aggressive automaker is going to start printing these by the thousands. Viewing the vehicle while testing in the Detroit area, I was surprised how narrow it looks compared to other cars (link). Here's an example of a ride from OutofSpec (link). Hours after its launch, NHTSA opened a new probe into the vehicle (link).

Waymo racked up 8,300+ parking tickets and nearly $1M in fines in San Francisco since the start of 2025 (link). ‘In 2024, Waymo caught just 589 tickets. It’s now averaging more than 100 a week.’ Jim Gibbs, founder of Meter Feeder: 'On average, robotaxis use the curb 8-10x more efficiently than a personally owned vehicle. It’s not that fleets are the problem. It’s that the curb was never built for driverless cars. Research even shows that banning AVs from the curb would raise driving by about 60%. Cities are moving quickly to resolve this, and are starting to ask the right question: who puts the quarter in the meter when there’s no one in the car?'

Automakers urge congress: ban Chinese cars before the end of year (link).

LLMs and vision-language models are reproducing human-like biases in whether they yield to pedestrians (link, link to PDF). 'Our findings show that both LLMs and VLMs make yielding decisions which are influenced by pedestrian gender, ethnicity, religion, disability, age, skin tone and socio-economic status.'

Researchers from MIT and Motional developed CW-Net, a system that makes an AV’s neural-network planner more interpretable by translating its work into something human-readable (link).

What do GM's in-car cameras record and when do they do it? (link).

Video: full size truck sim running NVIDIA's new DLSS 5 upscaling (link). Via TO. Video: Jeep's real fake hardware (link).

M&A / Deals / Changes:

Indian battery swapping startup Yuma raises $35M (link). Led by Magna.

AI startup Micro1 seeks to beat Google’s bid for Spirit Airlines data (link). 'Micro1 Inc. will pay $12.5 million for Spirit Aviation Holdings Inc.'s business records, which include Microsoft Team items, emails, customer chat sessions, operational data and other internal information.'

Waymo reportedly in talks to raise $3B in debt led by Pimco and Blackstone (link).

May Mobility and NTT Mobility to launch first public rides on Toyota's e-Palette in Japan (link).

Once again, AV trucking startup Plus AI plans to go public via SPAC (link, link to PDF presentation). Plus's 2021 SPAC deal was abandoned in light of regulatory concerns with its overseas/China operations; in 2023 it spun out its China business (which became Zhijia Technology), while Plus held on to its US, EU and rest of world business.

Trucking app Truck Smarter shut down after acquihire (link).

Uber to exit Nigeria and Uganda as part of global restructure (link). Related: Uber cuts 10% of its workforce (link).

Board & Executive Changes:

Pivotal: Ken Karklin departs as CEO (link).

CarGurus: Matthew Mandel named CFO (link).

LiveWire: Paul Krause departs board; Matt Ryan joins board (link);

Avis Budget: Ravi Simhambhatla departs as Chief Digital & Innovation Officer (link).

Curated Jobs:

View over new 1371 active job listings from companies, including Bedrock Robotics (link), Flamingo Marine (link) and iSee (link).

Rapid Prototyping Engineer – Drones & Unmanned Systems at Havoc AI in San Diego, CA USA (link).

New Stuff:

Uber launches AV service in London in partner with Wayve, starting with 15 vehicles (link).

'God's Eye View' is a satellite simulator in your browser, using real public data (link).

NHTSA announces it is giving a 30-day extension to the public comment period for its AV framework guidance (link).

Zoox expands service to Las Vegas airport (link).

Saudi's Human and Applied Intuition announce partnership on AV trucking (link).

'Leno's Law,' a phased-in smog check exemption for older collector and classic cars, passes in CA legislature (link).

VW plans over 50,000 in job cuts (link).

Joshua Schachter's truck parking game (link).

Patents & Patent Applications:

Ford's patent application shows multi-conditional authentication for starting a vehicle (link). 'The long short-term memory algorithm may be more likely to detect an anomaly in response to the sensor data indicating a person wearing a face covering.'

Statistics / Projections:

EV batteries last longer than expected (link). Via FT / Aviloo. 'Most used vehicles can retain about 90% of original usable battery capacity after 150,000 km.'

Tesla says its Robotaxi fleet has driven 1 million unsupervised miles (link). Via Electrek.

Australian EV sales overtake gas and diesel sales for the first time ever (link). Via Cars Guide / VFACTS and Electric Vehicle Council.

Uber’s average customer price rose 8.8% year over year to $24.62 per trip, while Lyft’s rose 6.2% to $19.83 (link). Via Gridwise. 'Driver gross pay per working hour also increased 7.3% to $24.41, with bonus and incentive spending rising even faster and pressuring those gains.'

Thank you:

Thank you to Minsoo Lee (link), Natasha McGrady (link) and Sam Wils (link) for offers of introductions to new founders, investors and friends over the last week.

Trucks portfolio companies mentioned in this issue:

Havoc AI (link), Meter Feeder (link), Motional (link). View the full portfolio of Trucks companies (link).

'A good start is half the work' (Brendan Behan),

Reilly Brennan