The Global Expansion of Self-Driving Vehicles

Summary

This episode brings together three experts in the autonomous vehicle space for a comprehensive discussion about the state and future of self-driving technology. Ben Seidl of Autolane, Ming Maa of Moove, and Nathan Parker of EdgeCase each bring different perspectives — from infrastructure and fleet management to safety validation and simulation testing.

The conversation covers how reliability of autonomous vehicles has dramatically improved, the challenges of bringing self-driving to new environments and operational design domains, and why the US is leading with regulatory clarity. Notably, the panel discusses why Tesla is not participating in California’s AV programs, how autonomous systems will (and should not) interact with each other on the road, and what federal regulation needs to look like to accelerate adoption. The episode also explores the economics of fleet management through Moove’s platform and EdgeCase’s approach to validating autonomous systems through simulation and edge-case testing.

Highlights

Uber Teams Up with Zoox

“Uber teams up with Zoox! Does EdgeCase work with Zoox?” — Jason Calacanis, 1:38

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Operational Design Domains Explained

“Operational design domains — the key concept for understanding where and how self-driving works.” — Nathan Parker, 2:21

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How Ben Seidl Came Up with Autolane

“How Ben Seidl came up with the idea for Autolane!” — Jason Calacanis, 15:20

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Why Tesla Isn’t in California

“Why Tesla isn’t involving themselves in California’s autonomous vehicle programs.” — Jason Calacanis, 44:26

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Why AVs Should NOT Talk to Each Other

“Why AV’s should not talk to other AV’s on the road.” — Nathan Parker, 41:38

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Key Points

• Uber-Zoox partnership (1:38) - Major partnership announcement between Uber and Zoox for autonomous ride-hailing
• Operational design domains (2:21) - Nathan Parker explains the concept of ODDs and their importance for AV deployment
• Challenges of new environments (6:02) - Bringing self-driving to unfamiliar cities and conditions remains a key challenge
• Reliability improvements (13:51) - How autonomous car reliability has dramatically improved in recent years
• Autolane founding (15:20) - Ben Seidl’s journey to creating autonomous vehicle infrastructure
• Moove fleet management (21:57) - Ming Maa explains how Moove helps autonomous vehicles go to market
• Fleet logistics (27:40) - The complex logistics of managing autonomous vehicle fleets
• Multi-modal question (32:47) - Why Autolane focuses on lanes rather than multi-modal transport
• Smaller AV platforms (36:50) - EdgeCase also works with smaller self-driving vehicles beyond cars
• AV-to-AV communication (40:20) - How autonomous systems will interact with each other
• No V2V communication (41:38) - Arguments against autonomous vehicles communicating directly on the road
• Market state (43:14) - Overview of the current self-driving market landscape
• Tesla’s California absence (44:26) - Why Tesla isn’t participating in California AV programs
• US regulatory leadership (48:31) - Why the US is leading with regulatory clarity in autonomous vehicles
• Federal regulation needed (49:53) - Ben Seidl argues federal regulation is necessary for scaling
• Growth barriers (1:02:10) - What’s holding back self-driving growth in the US
• AV revenue models (1:04:39) - Which companies make the most money in the self-driving space

Mentions

Companies

• Autolane (15:20) - Autonomous vehicle infrastructure company founded by Ben Seidl
• Moove (21:57) - Fleet management platform for autonomous vehicles
• EdgeCase (2:21) - Safety validation and simulation testing for autonomous systems
• Zoox (1:38) - Amazon-owned autonomous vehicle company, partnered with Uber
• Uber (1:38) - Ride-hailing company partnering with Zoox for autonomous rides
• Tesla (44:26) - Discussed for its absence from California AV programs
• Waymo (43:14) - Google’s autonomous vehicle subsidiary, market leader

Products & Technologies

• Operational Design Domains (ODDs) (2:21) - Framework for defining where autonomous vehicles can operate safely
• V2V Communication (41:38) - Vehicle-to-vehicle communication technology, debated for AVs

People

• Ben Seidl (15:20) - Founder of Autolane
• Ming Maa (21:57) - CEO of Moove
• Nathan Parker (2:21) - CEO of EdgeCase

Surprising Quotes

“Why AV’s should not talk to other AV’s on the road — the security and coordination problems outweigh the benefits.” — Nathan Parker, 41:38

“Tesla isn’t involving themselves in California’s autonomous vehicle programs despite being headquartered there.” — Ben Seidl, 44:26

“Federal regulation is a necessity for scaling autonomous vehicles across state lines.” — Ben Seidl, 49:53

Transcript

Jason Calacanis: 0:00 Hello and welcome back to TWiST. My name is Alex. It is Wednesday, March 11th, 2026 and today we are here to talk about the future of autonomy and the current state of affairs in the robo-taxi and autonomous commerce world. We’ve brought a great panel of folks here from all around the industry to help us understand where we are and where we’re going. So please, join me in welcoming to the show, or back to the show really, Ben, Ben Seidl from Autolane. Autolane provides software and hardware to facilitate autonomous commerce out there in the real world. Ben, welcome back.

Ben Seidl: 0:28 Thank you. Appreciate it.

Jason Calacanis: 0:29 Pleasure man. And then we have Nathan Parker from Edge Case. Edge Case helps autonomous vehicle companies find edge cases and problems before they deploy into production so they don’t have issues when they hit the streets. Nathan, I hope that was close, glad to have you here.

Nathan Parker: 0:46 Well done. Thanks Alex.

Jason Calacanis: 0:47 Thank you very much. And then we have Mr. Ming Maa from MOVE, which is the biggest fleet manager in the world for the autonomous industry. You may know him from his work in the past at Grab. Ming, welcome to the show.

Ming Maa: 0:58 Thank you. Excited to be on.

Jason Calacanis: 1:00 I am too. I have to say that of all the topics we talk about on TWiST, this is my favorite probably because I despise driving and I find it insane to this day that we let 16-year-olds here in the States get behind the wheel of a Suburban and go 80 miles an hour down the freeway. It just seems like a terrible idea. And so for me as a lazy person and a safety-conscious dad, I just want things to go faster. So that’s my prior going into this. Now, the biggest news today in the world of self-driving is that Uber and Zoox are going to partner up. Uber, of course, the American ride-hail giant, Zoox, the Amazon subsidiary, have been testing in Las Vegas, Ben. Now they’re going to work with Uber in Vegas this year and then expand to Los Angeles in 2027. So a relatively measured pace of expansion, but a good partnership. I’m curious from your insider perspective what this means for the industry.

Ben Seidl: 1:54 All right, I think it’s fantastic. I mean, it certainly validates the Uber strategy of aggregation of all these different players. I mean, they’ve taken a very long-term view on the industry that essentially this technology will be widely disseminated across many, many partners and Uber, you know, seeks to become that Expedia of AV mobility. And I think adding another company like Zoox into the mix is further validation of that strategy. So I think it’s fantastic and I also believe that Zoox really needs this. I’ve taken a couple rides in Zoox, both in San Francisco and in Vegas, and it’s a fantastic experience, but we’re at a point now with AVs where if every single AV company has its own app, it’s hurting the industry. And so I think with Zoox being relatively constrained, few vehicles, smaller geofences, it’s very smart for them to open up the demand to a wider audience and get a lot more people using their amazing purpose-built AV technology. So I think it’s great.

Jason Calacanis: 2:57 Nathan, Ming, have either of you been in a Zoox? I have—

Nathan Parker: 3:00 I have— So I can’t really verify what Ben said about it being a great experience.

Jason Calacanis: 3:02 I have not, so I can’t speak firsthand on Zoox.

Nathan Parker: 3:05 We really need to do a group field trip to Vegas apparently because I’ve seen videos of this and it looks tremendous, but I think they were doing just like an early circuit through Vegas and it didn’t seem that widespread so the way that I see this Ben is that if they’re expanding, they’ve sorted out whatever early kinks they might have had.

Ben Seidl: 3:22 Yeah, they’re also testing in San Francisco. It’s only for employees and friends of employees, but they’ve been here in San Francisco for I believe almost a year. So taking a Zoox through the hills of San Francisco, I did it one time on a Sunday night when there was almost no traffic and it was just, it was magical. It’s very, very cool, completely surreal experience because if you’re not familiar with what a Zoox is, they refer to it as a Zoox because

Jason Calacanis: 3:54 It’s not a car.

Ben Seidl: 3:55 Yeah, they seek to differentiate a Zoox from a car, meaning the Zoox has no steering wheel, it is not forward or backward facing, it’s omnidirectional. So you get into it more like a tram, the doors open up like this, you get into it, you’re facing each other as you ride. So I’ve taken it with three friends before and you can have a group conversation with four people, everyone’s looking at each other face to face and then you kind of get out.

Nathan Parker: 4:29 We have a picture of the Zoox coming up here.

Ben Seidl: 4:31 There we go, that’s helpful. So it’s like a totally different thing and it is absolutely special. So yeah, I mean I think it’s going to be great. What they’re doing in Vegas is seven different stops I believe still at the moment. When I took it at CES it only had seven stops. So it’s only point-to-point in Vegas, you can’t take it anywhere you want to. But I believe when they expand here with Uber it’s going to be an entire geofenced area. In San Francisco, if you are to take it, it can take you to any address within the geofence, it’s not point-to-point. It operates a little bit differently than most robotaxies do in the sense that you can only go destination to destination in Vegas.

Nathan Parker: 5:08 I’m absolutely furious that I left San Francisco right before all the self-driving cars actually started to work, which I think is a cruel, cruel irony. I saw all the early testing and got to have none of the fun. Ming, when it comes to managing large numbers of cars for AV companies, and I do want to get into the economics of fleet management a little bit later, but with Zoox as our current topic, is it different, harder or more economical to support vehicles that don’t operate like traditional cars? Because I presume that if you have a Jaguar I-Pace, it’s probably pretty easy to fit into other fleet management operations, whereas a Zoox probably has more custom parts, it’s harder to probably park, refuel, I don’t know, I’m just curious how that impacts your operations and how popular that model is.

Ming Maa: 5:51 First of all, thanks for that question. I actually think there’s a lot of different complexities involved that’s not just tied to the specific type of vehicle or the specific type of the platform. It’s also just tied to the city itself and how every city is very, very different. So when you think about fleet management, one of the biggest challenges that we have is really around how do you fine-tune the system to think about how every city’s different. Phoenix for weather, for example, just take one little thing. It’s typically above 110 degrees, you know, during the summer, and sometimes it reaches 120 degrees. And in those, you know, types of conditions, we have to be very thoughtful about energy management on the vehicles because the batteries drain just much faster than normal. You also have these very, very strange weather events called haboobs, which are just these massive wall-like dust storms that engulf the entire city. And when that happens, you have to be, you know, very, very careful to ensure all the sensors, the lidars, the cameras, all the radars are working, you know, properly. Miami, which is a city that we launched in January, has a very different set of challenges because, obviously, hurricanes, rain, all that occurs, it seems like almost every other hour. And so we have to be very thoughtful about how to protect the fleet against flooding risks, which is very important for electric vehicles. London, of course, will have its own different set of challenges. So, I think not only is the format of the vehicle very important, but it’s the locality and the unique differences in every market that makes the fleet management very interesting and challenging.

Jason Calacanis: 7:28 Nathan, does… does Edge Case work with Zoox?

Nathan Parker: 7:32 We can’t publicly disclose who we work with, unfortunately. We do have several partnerships that are public. Uh, to pick up on what Ming was saying, though, one of the things around safety that’s… that’s interesting with regards to what Ming was saying is something referred to as an operational design domain. And so the companies, what they’re doing is they’re… they’re doing what Ming just described. They’re looking at a certain geographic area, they’re looking at the autonomous vehicle, they’re assessing where is it going to operate? Is it going to be on surface streets? Is it going to be in city streets? Is it going to be, kind of, over-the-road trucking? What’s the weather? Is it, you know, do you have a lot of rain? Do you have a lot of ice? Do you have snow? Is there dust? All of the things that would per… potentially impact the performance of the autonomous vehicle. All of those things have to be solved and designed. At some point in time, you know, these companies are graduating into, you know, building fleets of vehicles. And so now you have to think about how operationally how are you going to… to make sure that those systems still perform at that high level.

Jason Calacanis: 8:35 Yeah.

Nathan Parker: 8:37 So that’s what we’re seeing at least from… from a safety side. They’ll clear one ODD, you know, and then they’ll say, okay, great, that’s cleared. We solved a lot of the hard engineering problems. Now we can go to the next ODD, which generally from a robotaxi perspective means one city we can now go to another city that’s… a lot of the conditions are the same as the… the previous city that was cleared.

Ben Seidl: 8:57 And that’s why, in the case of Zoox, if you go from, I mean, let’s just say Vegas to LA, both…

Jason Calacanis: 9:00 They’re relatively flat, both are in the same part of the United States, similar climate, so you would probably have some ODD overlap is my guess.

Nathan Parker: 9:08 Yeah, absolutely. So the core engineering problem they solved, in this case, in the original location, so now they can go to other like regions very quickly because now they’re just solving for the delta, right? They’re not solving for the full design. They’re solving for just the delta from where they previously launched.

Jason Calacanis: 9:28 So because they’re going from like to like, it’s kind of a modest step by them. Would you have been more impressed by Zoox going from, I don’t know, Vegas to, name a Canadian city, Ottawa, where it’s cold most of the year apparently because it’s Canada?

Nathan Parker: 9:43 I think it’s smart business. Most of the autonomous companies that we work with and talk to, they’re very methodical on their expansion plans. And so they’re thinking what does the engineering, what does the tech do today? How do I continuously expand that? And then they think about, you know, they look at it through that lens of technical expansion, commercialization, and who are the commercial partners in those new areas, and then the regulatory piece. You know, do we currently have the ability to operate the way we expect to operate from the laws and rules of the road governing AVs?

Jason Calacanis: 11:21 Is it wrong of me to be a little bit surprised that this far into commercial self-driving operations that we’re still having to approach most cities on a case-by-case basis for each group? Like, whenever Waymo announces they’re going to go map a place, I know they’re doing preparatory work, but perhaps it’s a little surprising from where I sit that this is not more generally applicable yet, this technology, and still requires that much in situ preparation, if that makes sense? I don’t know if this is best for Nathan or Ming or Ben, but why am I feeling slightly disappointed learning about how we’re approaching safety in these cases? Maybe Nathan, this is best for you.

Nathan Parker: 11:57 The companies take safety very seriously.

Ben Seidl: 12:00 And so it’s not one of those things where we’ll hope it goes okay. They’re very—they’re very, again, methodical on how they prove to themselves and then kind of the ecosystem around them, whether it’s commercial partners, regulators, that the system’s going to behave the way they expect it to behave when they go into a new geographic location. So, it’s—it’s not one of those things that they are going to hope it works. They absolutely have to prove to themselves and have strong conviction when they go to another location it’s going to perform the way they expect it to perform. So I—I actually could see that being perfectly normal.

Jason Calacanis: 12:31 All right. We’re going to take a very, very teeny tiny break to let Lon tell us about something, and when we get back, more about cities, safety, and how one company is blazing a different path. But in the meantime, Mr. Lon Harris, take it away.

Jason Calacanis: 13:51 Picking it up from where we left off. Uh, Nuro is going out into Tokyo and they are doing it without doing the usual mapping and preparatory work. They’re calling it, I think, zero shot autonomy. So as we talk about safety and the importance thereof, how is one company able to effectively go around or—not skip a step, but pass one by without doing more work, like Waymo does, for example?

Nathan Parker: 14:14 This is an interesting kind of new—new path for—for an AV company. I would say we’re seeing some—some version of this on the military side and some of the autonomous vehicles companies that we’re working with because they’re going into kind of austere environments, they’re going into terrain that they don’t necessarily have the ability to previously map. And so they want the capability to really, uh, you know, land a vehicle and go, uh, if you will. And so although a lot of the companies, again, that we’ve historically worked with, uh, definitely operate with trained data, um, the fact that there’s a company, you know, kind of aspiring to do something like this on—on public roads, um, it’s not entirely, uh, new, um, but it definitely will be something that—that we’ll be watching. Watching, I would say at- for again from an education perspective, our- our point of view would be you still have to you still have to make sure it’s safe. Whatever that system is, you still have to prove that, you know, your- your- your approaching autonomy slightly differently, but you still have to think about how do you- how do you demonstrate that the system’s going to perform the way you expect it to perform.

Ming Maa: 15:18 I think just to add on to Nathan’s comment, um, it’s very, very challenging to get from two nines of reliability to five nines of reliability and covering all of those different corner cases city by city is one of the biggest challenges, you know, for autonomy. So for example, uh, the- the color of the streetlights are slightly different, uh, for different cities, they’re at slightly different heights depending on the cities that you’re in. Um, when you’re driving on the left-hand side of the road versus the right-hand side of the road, the conditions are very different. Um, when you look at the curbs in different cities, some curbs are fairly tall, some curbs are fairly short. And so all of that influences how you think about pickups and drop-offs and navigations, uh, through the city. You also have to- remember there’s also an auditory component to this. So Waymo’s understand when there’s a first responder coming by the sound of the siren. So if there’s a- an ambulance or a fire truck coming by, they’ll know to pull that- vehicle aside and let that first responder go through first. But those sounds, as you can probably imagine, vary a little bit slightly, you know, city by city. And so really capturing all of those little nuances is what makes it five nines of reliability.

Jason Calacanis: 16:29 To get from zero nines to two nines and then from two nines to five nines, Ming, is it like, you know, 20% of the work to get to two nines and then 80% to get to five nines? Or am I inverting the- the amount of work per nine in terms of reliability?

Ming Maa: 16:42 Well, what we’re finding is we’re finding um new ways to make the system more and more robust uh every single mile that they drive. Um so we talked about weather as one of the- the key things to really understand. Um some cities in hot climates for example, there’s a lot of dust in the air and being able to have- really model and calibrate uh the sensors to detect and really understand dust and fine particles is an important component. Um once autonomy reaches the snowy cities in the north, uh being able to really understand snow and how that- affects uh the sensor stack is going to be very important, you know, as well. So I think all of this is really coming together now to make a- make really Waymo the world’s safest driver.

Jason Calacanis: 17:26 I came into this conversation incredibly excited about the quick pace of progress on self-driving and now I’m discovering it’s a little bit more piecemeal than I thought. Um, how has reliability of autonomous cars improved through the eyes of Auto-Line? Because you’re dealing with them in the real world. So do you see improvements in how they drive and do these edge cases that take you from two nines to five, do they show up in, you know, your interactions with them as a company?

Ben Seidl: 17:51 You know, the company that we’re most uh integrated with is- is actually Tesla and- I- I drive a hardware 4 Tesla. so every day 100% on FSD so I can mostly speak to that I’ve taken a lot of Waymo rides and we orchestrate Waymo’s on private property at some of the centers that we support but you know the Waymo capabilities because you can really only learn about them at least we can by riding in them that’s that’s harder so it’s all about the amount of time you have in the vehicles but with Tesla you know we have a fleet at Autolane of Teslas Hardware 4 and you know we’re driving them all day every day so every time that there’s a point release for FSD you know that’s being tested across our organization and myself on a daily basis and you know I I came up with the idea for Autolane in August 2024 because I bought a brand new Tesla and was astounded by how good the FSD quality was even at that point and kind of had the epiphany that if this technology continues at the rate that it’s improving then this is clearly a general-purpose technology that’s going to change the world and if that’s true then what we need to see is pretty significant and steady progress similar to the world of LLMs in order for for for this epiphany to become true and so we’ve bet you know a pretty big asymmetric bet at Autolane on the idea that autonomy is not only going to improve at a consistent rate but that it will eventually come to personally owned vehicles as well so I you know I can say over the last 18 months of building Autolane if if you looked at FSD as an example from August 2024 until today it’s significantly better I would even maybe say twice as good I mean it used to do even in August 2024 it would do things that weren’t safe things that would make you not want to use it again and unless you were kind of an intrepid early adopter you probably gave up on it um you know but I I could kind of see through the fog and understand that like it if they keep improving at this rate then these things are going to go away as Ming’s pointing out uh you know step by step and we’ve seen that happen every single quarter if not every single month for last 18 months so

Ben Seidl: 21:20 From my vantage point as CEO of Ottolane and working with these different and testing, when I’ve tested WeRide, I’ve tested Zoox, I’ve tested Wave, I’ve tested obviously Tesla, Waymo, so almost all of them and you know they’re all really good. They’re all really good and they’re all pretty close to each other. So I’m very bullish on the progress that will continue to be made here and hopefully that can be disseminated across all AV companies.

Jason Calacanis: 21:52 Yeah, we’re going to come back to you in a second, Ben, because we have an audience question about autonomous commerce that I want to get to, but Nathan, from the Edge Case perspective, have you guys seen the types of improvements in the cars that you help safety check similar to what Ben just described in how FSD has improved? I know you can’t talk about individual customers and clients, but have you seen a similar rate of them getting better at avoiding the sorts of issues that you need to flag?

Nathan Parker: 22:21 The short answer is yes, so you start to see certain of some of their metrics like interventions per mile, some of those industry standard things. I think the thing that’s also interesting is the problems they’re looking to solve like if you talk to some of the AV players like what are some of their biggest problems three to five years ago is some foundational engineering problem. Now they’re solving like ecosystem problems or how do I scale, how do I work with customers, how do I build the commercialization engine to support the deployments that are coming. So I think it signals to us that it’s they’re definitely getting very close to launch and several have because they’re solving different problems now. They’re solving very much a commercialization go-to-market problem. Of course there’s still safety cases that have to be pulled together and some fundamental engineering work that has to be done but it’s the aperture has been opened on the problem set.

Jason Calacanis: 23:14 So do you eventually fix yourself out of a job at Edge Case? Once you’ve solved the edge cases, because there’s only so many cities, there’s only so many ODDs to use your term. Does Edge Case eventually get out of this business once it’s solved?

Nathan Parker: 23:29 Short answer’s no.

Jason Calacanis: 23:31 I’m surprised to hear you say that.

Nathan Parker: 23:32 Yeah, so one of the other and this is back to some of our background. Part of the challenge is getting the system to market. What we also think is the bigger challenge is going to be keeping the fleet operational and keeping them performing to the safety standard. So you can imagine in the future, you know, a lot of the dev fleets they’re you know five to call it… 50 vehicles. The problem’s parts are going to go obsolete. You’re going to have things that change in the configuration of these platforms all the time. So you have to not only now understand the safety profile of a single vehicle, you have to understand the safety profile of a thousand, 10,000, 100,000, a million with precision to understand, much like the airlines, right? Uh, you know, a grounding of a fleet. What are- what is the autonomous vehicle community going to do when they have an incident? So we’re build- that’s part of what we’ve been building around our platform is that that real-time monitoring, real-time observability to understand are all of the vehicles in the fleet still performing to the safety standard that was set out, you know, way back when the engineers were- were building.

Ben Seidl: 24:29 Okay, Ming, this is we have to bring you in here because this is this is very fascinating. When I- when I think of fleet management in the back of my head I’m imagining some high school kids parking cars in a back lot and then picking them up again and driving them out. Clearly that’s not the case based on what Nathan just told us. So, how hard is it to keep the sensors clean and calibrated and to ensure that, you know, cross generations of different Waymos that all the technology is working and how do you test to ensure that the cars that are being used that you’re helping to manage are at exactly 100% readiness to take people just as we expect airlines to have their planes, you know, knocking on wood, uh, always ready to go.

Ming Maa: 25:21 It’s a great question. And I think, uh, the first- I think the first mental model is to- is to understand that managing an AV fleet is 100% completely different from managing a traditional fleet. Um, the- when you think about the goal of a traditional fleet manager, it’s really just BIS. It’s butts in seats. So you spend a lot of- a lot of energy looking for drivers. And then when you find a driver, you want to get that car out of your parking lot as soon as possible and then you completely forget about that car until it comes back for servicing. So you’re completely hands off. That’s traditional, uh, fleet management. Managing an AV fleet is almost the exact opposite in every single motion. So I- I spend- we spend 0% of our time thinking about filling seats. Um, instead, we spend a lot of our time, to Nathan’s point, thinking about the motions around recording every single vehicle when it comes back into the facility. How do we ensure that it meets the safety standards that our riders deserve? And so having that traceability every time we balance or- or repair a tire, how to ensure that the torque values are, uh, recorded for every single nut, uh, before it leaves the facility. And that process, that motion is much more akin to a airline level of safety than it is to a traditional, you know, fleet company. Now, we also think a lot about the demand curve, uh, for ride-sharing. So in- very different from traditional fleet companies, we think a lot about how does the rider demand change throughout the day.

Nathan Parker: 27:00 And then how do I match the supply curve to that demand curve as, you know, best as possible. Now, you know, companies like Waymo have invested a tremendous amount of engineering to develop very sophisticated tools for managing these supply and demand curves. But we find that, you know, every city is very different in certain small little ways. And so what I’d like to think about is how do we help them fine-tune the system for every city, to borrow that analogy from, from AI.

Jason Calacanis: 27:28 You guys raised a bunch of money last year and I, it sounds like you’re doing all of the tricky and difficult and hard work, but not getting as much of the praise and I presume not the entire economics of self-driving. So man, have you considered rolling your own self-driving car as well? Because I feel like you have, you know, the muscle and sinew required to do it. So I’m curious why, why not go up stack, if you will?

Ming Maa: 27:53 Our expertise is around operations and really helping the AV companies go to market in the most efficient and the most sustainable way, you know, possible. So I think ultimately why companies like Waymo choose to partner with us is because, you know, we accelerate the commercial scaling of their ambitions into cities on a faster timeline and in a more economic way. So what that means if you take a very concrete view on this is, first of all, we develop all the infrastructure needed to bring a Waymo to a city. And there’s really three types of infrastructure that we work on. The first is charging locations where we service the vehicles, we prepare them for ride sharing services. Second, we also set up the service facilities that’s needed to perform maintenance and repair and to, again to Nathan’s point, ensure every vehicle is as safe as possible and as roadworthy as possible. Um, and then the third is, uh, we do have, uh, parking infrastructure for situations when we have to de-fleet the, the fleet due to either bad weather events or, or other issues.

Jason Calacanis: 28:59 San Francisco losing power, for example.

Ming Maa: 29:01 Exactly, perfect, perfect example. Um, and then I think in any market that we operate in, we’ll most likely have multiple facilities for each of these three archetypes. And the real challenge for a fleet operator is in orchestrating this very distributed footprint of facilities to make sure that the overall fleet works as efficiently as possible. So that’s really on the infrastructure side.

Ben Seidl: 29:30 The second thing that we do is all the operations needed to ready the vehicles for ride sharing. And the objective to Nathan’s point is really to ensure first of all, our P0 is safety, that all vehicles are as safe and clean as possible for passengers while we maximize the total utilization of the entire fleet. So, you know, when you step back, um, we’re not going to go up stack if you will into the R&D and the AV development. But the mental model that I would leave you with is we help Waymo… Waymo, to really open up a new market, light up a new market without having a single person from Waymo needing to step foot in those markets themselves.

Jason Calacanis: 31:30 I want to double click on one thing you said, which is having multiple facilities to maintain self-driving fleets right now on a per-market basis. Given that we’re usually talking about double digits or triple digits numbers of cars in an individual market from an individual provider, I’m a little surprised you need that much square footage on the ground. Does that make it harder to aggressively roll out AVs because the maintenance and care and parking and so forth takes up that much space?

Ben Seidl: 32:01 It’s absolutely one of the rate limiters to growing a fleet in any particular market. And I think one of the biggest challenges is how do you provision the right amount of power into these facilities, either for charging or for other purposes. So you’re looking at, you know, these are facilities with, I would say anywhere from three, five, ten megawatts of power. And getting that provision from the local utilities can take anywhere from 12, 18, you know, plus months depending on the city. So as you think about the rate limiters of growth in autonomy, the infrastructure, provisioning the power, getting the right locations, locations that are close to end demand, that is absolutely one of the key challenges for autonomy.

Jason Calacanis: 32:47 Ben, a couple of questions from the audience about what you’re building. Seems that the consumers watching the show are very curious about when all this stuff we’re talking about is going to impact their daily life. So, first question, a little bit generic, but roll with me here. When… When will we be able to order coffees from AVs, just general commerce on the road? Super excited about this and trying to help build it. So, talk to the people.

Ben Seidl: 33:08 The first thing I’ll say is autonomous commerce and and Autolane helping to build this platform, this is not the first time this has been tried or piloted. So, even last year DoorDash and Waymo worked together in Phoenix on some things. Before that we had Nuro. Nuro built an entire multi-billion dollar business making purpose-built delivery vehicles, partnering with people like or companies like Kroger and Walmart and others. You know, so there’s been iterations of this, of course, for quite some time. And and the cleanest thing to point to right now is the sidewalk bots. You know, these are these are a form of autonomous commerce that are happening every day in many major cities in the United States, Miami, you know, Los Angeles and others. So, you know, autonomous commerce is not a brand new idea necessarily, but the way in which we think about it is is I think different. It’s more akin to the to the Uber strategy, which is to say we believe that robotics and largely speaking autonomous vehicles are going to be the next delivery form factor. And I don’t know if that’s necessarily even debatable. It’s not going to be 100% of all delivery demand, but it’s going to be I think the majority over time. And so what does that look like? Well, I believe absolutely that it’s going to be multi-modal. So you’re talking about drones. You’re seeing drones, drone delivery ramping up quite fast with Zipline and Wing and Walmart and Amazon.

Jason Calacanis: 34:45 Yeah, I just talked to the CEO of Zipline. That was a very, very enthusiastic conversation. It actually made me quite optimistic that that’s going to happen sooner than we think. Finally.

Ben Seidl: 34:54 Yeah, but you know that that form factor has its significant limitations as well. And so do the sidewalk bots and so do purpose-built vehicles like I don’t know if you’ve seen the DoorDash dot that they’ve created that they just launched in Fremont last week I believe. But that’s a purpose-built autonomous commerce delivery vehicle, you know, that’s faster than a sidewalk bot, that can go on roads but also smaller than a car and not fly.

Jason Calacanis: 35:26 Here’s what it looks like by the way, for anyone who wants to see it. Just imagine a meatball with stroller wheels and a terrible Honda Civic spoiler all put together.

Ben Seidl: 35:38 It’s cute. Yeah, so it’s it’s definitely interesting and I think, you know, we’re starting to see all these form factors. I don’t know if you’ve also seen there’s a company called River that’s doing doorstep autonomous delivery with these wheeled sidewalk bots, basically, that are like half robot dog, half sidewalk bot, and they can wheel… staircases and things like that. So you’ve got all of these form factors happening, which which I believe encompasses a new type of commerce called autonomous commerce. Exactly those, and those are live in a couple of cities as well. So you know, I think it remains to be seen which form factor is going to be dominant, but Autolane’s purpose here is to orchestrate autonomous commerce. So we aren’t necessarily making, we aren’t making a bet on one form factor or another. We are simply stating that all of these form factors, and others that we can’t yet imagine on this call today, will come to fruition and will create an ecosystem of delivery options that all function in a very similar way, meaning they don’t have drivers. None of those that I just mentioned, they’re all autonomous. They’re all driving with nobody inside of them. You can’t really take them over easily. And so these are autonomous delivery mechanisms that, if let’s just say, imagine a world in three years where all of those form factors I mentioned show up to a Walmart. And I didn’t even mention the other one, which is autonomous trucks, that’s also taking off. So, so you’ve got all this happening.

Jason Calacanis: 37:14 So then, why is it called Autolane then? Why isn’t it called Multimodal Lane? I feel like it’s some pretty false advertising because I, you know, I’ve always thought of you most as a place where self-driven cars can arrive to pick up people, drop off things, essentially, you know, creating the… orchestration’s the word of the year. The orchestration for that, but it sounds much more like you’re thinking about pretty much an all-of-the-above strategy for what gets delivered.

Ben Seidl: 37:41 I certainly think that autonomous vehicles, cars, are the form factor that’s going to win amongst all of these. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say that there isn’t a use case for every single one of the form factors that I mentioned previously. I think it’s more of an ecosystem of solutions, and depending on the need for the delivery, you’re going to get one of these options. But absolutely, you kind of need to work backwards from the actual retailer itself and say, put yourself in the shoes of Walmart, and then say, I’ve got three drone companies coming in, I’ve got two autonomous truck companies coming in, I’ve got two autonomous passenger cars, Tesla and Waymo, then I’ve got maybe humanoids and robot dogs and sidewalk bots, all coming to get different Walmart orders. That is either going to equate to twelve different distinct deep integrations with twelve different companies, or it’s going to result in some type of universal orchestration layer. And that’s what Autolane is. And so when I think of the word Autolane, I actually think of ‘Auto’ representing autonomous.

Jason Calacanis: 38:53 Oh, that, okay, that’s very reasonable. But but yeah, I mean I I think for sure the focus that we have is absolutely on autonomous passenger…

Ben Seidl: 39:00 passenger cars, Teslas, namely because if you look at all of those I’ll just kind of finish my thoughts here on these form factors but like

Jason Calacanis: 39:07 There you go.

Ben Seidl: 39:09 each one of those has significant drawbacks either regulatory wise in the case of drones, operational wise in the case of sidewalk bots in my opinion. So you’ve got significant drawbacks that equate to none of those options serving everybody.

Jason Calacanis: 39:31 Well what is the form factor that hypothetically could serve everybody?

Ben Seidl: 39:37 It’s a passenger car. Why? That already happens today. That’s how we serve everybody on DoorDash and Uber Eats and Amazon is with passenger cars and trucks. So my take on it is that is the form factor that’s going to take the lion’s share of autonomous commerce deliveries and that’s what we’re absolutely focused on, but understanding that you know it’s not a binary industry.

Jason Calacanis: 40:02 Yeah. Nathan, we talked about your company and helping people de-risk the AV world. Do you guys also work with smaller self-driven vehicles like we’re discussing here or is it only on the robotaxi-ish side of things?

Nathan Parker: 40:21 Yeah, we historically and currently we typically work with passenger vehicle companies, autonomous trucking companies, and then we have a very large defense business. So spent a lot of time on the defense side working with how they’re thinking about deploying autonomous systems at scale.

Jason Calacanis: 40:43 Which is I’m sure a pretty big topic just given the expansion of autonomous warfare in both Europe and the Middle East. Probably not a topic for today but I take it Edge Case is a little bit busy on that front.

Nathan Parker: 40:52 Yeah, yeah we have a lot of kind of pressing needs by our customers and you know we’re happy to support them.

Jason Calacanis: 40:58 I’m just curious about how we’re going to have all these different autonomous systems integrate because we’re talking about the number of different providers on the robotaxi side, you know everywhere from people in China to Europe to United States, lots of companies, lots of ideas, lots of different form factors. You know Ben told us about the different smaller devices that are also going to be kind of at play here. Do we have like the right standards built like I don’t know car-to-car Bluetooth or whatever it’s supposed to be to ensure that these technologies can interact with one another and therefore not have a large AV truck stomp my DoorDash dot robot that has my lunch in it? Because to me like I feel like people are building individual things but maybe not meshing them together Nathan as much as they should be.

Nathan Parker: 41:40 Yeah, you said two things that are really interesting. One was the standards comment and then the other was how the autonomous systems will interact with one another. On the standards we actually worked you know with one of our passenger vehicle partners doing a standards assessment.

Ben Seidl: 42:00 think through like, what are all of the standards out there that they need to make sure they’re in compliance to? And there’s like over 200. And so then the question is, okay, how many of those need to inform their design and then eventually an operations? And so that is, um, that is all part of the work that we do with our partners, to think through like how, how should you be thinking about standards? So historically, I won’t, I won’t bore you to death with a bunch of standards, but like ISO…

Jason Calacanis: 42:23 You can’t bore me. I love this. Hit me.

Ben Seidl: 42:25 Okay. So ISO 21448, it’s safety of the intended function. That’s a pretty common one. You have UL 4600, um, and 26262. Those are kind of the, kind of the exemplars, the primary standards that a lot of autonomous vehicle companies use and talk through. Um, as far as to how the autonomous systems will interact with one another, um, it’s an interesting problem. Uh, candidly, I haven’t thought a ton about it. My expectation would be is that, um, the perception system will see that as an object and it will detect the object and it will perform based on how the perception system, you know, trains the system perform for, you know, a small, you know, dot robot that’s, you know, either in the middle of a road, in a crosswalk or on the side of a street.

Nathan Parker: 43:14 I think there is a very good argument that you do not want AVs to directly talk to other AVs on the road, because when they start talking to each other, that creates a dependency. And the more dependencies there are, the less reliable the overall system, you know, could become.

Jason Calacanis: 43:34 Wait, wait, can I, can I interrogate that? Because that to me sounds like saying having a backup parachute is a bad idea because it builds dependencies. Like, I mean, what’s wrong with having a backchannel as a, as a last ditch, say?

Nathan Parker: 43:47 Ideally, you want every vehicle to be completely self-sufficient and able to sense and understand the world around itself in as complete a manner. I think over time, there may be, you know, AV to AV communications, but that shouldn’t be a reliant or a, a condition, if you will, when you think about safety.

Jason Calacanis: 44:08 Ben, just one more question for you on, on the autonomous commerce side of things. Um, I can track how quickly Waymo is growing because they release numbers, paid trips per week, and they’re shooting for a million this year by the end of the year. Um, I have a much smaller aperture of visibility into what’s going on with autonomous commerce. Can you, uh, describe the state of the market for us, um, demand, number of companies involved, consumer traction, just kind of define that for us and let us know how quickly it’s growing. I’m very curious.

Ben Seidl: 44:38 That’s a good question. I’ve actually admittedly not looked into kind of the aggregate because each one of these industries, uh, has a couple startups, namely in the drone space, you got Wing and, and Zipline and they don’t, you’d have to cobble together each one of their private reporting information, which is all at different timelines. Uh, so almost all these companies…

Nathan Parker: 45:00 Autonomous commerce are private. I think besides Serve Robotics is probably the only publicly traded one, and so I think it’s really early days for that reason. It’s not something that you can just cobble together public information from, you know, annual reports or 10-Ks and figure out what’s going on. You have to have kind of deep industry insider connections to kind of just get a grasp on who’s doing what. And so any information I have on that is not something I would want to share in public, but I think you can get a good sense of what’s happening by looking at those individual companies, you know, Coco in the sidewalk bot world and Serve, and if you follow each one of them, you get a taste of what they’re up to. And the overall summary for the industry would be all of them are growing, all of them are expanding, all of them are increasing their ambitions. And so there’s progress being made in each one of these small privately held companies, startups. But I think in aggregate, it’s still a very, very small industry, arguably almost doesn’t exist. It’s not taking any kind of notable market share from Uber Eats or DoorDash, I believe so.

Jason Calacanis: 46:31 Yeah, I read Serve Robotics’ earnings every quarter because they’re public and it’s always like, ‘We’re going from 50 to 100,’ and I’m like, ‘You get ‘em.’ And then I look at their market cap and it’s like $48. But I love that they’re public. I get to see what’s going on. Not everyone needs to be, you know, the OpenAI for sure.

Nathan Parker: 46:46 For sure. No, they’re fantastic operators. But I do think, I do think we’re incredibly early days on the commerce side. The ride-hailing side is of course quite mature. I mean, you can get those numbers as you said. There’s also something called robotaxitracker.com which is run by a really sharp kid out of UT Austin and his name is Ethan McKenna. And he’s actually got a, he got a nice robotaxi internship that he announced on X the other day, so he’ll be joining Tesla. But we work with him and he’s kind of producing the, I would say industry tracker for all of what’s going on. So you can see how many Tesla robotaxis are out there amongst Austin and SF Bay Area. You can see Waymo growth, you can see the ODDs as we talked about earlier, the geofenced service areas. Everything you want to know about the industry on autonomous ride-hailing is pretty much on that website.

Jason Calacanis: 47:50 Or, or if you want, you can go look and see what everyone’s betting on. I’m tracking this because I would like to see the Waymo Tesla competition be as as hardcore as possible because that… to lower prices faster out you know roll out and so forth but people are really bummed out about like the chances of Tesla actually expanding into Cali like the first half of this year and I don’t know I was surprised by this level of pessimism I thought they were going to be able to go faster and that’s a relatively small market over in Poly market but I just thought they would be already kind of trying to take away the Waymo crown in San Francisco Ben and yet

Ben Seidl: 48:24 Yeah I so did I actually um but when I put myself in the shoes of of the executive team there especially the the team working on robotaxi you’re talking about the introduction of a technology that’s going to completely transform the world the economy and society so if you you have if you hold such a powerful technology in your pocket that you’re internally testing and in some cases limited publicly testing in Austin it makes total sense to me why the rollout is slower than anticipated I do think they should be matching their comms to to those internal desires because clearly they don’t actually intend to or they’re hitting some type of roadblock they don’t intend to go as fast as what their public statements uh have laid out but you know if you were to nitpick that and say well this is disappointing and I I feel it’s a little bit disappointing as well but if you put yourself on their in their shoes I mean this is not something to take lightly and if you look back on the cruise thing all of us on this call on the operator side would be dramatically set back if Tesla were to have any significant issue when it comes to autonomy in particular Waymo or-

Jason Calacanis: 49:54 Except for Nathan wouldn’t Nathan then get like 10 times as much business?

Nathan Parker: 49:57 No that the industry the industry would be paused for a very significant time and it would be a winter for this industry so I when I look at it-

Jason Calacanis: 50:11 One one Cruise level crisis could do that still today even with all the momentum I thought things were much less fragile than they were back then just because so many people had-

Nathan Parker: 50:22 I’ll let Ming answer that but I would say if Tesla had one cruise level incident it would be a winter for 12 to 18 months.

Jason Calacanis: 50:25 Ming what’s your take on that on that uh estimate?

Ming Maa: 50:28 Let’s hope that never happens um I think the good thing in this industry is we have uh players that are very conservative about how they approach the regulators and how they approach the public and so I think we are in that public um trust building phase of the of the industry.

Jason Calacanis: 50:46 That blows my mind have you ever driven on a road with other people like humans have you seen what they do? I I just don’t understand why we hold robotaxis to this standard of they have to be literally Jesus Christ behind the wheel it’s that or it’s your-

Nathan Parker: 51:00 or 15-year-old cousin with a permit. Like I mean…

Jason Calacanis: 51:02 I completely agree.

Ben Seidl: 51:03 But but you gotta I mean once you start looking at this from a societal level, which is what has to be done in this industry now, because we’re not talking about does this technology work or do people want to use it? Both of those answers are yes, very loudly yes. Then the the next question to answer is well how is society going to adopt this, adapt to this? Those are really complicated questions that even us on this call are not able to kind of parse because every city, if you’ve been tracking kind of the response of a place like Boston or a place like New York or a place like Seattle, Portland Oregon, very anti automation, anti AI, anti autonomous vehicles, anti big tech, so we’re we’re about to enter into this kind of societal phase I would call it… where it’s less about does this technology work? Is it safe? Do people want to use it? Is it cheaper? Is it is it a good technology? Of course those things are all yes, but whether or not people, humans, want this at scale at this moment in time is a huge question mark and it’s not a resounding yes across the country and it’s not a resounding yes even across major metropolitan areas in the United States so that part of it to me is like the crux of how fast this industry is going to move or not is public acceptance and public perception and so if you look at what’s going on, if you look at the congressional, you know, testimony that the Waymo safety lead had to give and talked about the the remote operators and all the flack that they caught for that and politicians who are against this and citizens who are against this are looking for any small slip-up that they can point to to can this. And when and I don’t know if you ever you saw the I’m forgetting the name this cat, but a cat got hit by Waymo.

Jason Calacanis: 52:50 Oh yeah, we covered that on the show.

Ben Seidl: 52:51 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like San Francisco tried to ban Waymos over that. There was an entire army of people.

Ming Maa: 52:55 It was part of the mission.

Ben Seidl: 52:56 But those those people banded together and did a whole PR campaign, political campaign to try and get this and it got enough news that like, that’s just a cat.

Jason Calacanis: 53:00 KitKat, it was called KitKat.

Ben Seidl: 53:01 KitKat. So one but like, if you take that as a flashpoint and as an example of how hot-button this topic is, one cat, one cat can change the entire perception of this technology, which is wild to me.

Ming Maa: 53:11 I want to I want to hear’s the local coverage from Mission Local. I used to drink right around that area so I’m pretty familiar with it. RIP KitKat and if anyone has a pet they know how much this matters. I don’t mean to make light of it.

Ben Seidl: 53:22 Neither do I.

Ming Maa: 53:23 But I just read…

Ben Seidl: 54:00 I think I just rank cats below humans and so when we’re talking about overall safety, that’s where my focus is.

Jason Calacanis: 54:06 Ming, you were at Grab, um, during what we might call like the late ride-hailing boom years, if that makes sense. You were there from like 16 through 2023, I think?

Ming Maa: 54:18 Yeah, that’s about right. It certainly did not feel like the tail end, but certainly was well on its way.

Jason Calacanis: 54:25 Yeah, well, because I cover Uber… I didn’t try to say that I’m cool, but I got to go to like the Uber launch party in Chicago in like 2009 or something. So I was early to see this happen.

Ben Seidl: 54:37 That is cool.

Jason Calacanis: 54:38 Thank you. Um, it was fun to be young, let me say. Uh, but it seemed that the level of pushback to ride-hailing here in the States at least was much more vocal and virulent than what we’re seeing with autonomous vehicles and self-driving. I’m just curious if you could give kind of your more global perspective, given that Grab is, you know, based in Asia, um, about how the autonomous vehicle pushback from people compares to what we saw with ride-hailing in the preceding kind of generation of this area of technology.

Ming Maa: 55:17 So, it is a very… it’s a very interesting question. And I think I might step back, um, before we even talk about pushback and autonomy. I think one of the the conundrums that we all faced with ridesharing is that, you know, on the one hand it’s absolutely created a tremendous amount of value, a tremendous amount of good, you know, around the world, no question about it… better accessibility, affordability, mobility. Um, on the other hand though, the fundamental CVP for ridesharing hasn’t evolved. The customer value proposition hasn’t changed. I would argue the experience of opening up an app, ordering a car is largely exactly the same as it was five years ago. There’s more categories of cars, but by and large it’s the exact same experience. The only thing that has changed is pricing. Um, arguably it’s one of the few sectors in technology that’s been price inflationary because of rising labor costs. And compare that of course with most sectors of technology which become lower cost, more efficient, you know, over time. So at Grab, you know, we looked at autonomy as a way to fundamentally change that CVP. Um, and of course Singapore as you mentioned is a great market for autonomy. Everyone follows the rules, trip pricing is sufficiently robust to cover the cost of the vehicles. And so everything does make a lot of sense. Um, where we, and back to the safety point, prior to Waymos I would drive my kids to after-school activities probably four or five times a week. Uh, now I send my kids… school in a Waymo.

Jason Calacanis: 57:02 You live in the Bay Area for context.

Ming Maa: 57:04 Yes, in the Bay Area, in Palo Alto. And so now my kids are a little bit… find it a little bit cringe, you know, coming up to the school in a Waymo. But I feel fundamentally safer having my kids in a Waymo than…

Jason Calacanis: 57:17 Whoa, whoa, you can’t drop cultural pop culture knowledge like that and not tell us about that. Did you just say that Waymos are cringe?

Ming Maa: 57:22 No, my kids feel it’s a little bit cringe.

Jason Calacanis: 57:26 I know! But kids… kids are the future. The four of us are the past tense. Why is it… I would have thought arriving at school without your parents would be fundamentally cooler, because I remember my mom dropping me off and wanting to die. So what am I missing here, Ming?

Ming Maa: 57:45 No, the first time this happened, they took a ride in Waymo, I think they were a little bit self-conscious and a little bit… just self-conscious about the experience. Now, though, they’re more than happy. They take Waymos to and from school all the time. So I think the adoption and the acceptance is very, very high. And for me, it’s saved at least four or five trips, you know, during the weekdays. Um, so… so I do think autonomy is fundamentally changing the value proposition that consumers are experiencing, whether it’s better safety, whether it’s better privacy, and that will have an impact in how the regulators think about the adoption for AVs versus for ride-sharing.

Jason Calacanis: 58:18 Alright, before we let you fine gentlemen go, we’ve even been really talking about mostly the United States here from the safety perspective, from a company perspective, from a, you know, self-driving provider perspective. Nathan, what can you tell us about safety testing for AVs around the world? Ben has scared me with this idea that we are one crisis away from losing a whole year’s progress in the industry. Is that something that would happen globally or are the safety standards that you’re helping to get people to here in the United States as stringent in markets like MENA, Europe, across Asia? Because self-driving’s popping up pretty much everywhere there’s a developed economy.

Nathan Parker: 58:53 Yeah, well what we… well what we see is a lot of the standards in Europe are certainly pretty well-defined and continuing to evolve. We… from our vantage point, a lot of the development, a lot of the progress is happening in the United States and some of the other markets are watching what’s going on. I… we don’t spend a ton of time in the Asian market, so I, you know, my bias is probably somewhat of where we’re playing. So, um… Uh… we’ll have to see. I don’t necessarily have a strong opinion on, you know, the standards and how companies in Asia are testing their platforms today.

Jason Calacanis: 59:45 Leave me with a little nugget about other places looking at the U.S. How far ahead of other markets are we, and is there something that we’re doing particularly well that other markets are struggling to replicate or best?

Ming Maa: 1:00:00 …tory environment and how it’s a bit of a patchwork across the state. I would say in some other markets they don’t even have that.

Nathan Parker: 1:00:07 So even though like a lot of the the ecosystem I think would prefer to have a federal kind of guidance on how these systems should be defined safe and you know what’s acceptable, the fact that there is state laws that define that I think is a plus. So I think it’s over 40 states currently allow operation and testing on public roads, which allows these companies that we’ve all been talking about to really put their platforms in play. So it’s not just, you know, you’re at a test range spending countless hours, they’re actually operating in a meaningful way in the markets they’re trying to pursue. So there’s, I think that in and of itself provides a real advantage for the companies that are operating in the US.

Jason Calacanis: 1:00:57 Speaking about Congress, there’s been some movement towards doing something similar to AI legislation by saying at the federal level we’ll set a standard and then states cannot supersede or get in the way of kind of the federal national standard. Do you think that’s the right way to approach autonomous vehicle regulation or are you content with states and the federal government each getting to kind of play a role?

Nathan Parker: 1:01:23 I think it’s interesting on how that impacts the different verticals. So if you think about robotaxis, they could probably get away state by state in some some capacity. If you think about over-the-road trucking, that’s going to be problematic because the trucks are going to go state to state.

Jason Calacanis: 1:01:39 Interstate commerce.

Nathan Parker: 1:01:40 Exactly, it’s you pull interstate commerce into play. So at the federal level it’s not just a nice to have, it’s actually something that’s going to be required. Now, where a lot of the autonomous trucking companies are operating, it’s in the sunbelt, a lot of those states have kind of put consistent regulations in place. But I mean, I think it makes sense to have some type of federal guidance that’s consistent for something as as impactful as the technology that we’re talking about.

Jason Calacanis: 1:02:05 Alright Ben, really quickly, same question to you, state level AV regs or federal standard? And then also are the are the US regulations holding back startups like Autolane from expanding?

Ben Seidl: 1:02:17 Uh, I mean federal regulation is absolutely necessary. There there’s no way this industry can move forward in the way that it currently is situated. So uh with the NHTSA meetings, you know, earlier this week, I think that was a really good demonstration of sincerity from the federal government to to do something on this front. Um so we’re really hoping for some type of federal preemption or some type of federal regulation that uh that we can build against uh that I think everybody every other AV company is also hoping for that. So uh I actually think strangely enough that even though it’s patchwork and even though it’s a little bit… herky-jerky for the industry today and has been for the last couple years, it’s still a better regulatory environment and a more open and innovative regulatory environment than most other countries. So, uh, you know, I’m pretty bullish.

Jason Calacanis: 1:03:13 So more work to do, but we’re not super far behind other markets.

Nathan Parker: 1:03:16 If you look at Europe and you look at, even if you look at China, the way that they they do their licensing and data collection of autonomous vehicles. And then you look at what Europe’s done, which is essentially very little, outside of the UK, just this year started to kind of make some progress on on that, uh, you know, the US is obviously the kind of leader here in pushing regulation to allow this type of innovation to occur and I think this week’s NHTSA event really shines light on that effort. So I’m proud, you know, of the work that we’ve done as a country on this on this front and hope it continues because that’s what allows this, uh, this technology to blossom. We we have to have more acceptance of it being okay to do and then comparing that to standards that are set and that everyone has the same rules and we can we can move faster.

Jason Calacanis: 1:04:09 Yeah, maybe if we had the federal standards, then we wouldn’t be risking a 12 to 18-month winter in self-driving if there was a crisis because we would have already put in place the rules for it.

Nathan Parker: 1:04:14 True.

Jason Calacanis: 1:04:15 All right, Ming, last question of the day goes to you. I’m very curious about the expansion rate of fleets. I was a little surprised to learn how few cars are part of these autonomous fleets in different cities. So, two questions: One, after an operator opens up in a city, say Austin, how quickly does their fleet grow? And by the end of this year, how many self-driving cars are operating in the United States?

Ming Maa: 1:04:25 I wish I had a crystal ball. I think rather than talking about the growth, I would talk about the rate limiters to growth. And I think the the largest rate limiter today is the number of vehicles that are available for, for autonomy. And so, we’re seeing the supply chains become much more mature, both for EV batteries as well as other components that are quite critical. The maturity of that supply chain will only get better as volumes continue to increase and as scale manufacturing gets, gets larger and larger. You’ll see the unit economics become, you know, much better over time. So ultimately we’re waiting for the vehicles to get into market. And then the second rate limiter is around the infrastructure and being able to work with the regulators, with the utilities in order to provision the amount of power to light up every city that we operate in.

Jason Calacanis: 1:05:35 Who makes more money in a fully developed and mature self-driving market: the fleet operator or the company that designed the software that powers the self-driving?

Ming Maa: 1:05:45 Another great question. What I would do is I might step back a little bit. So when you think about the unit economics for ride-sharing, typically that’s very focused on a per-ride, per-ride how much do you make and how much do you…

Nathan Parker: 1:06:00 How much do you spend on incentives versus the ride value? For autonomy, we think about it very differently. We think about a five-year total cost to serve. So assuming that the AV can provide services for five years, what is the total cost of owning, operating and providing services to the public? And that’s very unique if you think about it from how traditional ride sharing is analyzed. With autonomy, the key to understand is that when you look over the total five years, the cost of the vehicle is roughly somewhere between 30 to 40% of that total pie. The remaining 60 to 70% is everything that’s required to get the vehicle onto the road. So think about all of the infrastructure costs, the insurance costs, maintenance, charging, cleaning. Now, the costs of the vehicles of course will decline over time as we get scale economies. But what the industry really needs to focus on is really laser honing on that 60 to 70% of the total TCS in order to make AVs commercially successful.

Jason Calacanis: 1:07:17 TCS is total cost of service?

Nathan Parker: 1:07:19 Total cost to serve. That’s right.

Jason Calacanis: 1:07:21 All right. Well, that’s a really polite way of saying you’re not going to answer the question. I’m going to go ahead and say that you’re going to make as much money as Waymo because I bet you there’s a lot of work that you’re going to do that has nice margins attached to it. Anyways, my friends, this has been so much fun. I have to let you go. I could pester you with questions all day long. But Ben from Autolane, thank you. Ming from Move, Nathan from Edgecase. You guys have been real sports. I appreciate it. Just quickly, where can people find your companies online and is there a job you’re looking to hire for that you want to shout out into the audience here? And we’ll go around here. So Nathan, you’re first.

Nathan Parker: 1:07:51 Yeah, edgecase.ai. We’re building out our platform and looking for four deployed engineers. So anyone that wants to get close to customers and build out the platform to help solve their problems, reach out.

Jason Calacanis: 1:08:04 Awesome. Thank you. Ben, you’re next.

Ben Seidl: 1:08:06 Yeah, our website is goautolane.com and we’re hiring for all roles at this point. So if you’re talented and want to be a part of building autonomous commerce, hit me up either on LinkedIn or ben@goautolane.com.

Jason Calacanis: 1:08:18 Thank you. And Ming, last last plug goes to you, my friend.

Ming Maa: 1:08:22 Thank you. Move.io, two O’s. We’re hiring across the board in almost every single function. So if you love operations and scaling autonomy, then please, please hit us up.

Jason Calacanis: 1:08:34 All right, everybody. This has been Twist. We’re back on Friday. We’ll see you then. Bye.