Episode 272 | Autonomy Markets: Uber’s Autonomy Push, Hesai’s Make-or-Break Moment, NVIDIA’s Big Plans

This week on Autonomy Markets, Grayson Brulte and Walter Piecyk discuss Walt’s recent trip to San Francisco, where he observed more aggressive driving from Waymo vehicles and spotted a FasTrak transponder—hinting that the great highway unlock is imminent.In the markets, Aurora and Lyft reported earnings, with Aurora’s market cap soaring to $17 billion—triple Lyft’s $5 billion. On its earnings call, Aurora emphasized its driver-out readiness and their hardware kit approach, mirroring Kodiak’s SensorPods. If hardware kits are the future of autonomy, power could shift from OEMs to autonomous driving developers, opening new market opportunities and validating Kodiak’s OEM-agnostic strategy.And then there’s NVIDIA. What if they acquired an autonomous driving developer and vertically integrated? How would the market respond? What would it mean for chip sales? As fragmentation grows in the autonomous vehicle market, so does Uber’s advantage. Opportunity abounds.Episode Chapters0:00 Walt’s San Francisco Trip1:54 Hesai LiDAR6:19 Waymo’s More Assertive Driving7:37 Should we be Concerned about Zoox?13:08 Aurora Earnings16:43 Autonomous Driving Hardware Kits21:43 Should NVIDIA Vertically Integrate an Autonomous Driving Stack?26:24 Nuro’s Licensing Opportunity30:29 Uber’s Next Autonomy Partner—May Mobility?33:50 Autonomous Vehicle Fleet Management & Financing38:00 DoorDash’s Autonomous Delivery Ambitions40:57 Next WeekRecorded on Saturday, February 15, 2025--------About The Road to AutonomyThe Road to Autonomy® is a leading source of data, insight and commentary on autonomous vehicles/trucks and the emerging autonomy economy™.Sign up for This Week in The Autonomy Economy newsletter: https://www.roadtoautonomy.com/autonomy-economy/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.