AV Funding Tripled to $21B, China Freezes Robotaxi Permits, Waymo goes Portland
Meanwhile, Uber diversifies the AV Fleet Management
👋 Welcome back everyone,
Another busy week. We start with a macro overview, AV funding hit a record in Q1 and Goldman put fresh numbers on the 2035 robotaxi market. From there, we walk through this week’s expansion and partnership announcements out of the US, including a significant Uber-Hertz deal on the fleet operations side. Then over to China, where Auto China 2026 produced ambitious scaling announcements and Beijing simultaneously froze new L4 permits after the Wuhan outage we covered in CW14.
Let’s go.
⏱️ ~4900 words, 22 minute read
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AV Funding Tripled, $415B Robotaxi Market by 2035, and What Happened in the US This Week
The macro frame: $21.4B raised YTD
I want to start this week’s edition with a short macro overview before diving into what happened this week.
Autonomous vehicle startups raised $21.4 billion across 34 deals through April 15, according to Crunchbase data. That is up 262% versus the $5.9 billion raised across 99 deals in all of 2025.
Three quarters of the total came from a single round. Waymo's $16 billion Series D in February at a $126 billion valuation, co-led by Alphabet, Dragoneer, DST Global, and Sequoia Capital. Wayve raised $1.3 billion at an $8.6 billion valuation, backed by Balderton, Eclipse, and SoftBank Vision Fund. Waabi raised $750M Series C, plus a $250M milestone commitment from Uber tied to a robotaxi deployment.
Let’s look at the three-year pattern:
2024: $12.1B across 127 deals.
2025: $5.9B across 99 deals.
2026 YTD: $21.4B across 34 deals.
The market collapsed in 2025. The 2026 rebound is bigger than 2024, but spread across almost a quarter of the deals.
The shape of the market matters as much as the size. Capital is concentrating at the top, not spreading. Waymo, Wayve, Waabi, and a handful of others capture most of the dollars while deal count fell year over year.
This signals two things. First, this isn’t research money anymore. The rounds going through are for companies close enough to commercial deployment that the technology is reaching paying riders and shippers. Second, investors have stopped spreading capital across dozens of startups. They’re concentrating billions into the small group they expect to dominate the market.
Let’s have a look at the market opportunity.
Goldman’s research arm filled in the long-term sizing this week. Global robotaxi market roughly $415 billion by 2035. US robotaxi market projected at $19 billion in 2030, up sharply from a prior $7 billion estimate. 2035 is estimated to be $48 billion.
Source: Goldman Sachs
Global commercial AV robotaxi fleet from about 7,000 vehicles last year to 1 million by 2030 and around 6 million by 2035.
Source: Goldman Sachs
Gross margins for vertically integrated operators in a 30% to 50% range, implying about $150 billion in global gross profit by 2035. The full AV sector, including hardware, software, services, consumer-vehicle autonomy, AV trucking, and delivery robots, projected at roughly $2 trillion total industry revenue by 2035.
That is the size of the prize the market is now pricing in. The reality this week is that scaling toward those numbers is harder than the forecasts suggest.
Uber diversifies fleet operations: Hertz launches Oro Mobility
Hertz is Uber's new fleet partner for the Lucid Gravity robotaxi service. Day-to-day asset management, charging, maintenance, repairs, cleaning, depot staffing, all through a newly established Hertz affiliate called Oro Mobility. SF Bay Area launch later this year. Lucid Gravity SUVs running Nuro's L4 stack. The two companies will explore expansion in 2027.
The market priced it; Hertz's stock was up roughly 18% on the announcement.
The deeper strategic move is diversification, and the pattern is consistent with how Uber has built its AV book on the technology side. On the technology side, Uber has not picked one autonomy provider. It has spread bets across Waymo, Nuro, Wayve, MOIA, May Mobility, Motional, Pony.ai, Zoox, Avride, WeRide, and more.
Uber's AV fleet operations were largely consolidated under Avomo, the Moove Cars subsidiary running Uber's Waymo robotaxi operations in Austin and Atlanta. Uber holds roughly 30% of Moove Cars and has committed up to $185 million through 2029. With this week's announcement, Avomo continues to handle the Waymo-platform business, but Oro Mobility takes on the Lucid + Nuro platform. Two operators across two distinct AV technology stacks.
That is a deliberate decision to prevent any single fleet operator from sitting on a chokepoint between Uber and its AV partners.
The competitive map across the operator layer is looking increasingly interesting, and the dimensions split cleanly.
Hertz/Oro brings a strong public-market capital access and an existing 500,000-plus vehicle global footprint across 160-plus countries that needs reconfiguration rather than greenfield buildout. Moove.io has roughly $1.2 billion in debt for fleet expansion. Avomo has a tested operating record on the Waymo stack and European pedigree but a narrowed path now that the Uber relationship is no longer exclusive. Avis got the Waymo Dallas partnership and is the closest direct competitor to Hertz in terms of operating model. Flexdrive sits inside Lyft and continues to argue that the integrated demand-plus-operations model is cleaner than Uber's multi-sourced approach.
What will be interesting to watch closely over the next few months is whether Oro wins additional Uber cities beyond SF in 2026, whether any non-Uber AV stack signs Oro for fleet operations, which would shift Oro from "Uber's partner" to "multi-platform operator" and whether Avis responds with a major fleet partnership announcement.
But one thing is getting increasingly clear: the conversation is now shifting to who owns the operations layer that supports all the autonomous technology providers. For most of the past decade, the constraint was on the software side, the self-driving technology itself.
Can the vehicle navigate dense urban environments? What about handling bad weather? Do you trust the technology enough to let it ferry passengers?
Those questions are now substantially answered. Waymo has driven more than 200 million fully autonomous miles across 10 cities. The software works. The vehicles work. The question has shifted from "can it drive" to "how do you deploy this at scale, across dozens of cities, reliably, safely, and profitably.
It is about physical infrastructure and local operations. That is the layer Uber addressed this week with the Hertz partnership
Waymo starts manual driving in Portland
Waymo announced on April 28 that it has begun manually driving its vehicles through Portland streets to map and learn the city. Bridges, downtown corridors, neighborhood streets, the bustling rain-slicked corridors. The company said it is working with state and city officials to create a regulatory pathway. Oregon’s House Bill 4085, which would have established a state-level framework for autonomous vehicle deployment, did not pass before the legislative session ended.
Tesla unsupervised fleet edges off single digits
Tesla’s unsupervised Robotaxi fleet has grown to 25 cumulative vehicles across Austin, Dallas, and Houston by the end of April, according to data from the Robotaxi Tracker. Austin has 19 unspervised vehicles, Dallas and Houston both have 3. The fleet was in single digits in January and essentially flatlined for several months. The expansion into Dallas and Houston is what unlocked the recent additions. Reported utilization is below 30%, far from the level required for viable ride-hailing economics.
Source: Robotaxi Tracker
Tesla’s Bay Area fleet exists, but those vehicles are supervised, not unsupervised. Counting the Bay Area in the total fleet size sits at 165 vehicles.
Source: Robotaxi Tracker
For context, Waymo runs approximately 3,000 robotaxis across 10 US cities and completes more than 500,000 paid trips per week. So when comparing scaled driverless deployments, the gap is roughly 120x in vehicle count and several orders of magnitude in paid trips.
This is the first real sign of unsupervised scaling at Tesla, and that matters. But it does not change the relative position.
Scale exposes operational gaps
The Tesla number is small enough that operational issues stay invisible. The Waymo number is large enough that they do not. That is what made the next two stories possible.
First responders say Waymos are getting worse
Wired published a report this week based on a private March meeting between first responder leaders and NHTSA officials. The takeaway was direct. Officials from San Francisco and Austin told federal regulators that Waymo’s performance is regressing. San Francisco’s emergency management executive director told NHTSA officials that they were seeing “backsliding of some things that had improved upon.” In Austin, first responders said Waymos are freezing up and failing to recognize officers’ hand signals.
This is exactly the kind of reporting that should not be sensationalized but also should not be ignored. We covered the SF blackout incident in CW10 and the Markey investigation findings in CW14. Fleet scaling without proportional investment in failure-mode resilience and emergency-response coordination produces real friction with cities. First responders are not the marginal stakeholder anymore. They are now the loudest voice in the regulatory conversation, and they are talking directly to NHTSA.
California AB 1777: police can now ticket driverless cars
The regulatory response is already arriving. Per SFGate and the SF Standard, California passed AB 1777, authored by former state Assemblymember Philip Ting (D-San Francisco), which lets law enforcement issue moving violation tickets to fully autonomous vehicles starting later in 2026. Until now, officers could only cite driverless vehicles for parking offenses, because state traffic laws assumed a human driver. AB 1777 closes that gap. The DMV will use “notices of autonomous vehicle noncompliance” to assess permitting and track safety.
The new requirements go further than ticketing. Autonomous vehicle companies must respond to first responder calls within 30 seconds. Local emergency officials are authorized to issue electronic geofencing directives to clear vehicles from active emergency zones. Companies have until summer 2026 to be in compliance with the communication standards.
The DMV bundled a separate but related package of rules adopted on April 28. Two pieces matter for the strategic picture. First, mileage thresholds. Under the new framework, manufacturers must complete 50,000 miles of testing for light-duty AVs and 500,000 miles for heavy-duty AVs at each phase of validation. That changes the cost and timeline calculus for any operator trying to enter or scale in California. Second, the DMV lifted the longstanding ban on operating AVs over 10,001 lbs. California is now open to autonomous freight, which had previously been a Texas-and-Arizona story. Aurora, Kodiak, Torc, Bot Auto, Gatik, and PlusAI all have a new and meaningful market.
The DMV also modernized data reporting. The proposal replaces the disengagement-report metric with new categories. Notices of noncompliance issued by law enforcement, dynamic-driving-task system failures during drivered testing and deployment, vehicle immobilizations during driverless testing and deployment, hard-braking events, and detailed vehicle-miles-traveled data.
AB 1777 plus the new DMV rules plus the Wired piece form a coherent arc. First responders surfaced the operational problem, federal regulators got direct feedback, and California is writing the answer into law on three fronts at once. Enforcement, performance disclosure, and capability gating through the new mileage thresholds.
What this all means
We are seeing further expansion this week. Waymo started manual mapping in Portland. Tesla nudged its unsupervised fleet from single digits to 25 vehicles, small in absolute terms but the first real sign of a ramp after months of flatlining. Uber continues to widen its partner network, this time on the fleet management side, and has onboarded a significant player in Hertz and the Oro Mobility affiliate. That one is worth watching closely. It signals that Uber is diversifying operations the same way it diversifies autonomy stacks.
On the regulatory side, AB 1777 plus the new California DMV rules are the most significant operating-environment shift, and they are a direct response to the operational gaps the Wired piece exposed.
🔗 Crunchbase News / Goldman Sachs / TechCrunch / AVFleetTech / Waymo / Portland Tribune / Electrek / Wired / SFGate
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🇨🇳 CHINA CORNER: BEIJING FREEZES NEW PERMITS, FORCING THE OVERSEAS PIVOT
Geely unveils the EVA Cab at Auto China 2026
Geely Auto Group, together with AFARI Technology and Caocao Mobility, unveiled what they are calling China’s first purpose-built robotaxi at the opening day of the Beijing Auto Show. The EVA Cab. No steering wheel, designed from scratch as an L4 autonomous vehicle.
Source: drive.com
The hardware specs: A 2,160-line digital LiDAR system with 25.92 million points per second imaging capability and detection up to 600 meters. A 196-billion-parameter AI model running on a high-performance computing platform delivering 1,400 TOPS. The reaction time is quoted at 4 milliseconds. The cabin has been redesigned without enclosed door pockets to reduce passenger left-behind incidents.
The deployment plan matters more than the specs. Mass production starts in 2027 through a partnership with Caocao Mobility, which is Geely's existing ride-hail platform. First markets are Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, and five mainland Chinese cities, with production, deliveries, and deployment happening "almost simultaneously." The fleet target is 100,000 autonomous vehicles by 2030. Geely positioned the EVA Cab explicitly as the Chinese answer to Tesla's Cybercab.
WeRide and Lenovo commit to 200,000 AVs over five years
Also at Auto China 2026, WeRide and Lenovo announced a deepened partnership to deploy 200,000 autonomous vehicles globally over the next five years. Robotaxis, robobuses, robosanitation vehicles. (For readers who want the full picture on WeRide’s multi-product strategy, the WeRide deep dive in our archive is the right reference.)
The Lenovo piece is where the unit economics get interesting. The two companies jointly launched the HPC 3.0 high-performance computing platform in July 2025, built on Lenovo’s L4 autonomous driving domain controller AD1, powered by NVIDIA’s DRIVE AGX Thor system-on-chip, delivering over 2,000 TOPS of AI computing. The HPC 3.0 platform reduces autonomous driving suite cost by 50% and lowers total cost of ownership by 84% over the lifecycle compared to HPC 2.0.
200,000 vehicles make an impressive headline, but the headline number deserves more scrutiny than most reporting has given it. By March 2026, WeRide’s total fleet had grown to 2,113 vehicles with 1,125 robotaxis. Going from 2,113 to 200,000 in five years is a roughly 95x ramp and implies production of roughly 40,000 units per year. The Capex for direct fleet ownership at that volume would sit at an estimated $10 billion, if we assume roughly $50,000 per vehicle. Other industry observers mentioned that WeRide's market cap, debt capacity, and asset base are not in that range. As a balance-sheet expansion, the numbers do not pencil out. And that’s correct in my view.
The way the math could work is through WeRide's asset-light international model.
As highlighted in our WeRide Deep Dive, in China, WeRide has historically owned and operated most of the robotaxi fleet through its WeRide Go platform, taking ride fares directly and managing fleet operations.
Internationally, WeRide pursues a platform-partnership model. It sells vehicles and licenses its autonomous driving system (”virtual driver”) while ride-hailing players like Uber provide demand aggregation and fleet operators handle day-to-day vehicle management. International revenue comes from three sources:
(1) revenue share from ride fares,
(2) annual licensing fees, and
(3) sale of the vehicle itself.
This is a higher-margin structure. Overseas gross margins run close to 50%, compared to roughly 20-25% domestically, where promotional pricing compresses margins.
However, China is moving toward asset-light too. On the Q3 2025 earnings call, management signaled that the domestic model would increasingly shift toward third-party fleet partnerships rather than self-owned fleets, mirroring the international structure. By the Q4 2025 call, Jennifer Li confirmed that the asset-light model is now the strategy globally, not just overseas.
Shifting the CAPEX burden to fleet partners frees capital for R&D and international expansion. The operators with the operating capacity and regional permits to absorb meaningful volume are the likes of Uber, Tawasul, and Grab. None of these partners was named in the announcement.
So, without binding offtake commitments from named counterparties, the 200,000-vehicle figure is strategic guidance that shows WeRide’s ambition, not a production commitment. WeRide is likely using the headline as a competitive signal to Baidu, Waymo, and the rest of the field.
Worth flagging: the 100,000 vehicles for Geely by 2030 is also aspirational guidance. The structural difference is what justifies giving the WeRide target more granular scrutiny in my point of view. Geely brings actual auto manufacturing scale, Caocao as a captive demand partner inside the same corporate group, and a publicly listed parent with substantial existing automotive revenue underwriting the bet. WeRide does not own production capacity and depends on third-party fleet operators absorbing the capex. But both numbers should be tracked as direction. Both have a distance to delivery.
Baidu’s Apollo Go vehicles arrive in London
The first Baidu Apollo Go RT6 robotaxis have physically arrived in the UK ahead of the Lyft pilot launch. Lyft CEO David Risher signaled the arrival publicly.
Source: LinkedIn/David Risher
The vehicles are now on UK soil. Lyft plans to launch commercial service in London before the end of 2026. Uber is running a parallel pilot.
Waymo is also in London with its own consumer app, hands-off operation, around 100 Jaguar I-Pace vehicles across a 100-square-mile area. London is now the first city outside the US where Waymo, Baidu, Wayve and Uber and Lyft are all operating or preparing to operate at the same time. That is a competitive density we have not seen anywhere else.
Cost advantage drives the overseas push
Geely producing at scale through Caocao, WeRide cutting compute and TCO costs by half through Lenovo, Baidu shipping RT6 vehicles into the UK. The thread is cost. Per SCMP, James Peng, founder and CEO of Pony AI, was direct on the opening day of the Beijing Auto Show. “We will push China’s autonomous driving technology to every corner of the world with overwhelming cost competitiveness.” This is no longer the implicit narrative that I talked about for months in this newsletter. It is the stated playbook.
Beijing freezes new L4 permits
That stated playbook just got a regulatory accelerant from Beijing. Per Bloomberg, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, together with the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Transportation, convened a meeting earlier this month and suspended issuing new licenses for autonomous vehicles. The suspension prevents self-driving companies from adding new robotaxis to their fleets, starting new test projects, or expanding to new cities. Duration of the freeze is not yet known.
The trigger was the Baidu Wuhan outage from CW14. On March 31, more than 100 Apollo Go robotaxis stalled on Wuhan city streets. Local police attributed it to a systems fault. Baidu has not commented publicly on the cause. Regulators called for local governments to conduct full self-reviews and enhance safety monitoring to prevent similar incidents. Baidu’s Wuhan operations have been suspended pending investigation. This is the second time in 18 months that Chinese regulators have paused permits because of a Baidu-related incident. The first freeze in late 2024 was triggered by labor protests over taxi-driver displacement.
The market reaction was immediate. Baidu shares fell 2.8% in Hong Kong trading on Wednesday. Pony.ai dropped 5.5%, WeRide tumbled 4.7%. Pony AI said its services in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen are operating normally and that preparation for Changsha and Hangzhou is progressing as planned. WeRide said it supported authorities’ efforts to ensure the highest safety standards.
In CW14, I wrote that "Baidu Wuhan incident will attract regulatory scrutiny and could slow highway deployment approvals in Chinese cities." That call was directionally right but conservative. The actual outcome is broader. A national-level pause on new L4 permits affecting every major Chinese operator, not just highway approvals.
The overseas pivot accelerates
With domestic expansion blocked at least temporarily, the overseas playbook becomes the only available growth lever. WeRide-Lenovo’s 200,000-vehicle commitment is global, not Chinese-only. Geely’s EVA Cab is launching in Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong. Baidu is shipping vehicles to London. Didi entered the UAE in CW16 alongside WeRide and Pony.ai.
With domestic expansion frozen, Chinese operators have an even stronger commercial reason to chase those markets. The Middle East remains the only real wildcard. Regional conflict creates operational risk that no AV operator wants. But so far, every major Chinese operator has stayed committed.
What this means
The Wuhan outage from CW14 came back this week as a regulatory wall. The geographic strategy across Chinese AV operators is already responding. Geely sending the EVA Cab to Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong, WeRide locking in Lenovo for what it calls a 200,000-vehicle global rollout, Baidu's RT6 vehicles physically in London. With domestic expansion blocked, the overseas-first playbook is no longer a hedge. It is the path. Chinese AV companies are going to compete on cost in every overseas market, and the regulatory freeze at home just accelerated the timeline.
🔗 Reuters / Road to Autonomy / InsideEVs / drive.com.au / electrive / Zag Daily / Bloomberg / SCMP
💡 Quick Takes
BOT AUTO COMPLETES FIRST FULLY HUMANLESS COMMERCIAL TRUCKLOAD
Houston-based Bot Auto completed the first US commercial freight shipment without a human in the cab, no remote operator, no in-cab observer. The run departed Riggy’s Truck Parking in northeast Houston at 1:16 a.m. CT on April 29 and arrived at Safe Stop in Hutchins, just south of Dallas, at 4:57 a.m. The 231-mile lane was completed in under four hours, at a cost per mile already below what a human driver would cost on the same route. The broker partner is Ryan Transportation. Bot Auto has 12 retrofitted Freightliner tractors, 25-plus contracted customers, $40 million raised, 80 employees.
HIRSCHBACH SIGNS NON-BINDING MOU FOR 500 AURORA AUTONOMOUS TRUCKS
Hirschbach Motor Lines signed a non-binding MoU with Aurora to scale its autonomous truck fleet to 500 trucks, with deliveries beginning in 2027. This is the largest publicly announced AV trucking commitment to date. The structure is interesting. Hirschbach uses Aurora’s Driver-as-a-Service model, owning the trucks while subscribing to Aurora’s autonomy stack. That gives Hirschbach asset control while letting Aurora run a capital-efficient, high-margin software business. To date, Aurora has logged more than 800,000 miles and hauled over 2,000 loads for Hirschbach. The carrier is active on Aurora’s Fort Worth-to-Phoenix lane, a roughly 1,000-mile coast-to-coast refrigerated corridor.
ROCSYS LAUNCHES MULTI-BAY ROBOTAXI CHARGING, RAISES $13M
Dutch hands-free charging startup Rocsys unveiled the M1, the first multi-bay hands-free charging solution for robotaxi fleets. A single robotic arm slides along an overhead rail to serve up to 10 bays, with a 99.9%-plus plug-in success rate and full interoperability across EVs, chargers, and connector types. The system is in pilot deployment now, with large-scale rollout across thousands of bays in North America and Europe planned for 2027. In a 50-bay depot, Rocsys projects up to 75% higher operational efficiency from existing staff and up to $1.7 million in annual savings. Alongside the launch, Rocsys raised a $13 million Series A extension led by Capricorn Partners, with participation from Scania Invest, Forward.One, SEB Greentech Venture Capital, and Graduate Ventures, bringing total funding to $56 million.
SCOUT AI RAISES $100M SERIES A
Silicon Valley-based Scout AI announced an oversubscribed $100 million Series A on April 29. The round was co-led by Align Ventures and Draper Associates, with participation from Decisive Point, Booz Allen Ventures, BVVC, and others. Scout AI is building Fury, a foundation model for unmanned warfare designed to translate commander intent into coordinated autonomous action across mixed fleets in air, land, sea, and space.
FORTERRA AND POLARIS DEBUT MESA AUTONOMOUS CASEVAC VEHICLE
Forterra and Polaris debuted the MESA at Modern Day Marine this week. It is an autonomous ground vehicle for casualty evacuation and last-tactical-mile logistics. The base is a modified Polaris Ranger XD 1500, integrated directly on the OEM production line rather than as an aftermarket modification. Forterra’s AutoDrive autonomy stack handles navigation, and the Vektor communications layer is designed to operate in low-bandwidth environments where cellular and satcom links are degraded. The platform supports up to 2,000 lbs of interchangeable payload using an L-track flat deck. The vehicle is positioned for the area between forward operating units and the front lines, where supplies, equipment, and personnel need to move under adversarial conditions.
HEIDELBERG MATERIALS EXPANDS AUTONOMOUS HAULAGE WITH PRONTO AND APPLIED INTUITION
Heidelberg Materials announced two parallel autonomous haulage expansions this week, one with Pronto and one with Applied Intuition. Pronto will deploy its OEM-agnostic Autonomous Haulage System at two new Heidelberg sites in 2026, the Mitchell, Indiana facility and the Servtex, Texas quarry. This builds on the successful pilot at Lake Bridgeport, Texas, which became North America’s first fully autonomous mixed-fleet quarry, integrating Caterpillar 775G and Komatsu HD605 trucks under one system. Applied Intuition will deploy its Self-Driving System for Construction at Heidelberg Materials’ Clarence Sands site in Australia, with full onboard perception and decision-making that operates without constant connectivity. Heidelberg Materials targets approximately 30 autonomous vehicles in 2026 and more than 100 by end of 2028.
ZELOSTECH DEEPENS SINGPOST PARTNERSHIP FOR PUBLIC ROAD AV LOGISTICS
Zelostech, a Chinese autonomous logistics company described as the world’s largest RoboVan operator, signed an expanded MoU with Singapore Post (SingPost) to accelerate fully driverless public-road deployment in Singapore. The two companies have been operating together since December 2025 in trials at SingPost’s Regional eCommerce Logistics Hub. The new MoU covers public-road deployment, autonomous fleet operations, distribution business development, and training for SingPost operational teams in fleet monitoring and maintenance. SingPost is working with Singapore authorities to progress from closed-environment to driverless public-road operations.
🔗 SingPost
BOSCH BEGINS HARDWARE DELIVERIES TO KODIAK FOR SCALED AUTONOMOUS TRUCK PRODUCTION
Bosch has started delivering critical hardware components to Kodiak as part of the strategic collaboration the two announced in January 2026. Kodiak is now actively testing camera samples and has completed early prototype sensor integrations into its proprietary SensorPod modules, the hardware that houses Kodiak’s autonomous-driving sensors. Vehicle actuation components from Bosch are also under evaluation. The combined platform is being engineered as production-grade and redundant, designed for high-volume deployment of trucks running the Kodiak Driver.
PORTUGAL APPROVES AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE TESTING ON PUBLIC ROADS
Portugal’s government approved a decree-law authorizing tests of autonomous vehicles on public roads, making it one of a limited number of European countries to establish a legal framework for such trials. The measure aims to attract foreign investment and promote innovation in the autonomous mobility sector, the government said. The legislation sets out licensing requirements for drivers, system operators, and vehicles, with strict safety standards as a prerequisite for autonomous vehicles operating on public roads.
🔗 Xinhua
🎧 Autonomy Insiders
In Episode 8 of Autonomy Insiders, I sat down with Roy Uhlmann, CEO of MOTOR Ai to unpack what it actually takes to build a sovereign European AV company, why the EU’s strict regulatory process is a moat rather than a drag, and why no company in the world (not even Waymo) has a type-approved Level 4 vehicle yet.
📚 Worth Reading/Listening
Harry Campbell: Keep On Rolling: Electrifying, Scaling & Automating The Vehicles of Tomorrow (Curbivore 2026)
🔗 The Driverless Digest
📊 Weekly Performance
Note: Stock performance data as of May 2nd, 2026. Past performance does not indicate future returns.
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