Autonomy Insiders

Waymo now pays riders to combine a robotaxi with the bus or train. Is that real integration with public transit, or a smart way to win over transit riders?

Dr. Henriette Cornet has worked on both sides of this question. She led automated mobility at UITP, the global public transport association, coordinated SHOW, the EU-funded project that put automated vehicles on the road in cities across Europe, and designed autonomous public transport in Singapore. Today she runs Urban Innovate in San Francisco, advises cities and transit agencies and teaches at the University of San Francisco.

First, the mechanics. Henriette explains how Waymo's transit rewards program works with Visa, what changed since the earlier station credit pilot, who the Waymo Cash reward really helps, and why physical access to stations, like Waymo's staging spaces at Caltrain, may matter more than the $2.85.

Then the big question: are robotaxis and public transit partners or rivals? Henriette explains why road capacity, not price, sets the limit, what data would prove that robotaxis feed transit rather than replace it, and what her research on rider sentiment found about privacy, safety and having other people around.

Finally, the decisions. Which partnership model a transit agency should start with, what to ask for in return, how cities should handle curb space and station parking, what Europe's SHOW pilots got right, how trust differs between Singapore, the US and Europe, and what a healthy mobility mix in San Francisco could look like in ten years.

CHAPTERS

1:01 - Waymo starts paying riders to take the bus
4:18 - How the transit rewards program works
5:34 - The first-mile gap in the Bay Area
7:04 - Waymo Cash, Clipper and who really benefits
9:10 - Station access vs the $2.85
10:06 - Robotaxis and transit: partners or rivals?
17:53 - What happens when robotaxis get cheap
19:27 - Why people choose or avoid transit
25:05 - The biggest mistake transit agencies make
26:33 - How to judge the Waymo program in a year
28:31 - Three partnership models: Bay Area, LA, Chandler
35:30 - Lessons from Europe's SHOW pilots
38:36 - Trust in Singapore, the US and Europe
41:12 - San Francisco in ten years
43:09 - One rule for every robotaxi permit

LINKS

Henriette on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/henriette-cornet/

Urban Innovate - https://www.linkedin.com/company/urbaninnovate/home/

The AV Market Strategist (newsletter) - https://avmarketstrategist.substack.com 

Listen on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/7KilrHXFnMqafvtLMQDWXw 

Listen on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/autonomy-insiders/id1883492805 

Subscribe on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@AutonomyInsiders

#Waymo #Robotaxi #PublicTransit #AutonomousDriving #AutonomyInsiders

Pony AI CEO James Peng on the robotaxi math behind his company: what one car has to earn, who should own it, and how many it takes before the whole company pays for itself.

Dr. James Peng co-founded Pony AI in Silicon Valley in 2016 after years at Google and Baidu. Today the company is listed on Nasdaq and in Hong Kong and plans to run more than 3,500 robotaxis by the end of 2026. Daniel Abreu Marques asks him how that fleet is meant to make money.

The numbers come first: what Pony AI counts in its unit economics and what it leaves out, why more and more vehicles belong to partners like Toyota or Verne, how its per-mile cost compares with Waymo's, and the fleet size at which the company turns cash-flow positive.

Then the map: Zagreb, the planned tests in London and Manchester, Luxembourg with Bolt and Stellantis, Dubai and Doha, and why Peng thinks Germany's 2021 law needs a smaller first step. It closes with the question investors keep asking: does the virtual driver become a commodity once Uber works with everyone?

CHAPTERS

0:00 - The founder story: from Google and Baidu to Pony AI

4:25 - The business: three revenue lines, the fleet and who owns the cars

14:20 - Europe: Zagreb, the UK, Germany, Luxembourg and data sovereignty

25:00 - The Gulf: Dubai and Doha

26:54 - The numbers: unit economics, remote assistance and the break-even fleet

30:28 - The industry: Pony World, the commodity question and 2027

LINKS

The AV Market Strategist (newsletter) - https://avmarketstrategist.substack.com

Listen on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/7KilrHXFnMqafvtLMQDWXw

Listen on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/autonomy-insiders/id1883492805

Every robotaxi still has to be charged, cleaned, repaired and financed. Hertz built a separate company to do that work, and it starts with human drivers.

Doria Holbrook is CEO of Oro Mobility, the fleet platform Hertz launched this year to own, operate and orchestrate vehicles for ride-hail and autonomous platforms. Before Hertz, she worked at Cruise and helped build Amazon's last-mile delivery network. Oro runs a 45,000-vehicle rideshare fleet across 33 US markets and works with Lucid, Nuro and Uber on its first autonomous fleet in the Bay Area.

First, the origin. Daniel Abreu Marques asks why Hertz spun Oro out instead of keeping it in-house, what makes innovation inside a hundred-year-old company hard, and where the name comes from.

Then the model. Doria explains why Oro treats its driver-led fleet as the precursor to driverless operations, what an AV company actually buys from Oro, how pit stops differ from depots, and where Oro draws the line on remote assistance.

Then the operations: what the Atlanta pilot taught the team, which KPIs partners measure, and why years of maintaining a large EV fleet transfer to autonomous vehicles.

Then the money: what the $80 million strategic investment will fund, how Oro sets itself apart from other fleet operators, and why the missing residual-value market makes autonomous vehicles hard to finance.

It ends with Europe, Hertz's franchise network, and what success looks like for Oro over the next five years.

CHAPTERS

0:00 - From Hertz to Oro Mobility
5:48 - Why driver-led comes before driverless
8:03 - What an AV company buys from Oro
12:55 - Lessons from the Atlanta pilot
15:53 - The first autonomous fleet and the EV playbook
20:09 - The $80M raise and the competition
23:55 - Residual value: the robotaxi financing problem
25:54 - Europe and the next five years

LINKS

The AV Market Strategist (newsletter) - https://avmarketstrategist.substack.com 

Listen on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/7KilrHXFnMqafvtLMQDWXw 

Listen on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/autonomy-insiders/id1883492805

Doria on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/doriaholbrook/

Oro Mobility - https://www.oromobility.com/

#Robotaxi #FleetOperations #AutonomousDriving #Hertz #AutonomyInsiders

Robotaxis get the billions. But driverless shuttles on airports and private campuses may scale first, because the owner of the ground can say yes before the law changes.

Taavi Rõivas was Prime Minister of Estonia. Today he chairs Auve Tech, a Tallinn company that designs its own eight-seat shuttle, MiCa, and its own self-driving software. Its shuttles run in small Japanese towns, in West Palm Beach and Abu Dhabi, and on the airside of Tallinn Airport with nobody on board.

First, the bet. Daniel Abreu Marques asks why Auve Tech chose low-speed shuttles when most of the money chased robotaxis, why Navya and EasyMile struggled, and why a company this size builds the vehicle and the software instead of picking one. Taavi explains the redundancy behind MiCa and how a new route goes from 3D map to driverless.

Then the economics. A driverless shuttle costs more than a minivan, so the saving has to come from the driver. Taavi explains how many vehicles one remote operator must monitor before the numbers flip, why that ratio differs between Switzerland and Dubai, and why the driver shortage at airports matters as much as cost.

Then the deployments: what the regulator needed to see before the safety operator could leave the vehicle at Tallinn Airport, why the customer there also sends tools and aircraft parts on their own, and what daily rides with elderly passengers in Japan show about acceptance.

It ends with the Middle East, Chinese robobuses arriving in Europe, whether "made in Europe" really sells, and the one rule a former head of government would change to scale driverless shuttles.

CHAPTERS

0:00 - From Prime Minister to driverless shuttles

4:06 - Why shuttles, not robotaxis

9:39 - Inside MiCa: full stack, redundancy, new routes

16:25 - The economics: when driverless beats a driver

26:50 - On the ground: Tallinn Airport, Japan, Florida

35:57 - Regulators, the Middle East and the next two years

39:57 - Chinese robobuses and the one rule to change

GUEST

Taavi Rõivas, Chairman of Auve Tech and former Prime Minister of Estonia. Auve Tech designs and builds the MiCa autonomous shuttle and its self-driving software in Tallinn.

LINKS

Taavi on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/taaviroivas/

The AV Market Strategist (newsletter) - https://avmarketstrategist.substack.com

Listen on Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/7KilrHXFnMqafvtLMQDWXw

Listen on Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/de/podcast/autonomy-insiders/id1883492805

Subscribe on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@AutonomyInsiders

#DriverlessShuttle #AutonomousDriving #Robotaxi #Estonia #AutonomyInsiders

Is Europe hopelessly behind in autonomous driving, or should it skip the race altogether? Lukas Neckermann thinks both camps are wrong.

If the driving software comes from California, China or Israel, what actually stays in Europe? Who earns the money, who employs the people, and who owns the fleets?

Lukas coined the term “mobility revolution” more than ten years ago, built on three zeros: zero emissions, zero accidents, zero ownership. He started his career at BMW and Allianz, has written four books on mobility and cities, co-founded PAVE Europe and the Urban Places Lab, and runs Neckermann Strategic Advisory in London.

In this episode:

• Why Europe’s path is an extension of public transport, not a substitute for it
• Why one type approval framework beats a patchwork of US city permits
• Why most robotaxi revenue sits in fleet management, not software
• Why banks and lessors are still on the sidelines
• What has to be true by October 2027 for Europe to win

Chapters
00:00 Intro
02:11 Why both camps are wrong: Europe’s own path
07:44 Regulation as a head start, and why pilots die
12:22 Oslo and the public transport playbook
14:45 Where the money really stays: orchestration and insurance
19:37 The vertical integration myth and the hidden labor behind robotaxis
25:14 Who will own the fleets: banks, lessors and residual values
28:34 Serving the suburbs: regulation, ride pooling and mobility deserts
34:13 Europe in 2027 and 2030, and where to meet Lukas

Links

My newsletter: The AV Market Strategist

Lukas on LinkedIn

Urban Places Lab on LinkedIn

PAVE Europe

Germany wrote the world's first legal framework for driverless commercial service in 2021. Five years later, no operator holds a regular Level 4 approval. Why?

Till Stegemann is a lawyer at Rödl in Berlin. He advises cities, transport operators and companies on autonomous mobility. He is a co-author of the German Federal Ministry of Transport's handbook "Autonomous Driving in Public Transport", a practical guide for cities and transit operators on bringing driverless vehicles into public transport.

In this episode, Till walks through the German process step by step. Which permit, from which authority, in which order, and what has to be in the file. We cover the vehicle approval from the KBA, why the functional safety concept is where applications stall, what the technical supervisor may and may not do, and how EU and UN rules change the picture. We close with Till's verdict on why Germany has the law but not the market, and what cities and operators should do first.

Chapters
00:00 Intro: Germany's legal head start
01:37 The architecture: StVG, AFGBV and the SAE levels
09:01 Permit 1: Vehicle approval from the KBA
18:20 Permit 2: Operating area approval and the Berlin real-world test
24:12 The technical supervisor and the vehicle holder
29:22 Passenger transport permit and liability
32:30 EU type approval and the new UN regulation
37:48 Why Germany is not the first market
40:44 Advice for cities and operators

Links

My Newsletter with weekly AV Industry Analysis: https://avmarketstrategist.substack.com/

Handbook "Autonomous Driving in Public Transport" (German Federal Ministry of Transport): https://www.bmv.de/SharedDocs/DE/Anlage/K/autonomes-fahren-oeffentlicher-verkehr.pdf?__blob=publicationFile

Till Stegemann on LinkedIn: here

Southeast Asia should be the last place AV's arrive. Dense, improvised traffic, monsoon rain and some of the cheapest driver labor in any middle-income region. Yet in April 2026, Punggol in northeast Singapore became the first residential neighborhood in Southeast Asia with a public autonomous passenger service.

In this episode of Autonomy Insiders, Daniel Abreu Marques talks with Dominic Ong, General Manager Autonomous at Grab, who runs that program with WeRide and Singapore's Land Transport Authority (LTA).

We cover:

→ Why Grab's case for autonomous vehicles is about reliability, not driver cost

→ How Grab's hybrid model dispatches robotaxis and human drivers on one network

→ How Grab, WeRide and LTA split the work in Singapore

→ Why vehicle uptime now matters more than miles per critical intervention

→ What breaks an AV stack in Southeast Asia: vehicle costs in Singapore, monsoon rain, motorcycles and right-hand drive

→ Delivery robots, and why Grab takes equity in AV partners like WeRide, Momenta and Vay

→ How Grab views Waymo's planned entry into Singapore

Chapters
00:00 Why Southeast Asia is the hardest robotaxi market
00:55 Grab and the GM Autonomous mandate
04:57 What autonomy actually solves for Grab
08:45 The hybrid model: robotaxis and human drivers on one network
14:02 Punggol: how Grab, WeRide and LTA split the work
19:02 From fixed-route shuttle to robotaxi ride-hailing
21:56 The metrics Grab actually watches
25:43 What breaks an AV stack in Southeast Asia
30:31 Autonomous delivery and robotics
33:48 Equity stakes, AV partners and Vay
42:01 Waymo enters Singapore
44:05 Who owns the fleet at scale

About the guest

Dominic Ong is General Manager Autonomous at Grab. He has worked on autonomous vehicles for more than a decade, first at Singapore's Economic Development Board and for the past ten years at Grab.

Newsletter: The AV Market Strategist
Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn

#robotaxi #Grab #autonomousvehicles

London's first robotaxi service runs on the Uber app with a safety driver still behind the wheel. Here is every step a company must clear before the UK lets it take the driver out.

Tym Syrytczyk co-founded the Institute for Driverless Transport (IFDT), an independent UK research body, and writes Self-Driving Insights. His recent piece on getting permission to run a robotaxi service in London is the plain-English explainer. This episode walks through it in order.

The law comes first. Two Acts separate supervised rides from driverless ones. The 2018 Act set out insurance and liability, and the Automated Vehicles Act 2024 builds the permanent framework, due to be complete by 2027. The Department for Transport formally grants the permit. The DVSA runs most of the process, the VCA assesses the vehicle and its software, and Transport for London holds local consent.

Next is the route a company actually takes. Waymo, Wayve and Apollo Go test in London without any trial permit, guided only by a non-statutory code of practice. Wayve and Uber carry passengers today on three ordinary private hire licences, so legally the service is no different from a standard Uber ride. Taking the driver out needs an automated passenger services (APS) permit and a safety case.

Then it gets political. TfL has six weeks to respond to a proposed service, and if it stays silent, that counts as consent. Applications opened in May, but TfL says it has received none for London, and it has not published any consent guidance. Daniel Abreu Marques asks Tym why nobody has applied yet, whether TfL could delay driverless services almost indefinitely, and how much time operators should really add to their plans.

It ends with Tym's on-the-record prediction for London's first driverless permit: which operator, how many cars, and which part of the city.

0:00 - London's first robotaxi service still has a driver

1:13 - Why a newsletter wasn't enough: founding IFDT

5:11 - Why permits matter as much as the software

7:14 - Supervised vs. driverless under UK law

8:23 - Two laws: the 2018 and 2024 Acts

10:42 - Who does what: DfT, DVSA, VCA and TfL

13:27 - What fast-tracking the pilot scheme changed

15:39 - Testing in London without a trial permit

18:06 - What goes into a safety case, and who reads it

20:15 - The vehicle special order

22:52 - How Wayve and Uber carry passengers today

26:44 - Uber operates, Wayve drives: why the split matters

28:11 - The APS permit, and why DVSA issues it, not TfL

31:11 - Remote assistance and the legal meaning of self-driving

33:41 - Operational design domain vs. permit area

36:13 - From application to permit, and TfL's six-week clock

39:45 - Why TfL has received zero applications

41:37 - No consent guidance: the practical effect

43:56 - DfT vs. TfL: real tension or working as designed?

45:17 - Prediction: London's first driverless permit

LINKS

Tym's Substack: https://substack.com/@tympj

The AV Market Strategist (my newsletter) - https://avmarketstrategist.substack.com

#Robotaxi #AutonomousDriving #London #TransportPolicy #AutonomyInsiders

Europe's first fully driverless commercial robobus runs in France.

beti is a French operator of automated mobility networks, and a spin-off from Bertolami, a family coach business that has moved people around rural France for 75 years. CEO Benjamin Baudet explains the layer of the autonomous driving industry nobody photographs: the people and software that keep a driverless bus service running once the driver is gone.

Before beti existed, the family studied its own routes and asked a simple question — if the driver is no longer on board, who does everything else? They counted 421 daily tasks that had nothing to do with driving. Autonomous driving technology replaces the driving task. It does not replace the operator. That finding became the company.

What beti sells is people and software: field teams trained to deploy someone else's autonomy, plus two in-house platforms — OperaVision for the ground crew and HyperVision for remote monitoring.

The conversation gets into the fleet operations numbers this layer rarely publishes: four vehicles per hypervisor on two-hour rotations, roughly 20% of operating effort spent on cleaning, charging, depot work and roadside recovery, and around 30% lower operating cost than a service with a driver — but only above eight hours a day and seven days a week.

In October 2024 beti flew to Guangzhou to argue it was the right size of European partner. Four months later the Valence TGV robobus line launched with WeRide and Renault. Adapting a robobus designed for the Chinese market took a year of closing gaps on language, interfaces and data protocols.

Plus: how French driverless permits came through in three months, why Keolis, Transdev and RATP are customers rather than competitors, how beti is preparing for robotaxi and goods transport alongside public transport, and the 2030 target Benjamin uses to measure success.

This show is the interview half. The analysis lands every Monday in the newsletter. Free: https://avmarketstrategist.substack.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=description&utm_campaign=ep27

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 - open: the gap in the leading pack is narrowing

0:59 - The service layer nobody photographs

1:53 - What beti actually sells

2:24 - Why a family coach operator started an autonomy company

3:32 - The 421 tasks that are not driving

5:01 - What transfers from a 75-year-old bus business

6:00 - The turnkey offer: people plus two software platforms

7:37 - Hypervision vs. teleoperation, and who owns the driving

8:52 - Why the control room sits in the same country

9:16 - Training customers to not need you

10:16 - What operators underestimate

11:12 - Four layers, and the two beti refuses to enter

12:13 - How many vehicles one hypervisor can handle

13:38 - What caps the ratio: human attention

14:18 - The ground crew: 20% of operating effort

14:54 - What stops WeRide or Renault building this themselves

15:55 - Valence 2025: how the WeRide deal came together

17:00 - Why that route, and the riders who became ambassadors

18:59 - Driverless permits in three months

19:59 - Rebuilding a Chinese robobus for Europe

22:02 - Navya, EasyMile, WeRide: a 20-criteria operator framework

23:31 - Roland-Garros 2026: a 100% beti operation

25:00 - Who the customer is, and who writes the cheque

26:11 - 30% below a driven service, with conditions

27:18 - When your supplier goes under

28:58 - Keolis, Transdev, RATP: customers, not competitors

30:13 - The 2030 target: 2,000 hypervision licences

Everyone measures robotaxi progress in miles driven. Almost nobody measures the hours the vehicle spends not driving. George Kalligeros, co-founder and CEO of Aseon Labs, is building a robot that compresses a depot into a single parking space.

When a robotaxi drops below its charge threshold, it leaves the zone it is earning in, drives three to five miles to a depot, queues, gets serviced, and drives back. In San Francisco, a compact city with unusually good infrastructure, that is roughly two hours out of service, and it happens several times a day. The driving stack is fully autonomous. Everything around it is still humans, real estate and deadhead miles.

Aseon's answer is a six-metre box that occupies one charging bay, holds two six-axis robotic arms, and completes a reset in twenty to thirty minutes: inspection, charge, interior clean, item retrieval, data sync and reboot. George is unusually direct about what version one does not do. No exterior wash. No sensor detailing. Anything genuinely unpleasant goes back to the depot.

Daniel Abreu Marques presses on the parts that decide whether this is a business or a demo: why Aseon operates a network instead of selling boxes, how the project-company and asset-backed financing model is designed to pull AV operators into owning part of their own infrastructure, and why a pod needs only about five resets a day — roughly 10% utilisation — to break even.

The wider argument is the one this show keeps returning to. If more than half the cost of a robotaxi service sits in infrastructure and operations rather than in the driver, then autonomy economics are settled off the road, not on it. And once cities start tendering licences with a cap on vehicle numbers, "drive somewhere cheaper to charge" stops being a strategy.

As George puts it: the infrastructure has to meet the vehicle, not the vehicle be taken to the infrastructure just because it drives itself.

Plus: what four years at Tier taught him about who you can actually incentivise, why Europe's density makes it the natural market for this product, and why he is building the company in California anyway.

TIMESTAMPS

0:49 - Introduction
1:26 - What Aseon is, and what an operator actually buys
1:52 - Inside the box: one bay, two robotic arms
2:41 - A 20-30 minute reset, bounded by charge rate
3:29 - What it replaces: two hours out of service, several times a day 4:50 - What they found inside real AV depots
5:31 - A third of the fleet offline at any given time
6:44 - Four years at Tier, and who you can actually incentivise
7:50 - Which jobs version one does, and which it refuses
9:47 - Interior resets: the 90% a robot can close out
10:55 - Getting power into a dense-city parking bay
12:00 - One pod, many platforms: ID Buzz down to Cybercab
13:55 - Orchestration: no queuing, just-in-time only
14:51 - When the pod fails with a vehicle inside
15:52 - Why Aseon runs a network instead of selling boxes
18:07 - How operators pay, and what makes it bankable
19:08 - Five resets a day: the utilisation math
21:02 - Where the $10M goes, and what 2027 has to prove
21:38 - $50M a metro: from venture equity to asset-backed debt
22:48 - Movable, permittable, live in eight weeks
23:55 - Lyft, Avis, Move: why route into a third-party network
25:20 - What stays in-house
26:14 - Are AV depots the new data centres?
27:39 - Is the cost really decided off the road?
28:55 - Curb space, cities and the traffic externality
30:53 - Europe: why build in the US, and when Aseon arrives here
32:52 - The one metric for the next twelve months