In this episode of the Ride AI Podcast, we sit down with Ali Kashani, CEO and co-founder of Serve Robotics, the company bringing AI-powered sidewalk delivery robots—with googly eyes—to city streets. Ali shares the origin story behind Serve's charming, efficient bots and explains why using a two-ton car to deliver a two-pound burrito simply doesn’t make sense.

We dive into the rationale behind sidewalk robots versus road-based vehicles, the surprising stats about food delivery distances, and how Serve’s robots—some capable of 40 miles on a single charge—are redefining last-mile logistics. Ali also explains how the company maintains Level 4 autonomy with human-in-the-loop oversight and the unique challenges of operating in pedestrian-dense environments.

Hear how Serve’s robots navigate public spaces with body language, what goes into scaling to cities like Dallas, Miami, and soon Atlanta, and why the future of delivery may depend less on bikes and more on scalable automation. Plus, Ali reveals unexpected revenue streams—from ad campaigns on robots to software licensing deals—and shares his dream cities for future deployment (spoiler: New York is high on the list).

In this episode, we explore Lyft’s evolving approach to autonomous vehicles and the future of rideshare. Rather than building its own L4 tech, Lyft is doubling down on its marketplace strengths—demand generation, rider experience, and fleet management—while teaming up with AV innovators like Mobileye. The company envisions a hybrid future where human drivers and AVs coexist, expanding the market rather than replacing people.

We dive into how Lyft plans to support its diverse driver base—over two million strong annually—by creating new opportunities, such as turning today’s drivers into tomorrow’s AV fleet owners. Plus, we break down the economics of surge pricing, the complexities of fleet ops, and how Lyft compares to competitors like Uber and Waymo.

In this episode of Ride AI, we dive into the fast-evolving intersection of autonomy, gig work, and delivery economics. Our guest, Gridwise founder and CEO Ryan Green, joins to discuss why autonomous vehicles won't spell the end for human gig workers — at least not yet.

In this episode, we dive into the gritty reality of autonomous trucking with Xiaodi Hou, founder of Bot Auto, a Level 4 freight-hauling company that's rewriting the playbook on autonomy. While much of the industry chases glossy tech demos and futuristic hype, Bot Auto is quietly building a cost-efficient, scalable logistics operation—one truckload at a time.

Today's episode is a recording of an interview from the Ride AI summit in which Vishay Nihalani of Waymo (Director of Product Management, Operations) unpacks the company’s transformation from Google’s self-driving side project into a global pioneer of autonomous mobility. From deployment strategy to global expansion, it’s a behind-the-scenes look at how Waymo is designing autonomy for the real world — and the road ahead. Interview by Edward Niedermeyer.

In this episode, Ed Niedermeyer sits down with Nimrod Nehushtan, EVP of Strategy and Business Development at Mobileye, to unpack the company’s push to bring ADAS to the mainstream. From Mobileye’s new partnership with Volkswagen and Valeo—bringing hands-free Level 2+ driving to EVs priced under $30K—to the rollout of Supervision, Chauffeur, and REM-based technologies, the conversation dives deep into Mobileye’s evolving product stack, regulatory tailwinds, and vision for scalable autonomy.

YouTuber, writer, and coder Sophia Tung recaps the week's most important AV news, including Waymo’s big Bay Area expansion, multiple Tesla controversies, Travis Kalanick’s robotaxi regrets, Rivian’s hands-free driving debut, and more.

This week’s episode is shorter than usual, but hopefully it serves as a good introduction to Sophia and her point of view on AI mobility. She’ll be podcasting more with us in the future.

As a reminder, the first Ride AI summit is taking place on April 2 at Neuehouse in Hollywood, California. We already have an amazing group of speakers lined up, including Amnon Shashua of Mobileye, Gill Pratt of TRI, and other top decision makers from Waymo, Zoox, Wayve, Apollo Go, Nuro, and more. There's a ton of excitement around the fact that this will be the first event of its kind that people will be able to take a fully driverless Waymo robotaxi to, making it the perfect opportunity to inaugurate the second chapter of this technological space. The on-stage conversations will be focused on this shift, from experiments and ideas to delivering real-world realities, and how to reboot conversations with stakeholders in the public sector, capital markets, media, and beyond.

Tickets are currently on sale ⁠here⁠: https://ti.to/rideai/ride-ai-2025

The first Ride AI summit, an intimate gathering of top leaders in driving automation technology and related AI-empowered hardtech, is taking place on April 2 at Neuehouse in Hollywood, California. In this episode, our hosts, Edward Niedermeyer and Timothy B. Lee, preview the aspects of the event program they are most excited about.

We already have an amazing group of speakers lined up, including Amnon Shashua of Mobileye, Gill Pratt of TRI, and other top decision makers from Waymo, Zoox, Wayve, Apollo Go, Nuro, and more. There's a ton of excitement around the fact that this will be the first event of its kind that people will be able to take a fully driverless Waymo robotaxi to, making it the perfect opportunity to inaugurate the second chapter of this technological space. The on-stage conversations will be focused on this shift, from experiments and ideas to delivering real-world realities, and how to reboot conversations with stakeholders in the public sector, capital markets, media, and beyond.

Tickets are currently on sale here. Space is limited.

Alex Kendall, founder and CEO of Wayve, shares how Wayve's unique end-to-end AI approach allows their self-driving system to generalize across different countries and driving cultures—from London to California. The discussion explores how Wayve (which recently raised $1 billion from Softbank and others) combines vision, language, and action to create more intuitive human-AI interactions, why synthetic data matters for safety testing, and how their lean hardware strategy could make autonomous technology more accessible to automakers worldwide.

The AV trucking company Aurora is spending the final days of 2024 busily getting ready to start hauling freight without humans on board, a long-awaited milestone. On the eve of this potentially historic launch, our host Timothy B. Lee catches up with co-founder Sterling Anderson about the long road of technological innovation that led here.