Avride

Exactly.

Well, these particular robots are built by a company called Avride, and they have been doing Uber Eats deliveries in parts of the Philadelphia area since March of this year.

But there's a woman, JG, in Philadelphia who doesn't like the idea of these things at all.

And she's not going to let the robots take over, so to speak, without a fight.

And just for the record, you are correct.

So it is AVRide, Tesla RoboTaxi, Waymo, and Zoox.

So you are correct.

You didn't miss anybody from a RoboTaxi perspective.

Get rid of people they have to pay and just let the robots do all the heavy lifting.

The robots were built by a company called Avride, and they've been making Uber Eats deliveries in Philly since March.

Meanwhile, her robotic rebellion has sparked a battle online, some rooting her on while others referring to her as just, quote, a robotic Karen.

But I love that.

There is an investment fund that owns 2%, with Hyundai owning 98% of the company, so it's really gonna come down to, to what Hyundai wants.

But I wanna s- caveat that and say that I visited AV Ride's upfitting factory in Austin yesterday, and how is the public going to be able to differentiate between a Motional vehicle and an AV Ride vehicle and a Waymo vehicle in the same market because they're both running, they're all three of them actually are running the IONIQ 5, is something that I'm starting to, to, to think about.

And to the AV Ride team, thank you for showing me the branding that you're working on.

Really, really impressive, and thank you for, for showing the facility of how you're upfitting these vehicles, also very impressive.

But I think it's gonna be interesting when you have three different providers with IONIQ 5s in the same market, how is the public gonna know who is who?

So I guess, uh, the question is, how do we get-- what are the signals to watch? Um, I know you like the term signals.

It's, it's [chuckles] it's what your AI beast is so good at.

What are the signals that we should be looking at to understand, you know, which way Hyundai is gonna take this in the future? And is this a risk, you know, to companies like AV Ride and Waymo to rely too much on Hyundai as their OEM partner?

Um, that's also a custom-build vehicle, so no steering wheel, no brake pedal.

Um, we've got AV Ride, which is testing.

I think we see a lot of those in Austin.

And then MOIA, which is using a Volkswagen, uh, platform as well.

Like, on one hand you've got this, these, these get a new city, get your 3, 400 cars in there, move on, like, get the footprint going.

But then there's, like, certain markets, obviously San Francisco, California, um, and Texas, Dallas, where you've got multiple competitors, or Austin even, where Cybercab is first launching, that, you know, it maybe makes sense to, to dump more in there just, you know, 'cause they know that Road to Autonomy's gonna be, uh, down there doing field work, so they wanna see that, you know, as you're trying to film that AV ride for Uber, that you have 15 frigging [laughs] Waymos driving by.

Um, and look, Tesla, I think you've done some good field work there in seeing some of the lots and the number of Cybercabs that I would sense are probably soon gonna be flooding the streets of Dallas as well.

So Dallas, you know, should be a good autonomy city for us.

Full disclosure, I have an investment in, in Autolane.

But it, it brings up some of the options, um, that exist there.

Um, and specifically in, in, you know, Coco Robotics, which has also been on Roads to Autonomy, and I visited with them, which has these, th- it's like the Serve Robotics, it's like the AV Ride.

It's, it's the, the robots that are delivering food.

But let's shift to the next related topic is Uber.

you know, cause we've talked about this before, but you know, there's no rush, right? These companies like just before you talked about wave taking 36 months, you know, we think AV ride, you know, maybe a year from now, if it's again, or Noro is a big success, their driver out, but we're not talking about a ton of cars, maybe hundreds of cars.

So there's not going to be, I think enough progress that a year from now, that it's going to be clear who Uber would want to own, right? Let alone the impact that that would have on the other partners.

I think they would want all of the partners to continue to be able to raise capital and develop their technology and still live in this fragmented world, which all of them, as far as I can tell, other than maybe what's going on in Europe, are very happy to stay on this Uber platform.

but it's something for them to talk about.

I know it's wacky, but it's something for them to talk about.

Well, Grayson, I've been in an AV ride.

I've been in a Noro.