The Robotaxi Race Has a 1.5 Billion Vehicle Blind Spot - #0080, Igal Raichelgauz

The robotaxi race has a winner’s podium that everyone can name. Waymo is expanding fast, with TechCrunch reporting that its fleet has now crossed 3,000 vehicles, completing over 500,000 trips per week across multiple U.S. cities. Tesla launched its robotaxi service in Austin. Chinese players like Baidu and WeRide are scaling aggressively at home, as well. But Igal Raichelgauz, CEO and founder of Israeli autonomous driving company Autobrains, thinks the industry is looking at the wrong scoreboard entirely. “The major market, the biggest opportunity today, is in the Western world for every car,” Raichelgauz told me. “We have today over 1.5 billion cars on the road. These are not addressed - not by Tesla, not by Waymo, and not by the Chinese players. And that’s where we see the biggest opportunity.” Waymo’s overall fleet is impressive and certainly dwarfs Tesla's. Take the state of Texas, which, as of recent state DMV filings, showed that the Musk-owned company had just 42 autonomous vehicles authorized for driverless ride-hailing, compared to Waymo’s 577. Meanwhile, Chinese players cannot realistically scale into Western markets for geopolitical reasons, leaving the competitive map with a conspicuous gap at its centre. Autobrains is positioning itself directly in that gap, using agentic AI to split the driving task into thousands of specialized agents rather than training a single monolithic model. The Israeli company has raised over $140 million from investors that include BMW, Toyota Ventures, Magna, Continental, Temasek, and others, and claims to hold more than 300 patents related to AI and autonomous driving. It’s where Raichelgauz sees the company getting the best chance to join that winner’s podium. The logic is as follows: Waymo’s approach is built on expensive sensors, LiDAR arrays, and HD maps that require enormous upfront investment before entering any new city. “When you need to move to a new city, you need to invest tens, if not hundreds, of millions into this infrastructure work,” he said. Tesla, on the other hand, has made the consumer vehicle its canvas, but still hasn’t delivered on unsupervised autonomy. “You don’t have a personal car that you can buy from Tesla with FSD (Full Self-Driving) that can run in a way that the person can start working, watch videos, and read emails. You must work in a mode that is ‘eyes on’.” The result, as Raichelgauz puts it, is “a disconnect”: one side has autonomy that doesn’t scale, the other has scale that isn’t yet truly autonomous. Industry analysts broadly agree: while Level 2 ADAS is expected to become the standard baseline across new vehicles through the 2030s, Level 5 autonomy remains a distant goal on a potentially multi-decade timeline. The practical payoff is that it can run on standard automotive sensors and existing compute platforms, without requiring the expensive hardware stacks that make Waymo-style deployments hard to replicate. “We want to make sure this technology becomes mainstream, where people can get the time back from driving and start working,” Raichelgauz said, describing eyes-off Level 3 capability as the near-term commercial target rather than full robotaxi autonomy. To get there, the company has secured partnerships with Uber, NVIDIA, and VinFast to run two contrasting real-world proving grounds. Germany’s Munich for European regulatory rigour, and South Asia, particularly Vietnam, for the sheer chaos. “If we can solve autonomous driving in Hanoi on a regular car, we can solve it everywhere,” Raichelgauz said. Chinese OEMs are already taking the lead on sophisticated ADAS integration in their home markets, which means the window for Western-aligned players to establish an OEM-agnostic standard is finite. Autobrains is betting that the company that cracks affordability and scalability will ultimately define what autonomous driving looks like for most of the world’s drivers. “The first starting point is ‘eyes off’,” Raichelgauz said. “When you can take your car driving from home to work without really supervising it… without paying tens of thousands of dollars to upgrade to a robotaxi.” You can watch the entire exchange in the video above. Thanks for reading The Spiro Circle! This post is public so feel free to share it. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe