SaaS Evolution: By Focusing on the Present, We’re Missing the Future

The easiest way to underestimate a technological shift is to judge it by the work it is already doing.

So far, the most visible applications of generative AI have been familiar ones: drafting emails, summarizing meetings, writing code, preparing presentations, and automating repetitive workflows.

These have been useful, and in some cases, transformative.

But they are still mostly examples of using a new technology to make historical processes faster.

With technology inflections, the larger opportunity always comes later.

With every major platform shift, the most consequential businesses often emerge when entrepreneurs stop asking, “How can this improve what already exists?” and start asking, “What is now possible that wasn’t practical before?”

We have seen this movie before.

(Click here to continue reading)

Until next week,

Steve Greenfield
General Partner
Automotive Ventures

🚗 Automotive

What to do with Jaguar has furrowed the brows of car executives for years. Jaguar Land Rover, shortened to JLR since 2023, has always been far more reliant on the other side of its business, which includes the high-end Range Rover, whose flagship SUVs now start at well over £100,000 ($132,000). The Jaguar brand has probably never made a profit for Tata Motors, the carmaking arm of the Indian conglomerate that bought JLR from Ford Motor Company in 2008 for $2.3bn. Despite its heritage of sporty models—such as the E-Type, launched in the 1960s—Jaguar’s saloon cars were long the brand’s biggest sellers. Over time, however, they acquired a staid image of pipe-smoking bank managers and golf-club car parks. Tata invested heavily in revamping Jaguar’s range in order to take on Germany’s premium carmakers, but the effort misfired. Although it managed to produce vehicles to a similar design standard and build quality, most drivers stuck with their Teutonic machines. In 2018, at its peak, Jaguar sold around 180,000 cars, compared with well over 2m apiece for BMW and Mercedes-Benz. Sales plummeted in the years that followed. The latest reinvention, which began in 2021, is an even bigger gamble. JLR has spent at least £2.25bn relaunching Jaguar as a battery-powered brand. In 2024 it halted production of its existing line-up of models. In November of that year it ran a marketing campaign with a controversial advert featuring androgynous models in brightly coloured futuristic outfits but no car, which outraged petrolheads and even provoked Donald Trump to weigh in (”seriously woke” was his verdict). The campaign’s two concept cars (bright pink and baby blue) were portrayed by critics as either audacious or mad. | The Economist ($)

Nissan Motor Corporation is careening toward its weakest global sales year in nearly a quarter century. The automaker delivered 1,932,790 vehicles worldwide in the first eight months of 2026 — 9.2 percent less than in the same period last year, according to figures released Sept. 29. That puts the company on pace for a full-year total of 2.9 million. The last time Nissan fell short of 3 million in a calendar year was 2003, when it sold 2.968 million vehicles. China is Nissan’s main challenge, dragging down the company’s global volume even as it gains share in the U.S. this year. China, now Nissan’s second-largest market, accounted for more than half of the year’s decline. Sales there have plunged 27 percent this year after cratering 52 percent in August alone. | Automotive News ($)

German sports car maker Porsche AG delivered 16% fewer vehicles globally in the first nine ‌months of 2026, as weak demand in China, the phase-out of the 718 model line and its focus on brand value over volume continued to weigh on sales. Deliveries in China plunged by 33% in the nine months through September. Volumes fell 13% in North America, Porsche's largest sales region, and declined 11% in Europe excluding Germany. Despite ⁠an overall decline in deliveries, demand for the iconic 911 remained robust, with nine-month sales rising ⁠12% to 42,217 vehicles worldwide. | Reuters ($)

Porsche AG plans to increase prices of its top-end sports cars by an average of 20%, including the introduction of a new model that will sit above the longtime flagship 911 in the lineup, as it seeks to revive flagging profits. The German manufacturer outlined a fresh strategy at an investor presentation Wednesday that focuses on selling fewer, higher-end cars with special features to drive returns. The push for more exclusivity follows costly missteps on electrification and a plunge in sales in China that last month contributed to parent Volkswagen AG slashing its outlook. Chief Executive Officer Michael Leiters cautioned the turnaround would take time and for now is working on reducing expenses. Medium-term, the company said it’ll see prices of its most exclusive vehicles rise as Porsche leans into offering buyers bespoke materials and performance features. The average price of Porsche’s top-end models is expected to climb to more than €330,000 ($370,134) by the end of the decade from about €270,000 this year, according to the company’s presentation. | Bloomberg ($)

German luxury carmaker Mercedes-Benz said on Wednesday sales in its core car business ‌continued to fall in the third quarter, declining 8% year-on-year due to challenging market conditions in China. Car deliveries fell ⁠to 407,200 units in the July-September period, the company said in a statement. In China, the drop was 31% to 86,800 units, compared with the same period last year. Group sales of battery-electric vehicles, which include cars and ⁠vans, rose by 52% to 78,100 units. | Reuters ($)

The European economy is falling behind. At the turn of the century, EU labor productivity was on a steady upward trajectory and had reached almost 95 percent of U.S. levels. Then the trend reversed. EU productivity is now 20 percent lower than that of the United States. One important cause of this decline is Europe’s failure to participate in the digital revolution. Of the world’s 100 most valuable high-tech companies, only two are headquartered within the EU. The bloc has no global-scale companies in cloud computing, online advertising, mobile devices, or chip design, and it has only one competitor—France’s Mistral—remaining in the race to build the large language models powering the current AI surge. The problem is not that the EU and its national governments are not doing enough to spur competitiveness. It is that they are doing too much to impede it. | Foreign Affairs ($)

Most independent truckers who operate job-to-job on the so-called spot market pay for their own costs, like fuel. To make up for high prices at the pump, drivers cut elsewhere. Out at the fuel bays, truckers spoke about cooking meals inside their cabs, sleeping where they unhooked their trailers to avoid overnight parking fees and waiting for rainstorms to clean their rigs rather than paying $100 for a wash. Some were parking their trucks altogether. Small operators, which dominate registered motor carrier companies, can’t keep up: More than a dozen have filed for bankruptcy in the past month, and the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association warns more will follow if fuel prices don’t drop. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Statistically speaking, you probably don’t drive a diesel. Oil burners represent a tiny chunk of light-duty vehicle sales, even when you factor in heavy-duty pickups and the like. But in the freight world, if you’re hauling heavy loads, chances are you’re fueling up with diesel—or maybe you were, if you drove for one of the 16 trucking companies that went bankrupt last quarter. According to multiple sources, the rising cost of diesel fuel was the straw the broke the camel’s back for 16 freight operators that filed for either Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in late August and early September. Some were small, single-operator outfits. Others were larger, operating dozens of vehicles. | The Drive

Rivian has received a $1 billion, 10-year loan from Volkswagen Group at a fixed rate of 6.03%, secured by its half of the EV maker’s software joint venture, a regulatory filing showed on Wednesday. The funding is the largest remaining payment under a partnership worth up to $5.8 billion and leaves $460 million still to come. | EV

Removing alcohol-involved drivers from the data pool reduces the average urban fatal crash involvement rate by 23%—dropping from 1.42 to 1.10 incidents per 100 million miles. The impact of alcohol varies heavily by geography. In Houston, for example, removing impaired drivers lowers the fatal crash rate by a staggering 31%. In contrast, in Minneapolis, the reduction is 13%. This underlines why it is important to use local human benchmarks rather than national averages when evaluating road safety. | Waymo

The Trump administration is pledging to modernize headlight standards, addressing a growing complaint among drivers about glare from powerful LED lights. Industry experts say U.S. headlight regulations are severely outdated, creating dangerous driving conditions. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced Tuesday that it will implement new rules to address issues like headlight glare and testing, vowing to align U.S. regulations with global standards.The agency will use the "negotiated rule-making" procedure to expedite the process of adopting new regulations, effectively bringing interested parties to the table to help draft the standards. | Axios

Car theft has been a major problem across the United States in recent years, but there’s finally some genuinely good news. Vehicle thefts plunged 21 percent during the first half of 2026, and remarkably, every single state recorded a year-over-year decline. That's right. Vehicle thefts are down just about everywhere nationwide. Well, almost. Apparently, nobody told Chicago, Illinois. According to a new analysis shared last week from the National Insurance Crime Bureau (NICB), 268,415 vehicles were reported stolen nationwide during the first six months of the year. That works out to roughly 77.81 thefts for every 100,000 people and continues a broader decline from the elevated theft levels seen in recent years. The improvement wasn’t limited to a handful of states, either. All 50 recorded fewer thefts than during the first half of 2025. | Road&Track ($)

A feature known as auto stop-start was introduced in Japan on the 1974 Toyota Crown. During the 1970s gas crisis, the technology delivered a 10 percent reduction in fuel consumption. The system turns off the engine when the car comes to a halt and the brake pedal is pressed and starts it when the driver releases the brake. U.S. drivers were first introduced to the innovation through hybrid vehicles, which could automatically shut off their gasoline engines when stopped. It wasn’t until the 2010s that the technology began to proliferate on cars powered solely by internal-combustion engines. In 2023, the Society of Automotive Engineers found that auto stop-start improves fuel economy between roughly 7 percent and 26 percent depending on driving conditions. Edmunds, an online automotive resource, conducted a test using three vehicles and concluded that auto stop-start delivered an estimated 10 percent fuel savings in city traffic. At a time of record-high fuel prices, you would think drivers would welcome anything that helps save gas. But some motorists despise it, and so does the Trump administration. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy called it an “idiotic” requirement that “every driver hates.” US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin added that his agency “is proudly fixing this stupid feature” by no longer giving automakers incentives to include it on new cars. | The Washington Post ($)

⚡️ EVs

Gas cars are now a minority of the world’s new car sales. Gasoline-only vehicles made up 49% of global new-vehicle sales in the first half of 2026, down from 73% in 2021, according to Mobility Global data first reported by Nikkei. It’s the first time on record that they’ve been under half. But there’s a catch: most of the cars taking their place still have a gas tank. Nikkei reported its first-half numbers last week, and they show sales of gasoline-only cars down 10% from a year ago to 20.25 million units between January and June. Their share fell three points in a single year, from 52% to 49%. | Electrek

High gasoline prices make a strong case for buying an electric vehicle. But a new AAA study found EVs still cost more to own and operate than gasoline and hybrid models in the U.S., although the gap is closing. While new EVs saved about 70 percent in fueling costs compared with gasoline vehicles, electric cars and trucks generate higher depreciation and financing expenses, offsetting the savings, AAA said in a 2026 new-vehicle ownership study. But there was a silver lining for EVs: The jump in gasoline prices this year brought them to near cost parity with combustion vehicles and hybrids in three of the four vehicle segments studied — compact SUV/crossover, medium SUV/crossover and truck, AAA said. In 2025, EVs fared worse against gasoline vehicles and hybrids before catching up this year as fuel prices soared. | Automotive News ($)

U.S. car shoppers have been slow to warm back up to electric vehicles since a key federal subsidy expired a year ago, despite persistently high gas prices, while Europeans have flocked to the cars. EV sales in the U.S. are down 30.7% this year through ‌September, according to research firm Motor Intelligence, accounting for just 6% of overall sales. That's less than the 8.5% at this time a year ago, when buyers rushed to beat the expiration of a $7,500 federal tax credit. In Europe, however, buyers have flocked to electrics for relief from higher fuel prices stemming from the war in Iran. EVs accounted for 23.2% of the European auto market this year through September, up from 17.7% a year earlier, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association (ACEA). The divergence in the two markets is due in part to key policy differences between the two regions. In Europe, automakers continue to roll out electric models to meet ⁠stringent tailpipe-emissions regulations, and Chinese automakers have stormed the European market with a slew of imported EVs. | Reuters ($)

Electric-vehicle sales in the U.S. are down by half compared with last year. The EV charging industry evidently didn’t get the memo. Charging companies in the U.S. are on track to install about as many public EV plugs this year as in 2025, the industry’s record high. By adding thousands of new plugs this year, charging executives say they aim to serve longtime EV owners looking for easier road trips as well as buyers flocking to used EVs—while prepping infrastructure for a future day when EV demand might bounce back. Optimism has been in short supply for the EV industry since President Trump axed tax credits and fuel-economy regulations aimed at moving Americans away from gas-powered cars. Automakers have backed away from their most ambitious pro-EV goals, canceling models and axing planned ones, while listing multibillion-dollar write-downs as they retool their investments and pivot back to gas. Even so, the U.S. by early October added nearly 2,000 charging stations with more than 12,000 plugs, according to charging-industry data firm Paren. That is roughly on pace with last year, which ended with 3,885 new charging stations added with 19,839 plugs. The U.S. now has more than 80,000 public fast-charging plugs, data shows. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Battery packs in EVs consist of numerous interconnected cells that do not age at the same rate. In conventional architectures, a particularly weak cell can therefore limit the usable capacity and lifespan of the entire pack. This is precisely where a new study by researchers from Chalmers University of Technology comes in. It examines so-called reconfigurable battery packs, in which switches and control systems can alter the wiring of individual cells or cell groups. Weaker cells can thus be selectively bypassed while the remaining capacity continues to be used. In the most advanced case, where each cell can be controlled individually, simulations show that the lifespan of certain high-voltage vehicles can be extended by more than 20 per cent. According to the study, the potential is particularly significant for electric trucks and long-range electric cars with many cells connected in series. | Electrive

Driver: "My EV battery is on fire!" Passenger: "Push that big red button on the dash. Dump the battery on the road!" Driver: "Thank goodness for innovation!" | CarScoops

🇨🇳 China

From robot-heavy factories to using artificial intelligence to design cars, automakers are speeding to catch up with China's lightning-fast development of low-price vehicles as the manufacturing giant's vehicle production grows rapidly and globally. Experts at the Automotive News Congress in Detroit last week warned of China's creeping dominance in Europe, Africa, South America and now Canada and Mexico — cutting into business once enjoyed by U.S. automakers and threatening to push Ford Motor Company, General Motors and Stellantis from the global stage. "I would say we're America's car company, but we do most of our business outside of the U.S.," said Ford CEO Jim Farley to a crowd of top industry decision-makers on Sept. 29. "And the competitive threat from China really requires a complete reinvention." If Chinese automakers are allowed into the United States, Mobility Global analysts have predicted those companies could claim 11% of the market by 2038 — squeezing already slim profit margins for legacy makers. While bipartisan members of Congress push to ban the sale and production of Chinese cars in the United States, the leaders of the Detroit Three automakers recognize that won't shield them from competition. Elected officials and industry leaders have raised concerns about China gaining near-monopoly status in the global auto industry. Because of the overlap in manufacturing and technology breakthroughs between vehicles and defense equipment such as drones, that could pave the way for Chinese military dominance as well. | The Detroit News ($)

China’s population will fall below the U.S.’s in about a century, Jesús Fernandez-Villaverde of the University of Pennsylvania, who specializes in demographics, calculates. He assumes both will keep their current age-specific fertility and mortality rates and net immigration of zero. The result: Around 2128, China’s population, now 1.4 billion, will fall to 174 million while the U.S. population now 342 million, falls to just above 174 million. | X

The number one challenge to expansion for BYD is geopolitics, Stella Li, BYD’s executive vice president, said on Thursday, ‌months after the Chinese company's chairman said it aims to become the world’s largest automaker within five years. "When we do business, we want to do something and have certainty and visibility then we can control, and then we can invest. But ⁠with geopolitics, you never understand what’s the angle and what they are doing," said Li at the Milken Institute Asia Summit in Singapore. Li said the company has decided to not sell passenger cars in the U.S. for now despite being in the U.S. for "a long time" as it is "complicated." "We don’t have clarity, visibility and stability there, so we’re saying let's hold and not to ‌go ⁠to the U.S. for passenger cars at this moment." | Reuters ($)

There’s been a lot of doom and gloom from the auto industry lately when the subject of China comes up. Automaker CEOs, in particular, warn that allowing low-cost, high-tech Chinese electric vehicles to be sold in the U.S. would effectively spell the end of their businesses. Hyundai Motor Company CEO José Muñoz is not as pessimistic as some of his counterparts. He says he’s confident the right mix of protectionist policies and improvements on the product side can keep China at bay. Even though his company is feeling the squeeze from China, Muñoz isn’t ready to throw in the towel. But he also acknowledges that China could flood the US with affordable imports without established protections in place. “As long as there is a level playing field for everybody,” Muñoz said at the reveal of the new 2027 Hyundai Tucson in New York City last week. “That’s all we ask, right? We compete everywhere in the world, and then we have seen that in the markets where that position is respected, so it’s really good for us.” Chinese automakers have expanded rapidly in Europe, gobbling up market share and damaging domestic brands like Volkswagen, Volvo Cars, and Mercedes-Benz by offering vehicles at much lower prices. U.S. automakers warn the same could be true for them if China were allowed to import its vehicles here. “We compete everywhere in the world, and then we have seen that in the markets where that position is respected, so it’s really good for us.” | The Verge ($)

Volvo Cars, a Swedish carmaker owned by a Chinese company that has a factory and material sales in the U.S., is no stranger to straddling geopolitical divides. But it is endeavoring its biggest balancing act yet. After years of challenges, with more pain on the way, Volvo’s plan for reviving its fortunes rests on a new generation of cars that will lean in to both its Chinese ownership and the American consumer—even as Congress debates a legislative ban on Chinese cars. In a recent interview, veteran Chief Executive Håkan Samuelsson told The Wall Street Journal that Volvo wants to lower costs by sharing more parts with Geely, its majority owner, while also protecting cars sold in the West from being accessed by China. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

America’s automakers enjoy the refuge of an anti-Chinese wall. But so do foreign, non-Chinese automakers who also sell vehicles in America, especially if they manufacture here. This means Chinese competition is exerting pressure on U.S. dealer lots already; indirectly, yes, but it’s likely to intensify. Detroit’s defensive moat is less impenetrable than it might seem. This point was made recently, if also indirectly, by none other than Paul Jacobson, General Motors’ chief financial officer, at a recent conference: "I think the United States is the most lucrative auto market in the world. And that’s evidenced by what you see many competitors doing in terms of aiming more capacity. I think that’s been a defense and a pivot away from some of what we’ve seen of Chinese competition throughout the world. And the U.S. becomes a little bit of a safe haven." | Bloomberg ($)

Geely Automobile Holdings plans to launch in Canada next year, positioning it to be the first Chinese mass market electric vehicle maker to establish a presence in the North American market. The carmaker has begun setting up a retail and service network in the country ahead of the 2027 start, according to a company statement Friday. Geely, which owns premium EV brands including Zeekr International and Lynk & Co as well as more affordable offerings, didn’t specify a start date for sales or which models would be available. The move marks a significant step after Ottawa and Beijing reached an agreement in January to allow a limited number of Chinese EV exports to Canada. As trade disputes deepen with the U.S., Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s administration is looking to forge new alliances, including by allowing Chinese automakers in and hoping to attract investments from them. | Bloomberg ($)

Stellantis said the spread of cars partially assembled in China threatens South America’s auto supply chain, with its regional chief warning that the company would need only about 10% of its roughly 35,000 workers in the region if it adopted the same model. Herlander Zola dos Santos, President of Stellantis for South America, made the remarks at a lunch with reporters in São Paulo on Tuesday. “Today, we at Stellantis employ around 35,000 people in South America,” Zola said. “If this business model changed completely, 10% of this workforce would be enough.” That implies about 31,500 jobs that a kit-only operation would not need, a figure Zola did not state himself. “If this model really starts to migrate to CKD and SKD, this is the chain that is at risk in this business,” he said, referring to vehicles shipped as completely knocked-down and semi-knocked-down kits. He went further on what the current rules reward. "Given what we have today, if nothing is done, it is better to produce cars in China, take them apart and bring them here,” Zola said. Chinese carmakers BYD and Great Wall Motor Co., Ltd. (GWM) have opened plants in Brazil that put together vehicles from kits made in China, and both have gained market share quickly. Zola said Stellantis itself could import kits if that proves the most competitive option, possibly through its Chinese partners Leapmotor and Dongfeng. | EV

Britain faces a finely balanced choice over whether to follow the EU in imposing tariffs on Chinese EVs, as it seeks closer post-Brexit ties while risking retaliation from Beijing. Chinese automakers are rapidly gaining ground in Britain.Analysts warn EV tariffs alone may not curb China’s advance, with hybrid sales also surging and Chinese brands benefiting from advantages in cost, supply chains and product development. | CNBC

No big industrialized economy has embraced Chinese cars more enthusiastically than the U.K., where Brits are being won over by the combination of affordable prices with status-signaling styling and technology. The Jaecoo 7, made by China’s Chery Automobile, was Britain’s bestselling vehicle in September, an important sales month in the U.K. In the first half of 2026, almost every sixth car sold in Britain bore a Chinese brand, according to Schmidt Automotive Research, a higher proportion than in any other European country except Norway. Britain’s vehicle imports from China have almost doubled this year compared with the same period in 2025. Only Russia and Brazil—developing economies that mostly buy cheaper models—have imported more. Cratering sales in China, the world’s largest car market, have encouraged its manufacturers to look for growth overseas. The U.K., a cradle of the car industry, showcases what could happen in America if Chinese cars were let in. “Range Over!” began a press release trumpeting the Jaecoo’s early sales success, winking at its likeness to the Range Rover Evoque. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

Britain is weighing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles that could match the EU's levies to avoid being excluded from the bloc's "Made in Europe" local content rules. U.K. officials determined that being dropped from the Made in Europe mechanism would be far more damaging than risking Chinese retaliation against JLR. Chinese brands including BYD, MG and JAECOO UK's CHERY-owned models captured 23 percent of British new-car sales in September, with the Jaecoo 7 the country's top-selling model. | Automotive News ($)

Pitcher Partners has published their September 2026 "Australian Listed Dealer Comparison" publication, and it's shocking to see how dramatically the Chinese automakers have taken market share down under. | Pitcher Partners

Chinese-made cars accounted for more than four in every five electric vehicles purchased by Australian drivers since February, when U.S. attacks on Iran caused petrol and diesel prices to spike and created an unprecedented surge in EV sales. More than 180,000 battery electric vehicles were sold in Australia in the first nine months of 2026, a 136 per cent year-on-year increase driven by high fuel costs, generous government tax breaks and a flood of cheap Chinese brands including BYD and MG. About 85 percent of the EVs sold in 2026 were made in Chinese factories, while more than half of the vehicles sold this year were purely Chinese brands, many of which were unknown to Australian consumers less than five years ago. Chinese brands have established near-total dominance at the cheaper end of the market and now account for 17 of the top 20 cheapest cars available in Australia. BYD’s Atto 1 is the cheapest car on the Australian market, regardless of fuel type. | Financial Review

The European Union said China will slash millions of hybrid car exports to the bloc, offering a potential trade detente before EU leaders meet to discuss further action against Beijing. The EU's trade chief, Maroš Šefčovič, said the deal will span the next four years, but neither side offered details of how they will moderate hybrid exports. China will also expand market access for some EU products and work to accelerate licenses for rare earth exports, which Europe needs to build modern technology. | Bloomberg ($)

Renault and Geely finalized a joint venture in November 2025 giving Geely access to Renault's Curitiba factory and dealer network in exchange for platform technology. Chinese automakers captured 28 percent of Brazil's passenger car sales in August, up from roughly 12 percent a year earlier, forcing established players to adapt quickly. Rising tariffs on imported kits, set to reach 35 percent, could erode the cost advantages Chinese automakers have relied on, potentially leveling competition for locally assembled vehicles. | Automotive News ($)

🤖 Autonomy

Humans can be a frisky bunch, and it wasn’t very long after Tesla Autopilot started letting drivers go hands-free before people decided to post footage of themselves having sex from the driver’s seat. Recently, The San Francisco Standard interviewed multiple people who claimed to have had sex in robotaxis belonging to General Motors’ now-defunct Cruise. “There’s no one to tell you, ‘You can’t do that.’ It gets to the point where you’re more and more and more comfortable, and if you’re with someone, like a more serious partner, it can escalate to other activities,” one man told SF Standard. The interiors of vehicles has been sexualized and appropriated for sex since forever in popular culture. You can see it in movies, you can see it in lyrics, you can see it in photography,” said Alexandros Rouchitsas, a human factors/UX researcher and one of the organizers of a recent workshop, “Love in Traffic,” that brought researchers from academia and industry together in late September in Sweden to consider how design can help the problem. One difference between a robotaxi and a human-driven ride is the removal of the social obligation to interact with a human driver. There’s no need to make small talk, and you won’t have to listen to someone’s terrible opinion, which can lead to riders assuming far more privacy than the cameras and ridership terms and conditions provide. That’s a lesson that a pair of teens who hired a Waymo, spent their ride getting drunk, and shot gel beads out the windows learned the hard way this summer. | ARS Technica

Elon Musk says the main thing holding back Tesla Robotaxi’s night hours is that the cars have a hard time seeing pets in the dark. His example was “grey kittens on grey tarmac.” That’s a low-light, low-contrast detection problem, which is the textbook weakness of cameras and the exact thing lidar and radar handle. Musk has spent years calling those sensors a “crutch” and a “fool’s errand.” | Electrek

Waymo, the autonomous vehicle technology company under Google parent Alphabet, closed a $5 billion loan from a series of high-profile lenders, including PIMCO, Blackstone, and Sixth Street. The debt financing — Waymo’s first — comes as the company accelerates its commercial expansion within existing cities while pushing into new markets in the United States, Europe, and Japan. Waymo described the debt financing as an important step in its evolution into a “scaling commercial enterprise.” Until now, Waymo has relied on capital from its parent company and outside investors. In February, Waymo raised $16 billion in equity from investors that pushed its valuation to $126 billion. The company raised $5.6 billion in a Series C funding round in 2024, $2.5 billion in 2021, and $3.2 billion in 2020. | TechCrunch ($)

Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa said on Friday, Oct. 9 that the automaker's partnership with British startup Wayve could help slash development times and costs for advanced driver-assistance systems as carmakers race to bring autonomous features to market. Speaking alongside Wayve CEO Alex Kendall at the Wave technology event in Turin, Filosa said scale would be crucial to making hands-free driving affordable and accelerating adoption. "So as long as penetration follows the path that we believe is going to happen massively … automotive scale, which is one of the complementary assets that we bring to Alex, for instance, will decrease costs, which is very important, obviously," Filosa said, referring to so-called level 2++ driving assistance technology, which allows for hands-off driving while still requiring driver supervision. | The Detroit News ($)

Autonomous Vehicle (AV) companies claiming that safety is a solved problem are not telling the whole story. The fine print of their safety studies overwhelms their public relations headlines. AV safety is still very much an open question. Worse, studies are not answering the question that matters. A rearview mirror accounting of how safety happened to turn out for older versions of technology is not predictive of safety outcomes for dramatically larger deployments of newer technology. The safety studies being used to justify expanding robotaxi fleets don’t offer an answer to the most relevant question of how safe those newer, bigger fleets will be. | AV Safety

🦾 Robotics

AI-powered robots are likely to dominate the next phase in the rapid technological transformation of warfare, and Ukraine cannot afford to debate the societal risks before pursuing such autonomous weapons, the country’s former defense minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, said in an interview. “The main thing for Ukraine is to survive and preserve our independence,” Fedorov, an architect of Ukraine’s drone program, told The Washington Post. “And we need technology to defeat the Russians.” While officials worldwide worry about the potential risks of artificial intelligence, including the prospect that rogue AI agents could kill humans, Fedorov said Ukraine was already confronting its own extinction at the hands of Russia and cannot afford to slow or restrict AI on the front lines. “Our biggest concern is that our enemy, Russia, together with its allies, will move faster toward AI robots; they will build drones without communication links, fully autonomous ones,” he said. “Once the first robots are deployed, it’s basically inevitable and irreversible.” “The question,” Fedorov continued, “is who will be the first to start using this, who will regulate its use and how.” But regulation, he said, must come afterward, and the priority for Ukraine is to “get there first, gain the advantage and dictate the rules of the game.” | The Washington Post ($)

Walmart has relied for years on more than 140,000 warehouse workers to unload trucks, forklift pallets of merchandise into warehouses, sort and store the goods on towering racks, then reverse the entire flow to send them out to stores and homes. It isn’t an easy job. A worker might walk 20,000 steps a shift. It also isn’t all that complicated—unless you try to program robots to do it. Consider the seemingly simple task called “breakpack”—removing items from cardboard boxes to send out individually. It’s a no-brainer for Walmart’s humans. But it turned into one of the many challenges bedeviling the company’s decade-long, multibillion-dollar quest to automate its warehouses. Walmart and the robotics companies it hired to help searched in vain for a way to choreograph robots to sort merchandise into bins while zipping past warehouse workers, testing technology that either didn’t work or cost too much. Eventually, they designed small robots on wheels with motion and obstacle sensors and are now installing them in more than a dozen warehouses. “ We are kind of in this peak complexity,” said Rob Montgomery, head of supply-chain operations for Walmart U.S., who is overseeing the automation transition now under way at most of Walmart’s roughly 200 U.S. supply-chain buildings. Problems have multiplied. The cardboard shipping boxes Walmart has used for years are too big for the automated systems. The miniature robots that shuttle goods break down too often. The systems can’t accommodate some oversize products, such as big bags of dog food. Many of the nation’s largest retailers are struggling through similar automation transitions as pressure grows to boost sales and ship merchandise to homes faster without spending a fortune on additional workers or facilities. The rapid growth of Amazon—which is ahead of its retail rivals on automation and earlier this year surpassed Walmart to become the largest U.S. company by annual revenue—has dialed up the urgency. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

🤖 Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Global call center headcount is 5.3% below its December 2023 peak, ending more than a decade of growth. It has fallen year over year for eight straight quarters, a decline that started in high-income countries and coincided with the rise of AI chatbots. Call center support is falling behind other white-collar work in the same countries. Before ChatGPT, call-center headcount tracked other office and administrative roles in middle-income countries. After its launch, however, call centers have stalled or declined while the rest of white-collar work has continued to grow. | Revelio Labs

A month after Meta’s launch of Muse, the personal agent that quickly turned into a viral sensation, a group of companies is coming together to try to simplify the process of bringing the technology into the business world. Meta, Walmart, Stripe and a handful of other companies are publishing what they’re calling a “personal agent protocol.” It’s an open standard meant to dictate how artificial intelligence agents can interact with businesses. Enterprise AI startup Sierra, co-founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, is part of the group. Taylor, who’s also chairman of OpenAI and is leading the initiative, told CNBC in an interview that companies have a lot of work to do to figure out how and when personal agents are able to access information. For the new standard, Taylor compared it with the experience of logging into other websites with Google or Facebook credentials, technology he worked on when he was tech chief at Facebook. He said the practice will help with authentication so that businesses know if they’re dealing with a bot, and will provide visibility into what personal agents are actually doing through these websites. David Singleton, vice president of engineering and consumer products at Meta Superintelligence Labs and former technology chief at Stripe, highlighted security. In order for agents to work well, he said, customers need to share credit card and personal information, and the new standard creates some level of visibility and control. | CNBC ($)

⚓️ Marine

The United States might be losing another war — one that could define the country’s security into the next century. Military and commercial power are intertwined. Maritime power, in particular, has always played a crucial part in establishing and maintaining commercial power. America is learning this lesson the hard way. For hundreds of years, the countries that have ruled the waves have ruled the world, as the 19th-century American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan put it. In an age of drones, we can be forgiven for thinking this time has ended. Yet today, more than 80 percent of global trade is still transported by ships. America has all but lost the ability to build them. A country that manufactured 5 percent of the world’s fleet by tonnage and that dominated the global maritime industry in the 1970s makes 0.2 percent of the world’s fleet by tonnage today. How did we get here? During the Reagan era, U.S. policymakers decided to stop supporting commercial shipping, which quickly migrated to other countries like Japan and South Korea. Meanwhile, the defense arm of the naval industry shrank after the post-Cold War defense cuts of the 1990s. At the same time, the Chinese decided to make shipbuilding and maritime industries a strategic priority, tripling production relative to the United States over the past two decades. The Chinese now dominate in terms of sheer production capacity and their global market share of shipbuilding, thanks to decades of state support. In 2006, the government named shipbuilding as one of the seven strategic industries over which state-owned Chinese enterprises had to maintain control. By 2015, Beijing identified shipbuilding as one of 10 priority sectors through which China would dominate global commerce. | The New York Times ($)

President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a nearly $7 billion deal with a defense firm founded by one of his most prominent political supporters to expedite submarine shipbuilding, an unexpected arrangement that thrusts a largely autonomous-weapons company into a more traditional defense manufacturing role. During an address at the industrial hub in Sparrows Point in Maryland, Trump said the new project with Anduril Industries will transform the Baltimore-area port site into “one of the most significant shipyards” in the world. "Right here in Sparrows Point, you’ll build the next generation of American submarines, including autonomous subs, torpedo tubes, and critical components for our cutting-edge Virginia-class attack submarines — the greatest and quietest ever built,” Trump said. The deal is backed by a $3.7 billion investment from Anduril coupled with a $2.9 billion US Navy contract, Trump added. He also said that U.S. taxpayers “will receive a 40 percent stake in the new shipyard,” without providing specifics of the potential equity arrangement. | The Washington Post ($)

Anduril Industries and the U.S. Navy announced Tuesday their plans to spend $6.6 billion to build a software-run shipyard within the Port Of Baltimore in Maryland. The shipyard, dubbed Arsenal-2, will span two million square feet and manufacture components for Virginia-class submarines to refit the Navy’s fleet. The site will also create over 3,100 jobs by 2034, according to the press release. Permitting and site preparation is set to “begin immediately,” and construction is expected to commence as soon as Anduril receives the required approvals for the shipyard. Operations are anticipated to come online in 2030. | ManufacturingDive

🛴 Micromobility

Authorities are cracking down on the latest teenage craze wreaking havoc in communities across the US: e-bikes. Zipping along at up to 28 miles an hour, e-bikes and similar vehicles have become fixtures on American roads in recent years. But as they have caught on with younger riders, the dangerous — and sometimes deadly — consequences of reckless riding have been magnified. E-bikes were responsible for more than 155,000 emergency room visits from 2017 through 2024, as well as over 300 deaths, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. In California alone, the number of injuries from e-bike collisions rose from two in 2020 to 1,566 in 2024, according to a study by the University of California, San Diego. | Bloomberg ($)

A rampant species has taken over the urban jungles of Latin America. Small, noisy and remarkably good at squeezing into tight spaces, motorcycles have found the crowded streets of Bogotá, São Paulo and Mexico City an accommodating habitat. They swarm between cars at traffic lights, crowd pavements and are the trusty steeds of delivery riders. They are also multiplying fast: annual motorcycle sales across the region doubled from 3m in 2019 to almost 6m last year. In 2010 there were just five registered motorcycles for every 100 people; by 2024 there were 14. Mexico’s motorcycle fleet more than quadrupled in the decade to 2025, from 2.6m to 10.5m. Motorbikes are a cheap and easy way to weave through horribly congested cities. As public transport has failed to keep pace with rapid, and often informal, urban sprawl, motorcycles have filled the gap. Their buyers are disproportionately young, poor and male. Many work as couriers. Brazil had 351,000 motorcycle gig workers in 2024, 66% more than two years earlier. In Mexico an industry group estimates that seven in ten motorcycles sold in 2023 were bought for work, including for deliveries and for use as motorcycle taxis. Governments have added fuel to the boom by encouraging their use, in part to support growing domestic industries. In Colombia, where more than 90% of motorcycles sold are assembled locally, bikes of up to 125cc are exempt from vehicle tax; none pays any road tolls. In June Brazil launched subsidised loans for delivery workers to buy locally made bikes. | The Economist ($)

✈️ Aviation & Space

Renault is one of a number of companies in the struggling auto sector seeking tie-ups in defence, from General Motors in the U.S. to Volkswagen in Germany. Suppliers including Continental, FORVIA and Valeo are doing the same. Some have turned to defence collaborations to revive ailing factories or to help them diversify amid sluggish consumer demand. Others, including Renault, have been urged by governments to help accelerate national weapons manufacturing. Renault seeks to bring mass production to drones, typically made in small runs by specialists, using techniques honed in an industry that turns out tens of millions of cars a year and which has been forced by constant crises to find new ways to cut costs. | Financial Times ($)

SpaceX reached a deal to buy cellular spectrum licenses from investment firm Grain Management, its biggest move yet into a wireless market dominated by traditional telecom companies. The Elon Musk-led space company will pay about $8 billion in cash for the assets, according to people familiar with the matter. The U.S. licenses, which are in the 800-megahertz band, are tailored for wireless service from cellphone towers rather than satellites. The spectrum could serve SpaceX’s stated ambition of moving its Starlink satellite service beyond broadband into the wireless market to compete with the likes of AT&T and Verizon. U.S. cellphone carrier stocks sank on the news. The Federal Communications Commission earlier this week approved SpaceX’s bid to launch up to 15,000 satellites dedicated to mobile service. The company said that upon FCC approval of the spectrum purchase, it will combine the growing constellation with “an advanced terrestrial deployment” to connect devices. It said its new spectrum will help cover places satellite links can’t reach, including inside buildings. | The Wall Street Journal ($)

🚘 Car of the Week

Our Automotive Ventures “Car of the Week”: a 1984 Lamborghini Countach 5000 S. | Broad Arrow

📰 In The News

📢 Steve was on the cover of Automotive News. | Automotive News ($)

📢 Steve was quoted in The Detroit News: Automotive venture capitalist Steve Greenfield said U.S. companies have less incentive to invest in EVs, which are performing poorly in the United States but are still expected to lead global auto sales in the future. "How do I cater to shareholders who want me to deliver quarterly results when my competition is playing an entirely different game and has the luxury of looking at very long timelines and applying tremendous pressure towards achieving those goals?" said Greenfield of Automotive Ventures. "An automaker that's public that's catering to that quarterly pressure is not going to be able to think long term and say, OK, what would I do if I was given this gift where I can harvest cash flows in the short term to make big strategic bets that might be able to leapfrog the Chinese?" he later added. "My fear is that we aren't positioning the domestic automakers to be able to make those bets." | The Detroit News ($)

📢 Automotive Ventures portfolio company Privacy4Cars was issued two new patents. | Privacy4Cars

📢 Steve caught up with the team at the Virginia Automobile Dealers Association (VADA) to discuss the industry. | VADA

📢 On this week's Automotive Ventures "Future of Automotive" segment on CBT News, a question about one of America’s most important industries, and whether it’s ready for what’s coming next. Because perhaps no business depends on predicting the future more than the auto industry. | CBT News ($)

👀 Automotive Ventures Company to Watch

LoanBridge delivers vehicle event intelligence that helps teams act faster and waste less time. Near-real-time alerts surface impounds, tows, theft, and resale activity from a unique nationwide data mix. Then Voice AI verifies the details automatically, so your team moves from alert to recovery faster. | LoanBridge