Ride AI 2027 Is Coming Back to SF JAZZ. Early bird sale is live!
Plus, a banner week in trucking, Europe's first commercial robotaxi, and a cool gig at Waymo
Welcome to the Ride AI newsletter: The most comprehensive weekly digest of news and intelligence at the intersection of technology and transportation.
Today’s big news— we are headed back to SF JAZZ Center on April 7, 2027 for Ride AI 2027 and early bird tickets are live. All the good stuff follows below.
Ride AI Returns to SFJazz Center on April 7, 2027. $500 early-bird tickets through May 31
Ride AI is returning to the SF JAZZ Center on April 7, 2027! We’re going bigger and bolder next year, expanding the event to 500 invite-only leaders across the industry with additional vehicle exhibitions, activations and satellite meetups.
Applications for early access are now live on the Ride AI 2027 website. For approved participants, we’re offering special $500 early-bird pricing if you purchase by May 31. We expect GA tickets to land at $1,499 and we will sell out.
We’re also opening up partnership conversations for the 2027 event. If you’d like to discuss how to help shape the narrative and put your brand front and center in the AV zeitgeist, reach out here or drop me a note at mike@rideai.org.
Now, on to the week’s regularly scheduled programming from a packed news slate…..
Domestic News
With a hat tip to our friend Thomas Wasson at FreightWaves, Houston-based Bot Auto completed the first fully humanless, over-the-road commercial truckload in U.S. history, running a 231-mile freight load from northeast Houston to Hutchins, TX (just south of Dallas) overnight on April 29. The run was completed with no safety driver, no in-cab observer, and no remote operator. The shipment, booked through 3PL Ryan Transportation, arrived in under four hours and hit a tight delivery window. Bot Auto was founded in 2023 by Xiaodi Hou, employs 80 people, runs 12 tractors, and has raised $40M.
Axios then published the money shot a week later: per Bot Auto's own numbers, the Houston-Dallas humanless run costs $1.89 per mile vs. the industry's estimated $2.26 per mile for a human-driven truck (per ATRI), while collecting revenue equivalent to $2.70 per mile. "We're reaching the tipping point where we can make money," Hou told Axios. Goldman now projects the global autonomous trucking market will hit $560B by 2035, eclipsing the projected $415B robotaxi market.
NHTSA opened a Preliminary Evaluation into Uber's robotaxi partner Avride on May 8, flagging 16 crashes and one minor injury across Dallas and Austin. The Office of Defects Investigation said all 16 incidents tie back to "the competence of" Avride's automated driving system, which has struggled with lane changes, responding to slow or stopped vehicles, and recognizing stationary obstacles. NHTSA's language was quite direct, citing "inappropriate assertiveness and insufficient competence" and noting the behavior "may also constitute traffic safety violations."
Notably, every crash occurred with a trained safety operator behind the wheel. Avride, the Nebius-owned, formerly-Yandex AV unit, began offering rides on Uber in Dallas on December 3, 2025 and now operates approximately 200 vehicles. The probe is the first major regulatory shoe to drop on Uber's partnership-as-distribution model, and it lands two weeks after California's new rules — covered in last week's edition — formally extended traffic citation authority to AV operators.
Nuro received a modified California DMV driverless testing permit on May 5 that now covers the Lucid Gravity SUVs slated for Uber's premium robotaxi service. Per Lucid's Q1 earnings call the same day, 75 engineering vehicles have been delivered to Nuro and Uber, with testing actively underway across multiple U.S. cities. Lucid reiterated it remains on track for commercial robotaxi operations to begin in late 2026, though the company conceded those operations may not be driverless or may be otherwise limited depending on regulatory approvals.
A few permits still stand between the partnership and a paid driverless service: Nuro needs a driverless ride-hailing permit from the CPUC and a deployment permit from the DMV. For now, Nuro and Uber are running supervised testing, with Uber employees able to request a Lucid Gravity ride via the Uber app (safety operator on board). Uber's total “moneyball” commitment to Nuro now reportedly sits near $500M including milestone-based future investments.
Aurora had a pretty good week. On May 4, Aurora and Volvo Autonomous Solutions launched a new 200-mile autonomous lane between Dallas and Oklahoma City, running five days a week with the Volvo VNL Autonomous integrated with the Aurora Driver. Two days later, Aurora reported Q1 results with an EPS loss of $0.11 (slightly better than the $0.118 consensus), and confirmation that the company remains on track to deploy driverless trucks without a partner-required observer in Q2.
The bigger headline came in parallel: Aurora and Berkshire Hathaway-owned McLane Company announced an agreement to begin fully driverless commercial hauls between Dallas and Houston, with plans to expand to additional McLane distribution centers across the Sun Belt by year-end.
This one caught my eye as it is the first publicly known deployment of fully driverless long-haul trucks inside a core Berkshire Hathaway business. Buffett of course famously skipped the dot-com boom, only conceded he misjudged Amazon years after the fact, and has spent decades selling the Berkshire ethos as a refuge from tech’s jagged edges.. McLane signing off on autonomous Class 8 trucks running perishables to America's chain restaurants is pretty serious Omaha-coded validation for L4 trucking.
International News
Bloomberg profiled the first full month of operations at Verne, the Mate Rimac-backed startup running Europe's first commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb, Croatia. The service launched April 8 in partnership with Pony.ai (autonomy stack) and Uber (forthcoming app integration), using a fleet of 10 BAIC Arcfox Alpha T5 EVs equipped with Pony.ai's Gen-7 system. The service zone covers ~35 sq miles across central Zagreb including the airport. Rides are a flat €1.99 (~$2.33). About 300 riders have access; the waitlist is 4,000+ and growing.
A safety operator remains behind the wheel during this phase per Croatian regulations, with Verne targeting fully driverless operations by year-end pending approvals. Verne is now in permitting conversations with 11 cities across the EU, the UK, and the Middle East, with 30+ more under consideration.
No word yet on how this bodes for New York which famously has been dubbed “the Zagreb of America.”
Pony.ai reported on May 8 that daily paid robotaxi orders during China's Labor Day holiday (May 1–5) rose 544% year-over-year and 155% over the New Year holiday earlier this year. A standout proof point: in Guangzhou's Nansha district, Pony.ai deployed hundreds of robotaxis during peak departure windows (10pm-2am) across four consecutive nights of a major K-pop concert series at the Greater Bay Area Cultural and Sports Center, moving 3,000+ concertgoers and getting included in the local government's official post-event transportation plan.
The data lands as China's domestic permit freeze (covered last week) remains in effect after the March 31 Wuhan stall. Pony.ai is maintaining guidance to exceed its 3,000-vehicle fleet target by year-end and reports Q1 earnings on May 26. A separate Boston Consulting Group report cited in the release noted that more than half of first-time robotaxi riders surveyed in China showed a stronger preference for driverless rides over human-driven services after their initial trip.
In Other News…
Uber reported Q1 on May 6: revenue of $13.2B (+14% YoY), gross bookings of $53.7B (+25%), 3.6B trips (+20%), and non-GAAP EPS of $0.72 (+44%). The headline AV stat: autonomous mobility trips on the Uber platform grew 10x year-over-year, with the company now live with AVs in 8 cities and targeting up to 15 by year-end. Waymo alone is doing ~250,000 paid rides/week via Uber.
Tesla's FSD (Supervised) fleet crossed 10 billion cumulative miles on May 3 — the threshold Musk publicly set in January as the data volume needed for "safe unsupervised" driving. The fleet is now logging ~29 million miles per day. As Electrek's Fred Lambert is quick to note, Tesla still hasn't flipped the switch — and unsupervised FSD for customer vehicles remains pushed to Q4 2026 at the earliest.
Lime filed its S-1 for a Nasdaq IPO on May 8 under ticker "LIME" — $886.7M in 2025 revenue (+29% YoY), $59.3M net loss, ~$1B in current liabilities of which $675.8M comes due by year-end, and a "substantial doubt" going-concern disclosure that frames the IPO less as a growth flex than as a refinancing necessity. Goldman and JPM are leading; target valuation reportedly ~$2B.
Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga revealed at TechCrunch's StrictlyVC on May 1 that Uber wants to outfit its global driver fleet with sensor kits to collect real-world driving data for its AV partners. "The bottleneck is data," Naga said. Uber currently has 30+ AV partnerships and is building what it calls an "AV cloud."
The 2026 Tesla Model Y was the first vehicle to pass NHTSA's new ADAS pass/fail tests, clearing pedestrian AEB, lane-keeping, and blind spot evaluations under the updated NCAP framework. This is a solid narrative win that runs in parallel with the ongoing 3.2M-vehicle FSD engineering analysis NHTSA escalated in March.
Kodiak AI and Roehl Transport launched a Dallas-Houston autonomous freight service running four round-trips per week with the Kodiak Driver, with fully driverless operations targeted by year-end.
Coco Robotics wrapped 100+ delivery robots across South Beach, Wynwood, Brickell, and downtown Miami with brand campaigns from NVIDIA, Coca-Cola, BYLT and four others for F1 Miami weekend, turning a delivery fleet into an out-of-home media channel. In case you’re worried this wasn’t peak Miami enough, one of crypto’s largest conferences was also in town at the same time.
In Slow Boring, Catherine Sutton wrote “This Mother’s Day, let moms have Waymo.” While Matt Yglesias’s newsletter is about as friendly yuppie territory as normie media gets, it’s still something to see autonomous vehicles cross the chasm as a general punditry cultural phenomenon. Hats off to Catherine for such a well written piece.
Featured Job Post
Editor’s Note: We’re adding a new section to Ride AI, highlighting one job posting each week that we think will be interesting to this community and is microcosmic of trends in the broader zeitgeist.
We’re also open to sponsored job listings here– to get in touch about a featured job opportunity, email mike@rideai.org
Product Manager, Pickup and Dropoff Systems, Waymo
Pickup and dropoff is the most underrated problem in autonomous ride-hail. It's the moment the technology stops being a demo and becomes a true service.
Owning that roadmap means owning the product surface that determines whether a ride feels magical or merely mundane, across millions of trips, every market, and the company's coming push into goods delivery. Can’t think of too many cooler product gigs in the industry.
Thanks so much for reading. If you have any ideas about what you’d like to see at Ride AI 2027, please give me a shout. Can’t wait to see you all next year!