Kodiak just signed a deal to haul freight for IKEA in our self-driving trucks!
At Forbes, Ed Garsten has a great article situating this latest news in the context of Kodiak’s ever-expanding commercial business, hauling freight coast-to-coast. Kodiak has been on a roll.
One of the overlooked aspects of a big win like this is just how much it says about Kodiak’s ability to work with large multinational corporations. Companies like IKEA take their responsibilities to stakeholders – workers, communities, vendors – seriously. These companies typically have a deep set of partner requirements that new partners like Kodiak must meet. Kodiak’s ability to qualify to carry freight for IKEA speaks volumes about the robustness of our performance.
Our purpose-built AV, the Origin, is on track for production! While we eagerly await its arrival for commercial use in the coming months, you may see a human-operated Origin prototype driving on the streets of SF. đ
I worked on the Origin when I was at Cruise and the vehicle was in pretty early stages. I spent a chilly December week at GM’s Milford Proving Grounds last year, getting the Origin moving autonomously.
If the Origin really is on the road in San Francisco now, or in the near future (the tweet is a little ambiguous), that is awesome progress by Cruise.
The company is on a roll. Eventually, hopefully in 2023, I will be so excited to take my first ride as a paying passenger in the Origin.
The article features a table of 14 self-driving-related companies that went public, ranging from Quanergy (down 99% since listing) to Arbe (“only” down 50% since listing). For comparison, the Nasdaq is down 35% from its high at the beginning of the calendar year.
On bright side, the article notes that “VCs are still investing.”
Maybe private market investment isn’t as robust as a year or two ago, and the term URINO made me chuckle, but for a startup cash is oxygen. Oxygen is easier to come by in the private markets than the public markets this year.
In a down market, it’s often easier to be private than public, as the relentless and public downward march of a company’s stock price can depress employees and potential new investors.
A year ago, multi-billion dollar valuations on zero revenue, and good-as-cash equity grants to employees, were pretty awesome. In 2022, maybe not so much.
I just watched this terrific tech talk from Lucid Motors CEO Peter Rawlinson. He does a great job explaining both the basics of electric vehicle battery packs and also some of the tricks Lucid has turned in order to push the technology forward.
Rawlinson incorporates just enough basic physics to ground the explanations in reality. I really appreciated that he took time to explain different approaches to battery pack configuration, what the trade-offs were between approaches, and why Lucid took the approach they did.
Kodiak Partners with Werner. The latest in a series of partnerships Kodiak has signed to haul freight for major industry shippers.
CEO Don Burnette in the New York Times. Don discusses where Kodiak is on the road to autonomy, and why trucking is such a good domain for driverless automation.
CTO Andreas Wendel on Austrian TV. In German, so I had to turn on YouTube’s auto-translated captions, which worked well. An interesting window onto how the world outside of Silicon Valley, and even the US, thinks about driverless technology.
GNSS (GPS) as part of Kodiak’s localization stack. Unlike urban self-driving companies, Kodiak uses lightweight, sparse maps for self-driving. These maps are fast to construct and rely much more on GPS than a high-definition mapping solution, which is almost entirely lidar-based.
Don Burnette on Fox Business. Starts with an interesting segue from rail to trucking, and then offers window onto how the investment community thinks about driverless technology. Also touches on recent Kodiak coast-to-coast freight routes.
Bloombergreports the demise of Amazon Scout, the delightfully-shaped last-mile sidewalk delivery robot.
Amazon spokesperson Alisa Carroll said the Scout team was being disbanded and would be offered new jobs in the organization. About 400 people were working on the project globally, according to the person, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter. A skeleton crew will continue to consider the idea of an autonomous robot, but the current iteration isnât working.
400 people is a pretty huge project – well beyond Amazon’s famous “two pizza” rule. That also raises the question of how big the remaining “skeleton crew” will be.
Bloomberg puts this news in the context of a broader Amazon initiative to reign in far-flung experiments, in light of slower growth in its core business. Amazon is winding down its health care service, among other ventures.
No news on whether Amazon Prime Air drone delivery might be next for cutbacks.
Within 90 days, @Cruise is going to be live in both Phoenix and Austinâin addition to San Franciscoâwith our awesome fully driverless service. I can't wait to serve our new riders.
Going forward, AVs are going to be scaling rapidly đ
I love a good Oliver Cameron tweet in my timeline đ
In another tweet, Kyle Vogt shared:
Our team is going from zero footprint in Austin (no test vehicles or maps) to driverless rides in ~90 days. Weâve been prepping for scaling the last couple years, glad to see that work paying off.
As a strategic investor, Pilot Flying J bring a lot of benefits. In addition to financial backing, the company will join Kodiak’s board of directors. We’ll also open an autonomous truckport near Atlanta, Georgia, to progress toward Kodiak’s goal of automating the “middle mile.”
Middle mile automation means hauling loads autonomously over the long distances between the “first mile” and the “last mile”. These points, at either end of a journey, involve complex urban driving, at which human truck drivers excel. The middle mile involves more routine long-distance highway driving.
The Kodiak partnership with Pilot Flying J demonstrates how well this model can serve human drivers, who are the backbone of Pilot Flying J’s customer base. Human truck drivers often have to spend long periods of time away from their families while hauling freight over that middle mile, from coast to coast. Drivers frequently sleeping in the back of their truck cabs, while their families are back home, in another state.
An autonomous middle mile would increase overall freight traffic, meaning even more local jobs for humans driving the first and last mile. Instead of having to haul freight coast-to-coast, spending days or weeks on the road, drivers could haul loads in the home area and spend every night with their families.
To bring this vision to fruition, Kodiak and Pilot Flying J will work together to efficiently hand off loads between Kodiak’s autonomous trucks and human-driven trucks covering the first and last mile.
That’s what makes this partnership, and what it could turn into, so exciting.
Lidar manufacturer Innoviz, based in Israel, just closed a big design win with Volkswagen. The headline number is $4 billion, to supply sensors to VW’s CARIAD technology division.
VW owns part of Argo, but I haven’t seen anything describing Argo’s involvement, or lack thereof, in this deal.
The announcement is a huge boost for Innoviz, however. Their stock is up about 50% from two weeks ago.
Baidu’s Apollo self-driving car program has received permission to operate fully driverlessly in Wuhan and Chongqing.
For a long time Apollo has been operating driverless robotaxis in Beijing, but with a “chaperone” in the front seat. This next phase will see riders travel in the cars completely unaccompanied.
David Silver 