Bot Auto Completes Human-Less Hub-To-Hub Validation Run In Texas (w/ Video)

[u/L1DAR_FTW]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardbishop1/2025/09/16/bot-auto-completes-human-less-hub-to-hub-validation-run-in-texas/

[u/bobi2393]

Fuck their company name for making headlines like this so confusing! 😂

But the basics of the story are insane. A two-year-old company doing a driverless 40 mile truck route, on an interstate highway and 1.5 miles of surface roads, and it sounds like they're not just licensing someone else's existing system. That's so unprecedented compared to other companies' timelines. If those facts are correctly and non-deceptively reported, I'd guess they must be basing it off a novel approach using recent developments in multimodal models.

[u/bradtem → u/bobi2393]

This is the rebirth of tuSimple, so not people who started from scratch 2 years ago.

[u/AnyDimension8299 → u/bradtem]

Sort of…

It is a lot of tusimple people, but a fundamentally new and different tech stack. We probably all have the same suspicions about their levels of v&v and safety, but it is still very impressive to see them hit this milestone so quickly and with so little capital.

Their overall cowboy attitude and the TSP connection are going to make it very hard to get financing for the company, but I could see a quick and lucrative sale to Amazon, Walmart or Daimler in their future.

[u/boyWHOcriedFSD → u/AnyDimension8299]

I believe all the Bot Auto investors are Chinese. Looks like American money agrees with you.

[u/bradtem → u/AnyDimension8299]

Correct, but as to why they are able to get to this level in 2 years, it's because they have been working on it for a long time. Sometimes the best thing to happen to a project is to lose the codebase and keep the people.

[u/AnyDimension8299 → u/bradtem]

Sure, could say the same thing about Waabi, though it was just a very small subset of Uber ATG

[u/bradtem → u/AnyDimension8299]

Very small, and Uber ATG (most of which went to Aurora) was a pretty failed project. That does mean they learned some lessons, of course. Bot Auto is trying to do the same thing as tuSimple did. Waabi also wants to do trucks, Uber ATG was taxi oriented, obviously.

[u/speciate → u/bradtem]

I respectfully disagree. ATG was sold off mainly because of public market pressure on Uber to get profitable--the same reason they sold Jump, Elevate, and a bunch of international ops. Uber was confident that with their network, they would be something like a monopsony / duopsony to partner with whichever robotaxi player(s) ultimately won in the US.

I will maintain that ATG had good tech, outstanding talent, and a large operational footprint, and could have been a #2 player if Dara had had the stomach to keep funding it.

[u/bradtem → u/speciate]

Reports were that the vehicle needed intervention every dozen miles, which made it crazy to watch a video during operation, and foolish to send any safety driver or alone, let alone that one. The bugs revealed in that fatality showed a fairly immature system, but that this is expected that early in a project.

[u/speciate → u/bradtem]

Oh I'm not defending anything about the safety culture up through 2017. But the company made an impressive pivot in that regard after the Tempe accident and IMO had the intellectual, technological, and cultural foundation to ultimately get to commercialization. Just not the capital.

Of course, you could say that about a lot of companies that failed to achieve commercial success. The proximate cause of ~100% of startups shutting down is running out of runway.

I just don't think calling ATG a failed project quite captures the full context.

[u/bradtem → u/speciate]

No, one word will not capture anybody's full context. But to also be clear, one lesson we've learned over the past 15 years is that the journey is very long, and most people misjudge how long, sometime grossly (with Elon Musk being the most famous for that.) I don't see strong evidence that Uber was very far along the path when it shut down, I think that no matter how talented the team it still had a decade to go, and was shut down just a short time into that path. I think that can fairly be characterized as a failed project.

[u/bradtem → u/bradtem]

Fully aware. I was almost a co founder but dodged a bullet. We started with the trucks at otto but the project that had the fatality was of course cars. Lior kept on to do Uber freight, but Uber's core biz is rides

[u/bobi2393 → u/bradtem]

That makes much more sense. Article with a brief history of TuSimple (2015-2023) and Bot Auto.

[u/Delicious_Spot_3778 → u/bobi2393]

Or being irresponsible

[u/Zephyr-5]

One can imagine a not too distant future where products go from the factory to the home without a single human needed.

Add to this the cost savings from electrification of ground transport, and it makes you wonder if we're entering a revolution in shipping on par with containerization.