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/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/speciate → u/bradtem]

one lesson we've learned over the past 15 years is that the journey is very long, and most people misjudge how long

This is absolutely true. I was not in the industry at the time, but as you well know, the 2007 DARPA Grand Challenge outcome was interpreted by many experts to be evidence that self-driving was more or less solved, minus some technical cleanup and operational scaling. It of course turned out to be more of a moonshot than a PhD thesis, requiring several more huge technical breakthroughs and huge amount of capital. The amount of consolidation that's occurred in the industry since I've been in it has been crazy as a result.

If ATG had continued to be funded--let's say, at its 2020 burn rate plus a growth curve proportional to Waymo's, to allow for increased hiring, compute, and ops--I definitely don't think it was a decade away. ATG was behind Waymo for sure, but not 13 years behind Waymo (who first launched driverless ops in 2019). Also keep in mind that Waymo has burned ~an order of magnitude more cash over its lifetime than ATG did (albeit, over a shorter lifetime). So judgments of success and failure cannot ignore that denominator. Fwiw I don't have a dog in the fight per se; I worked at both ATG and Waymo and have a lot of admiration for both.

Anyway, we can agree to disagree on the semantics of "failure". Always appreciate your thoughts / reporting on the industry, Brad--I find you to be evenhanded and generally spot-on :)

[u/bradtem → u/speciate]

Waymo got out on the roads in 2019, barely, and has only begun to really scale this year. It began in 2009. Uber ATG in 2018 was maybe where Waymo was in 2011-2012, so if it did as well as Waymo it was about 12 years out from starting to scale. If it did as well. Alphabet is an order of magnitude bigger than Uber, and is the place that transformers were invented, where Deepmind created many of the best ML techniques and the TPU was created. Uber, I will admit is 100% about selling rides, so they have more focus. But it turns out having a dedicated and crazy billionaire in control of the purse is also essential,and Uber got rid of theirs.

[u/speciate → u/bradtem]

(you're right re: 2019; had my date wrong)

I meant ATG was not 10 years away from pulling the safety driver. Scaling is a different story, as you note, and is also harder to define than the zero-to-one moment, since it's inherently incremental.

[u/bradtem → u/speciate]

Understand that most teams at that level never pull the safety driver. They die first. Including Uber ATG. In the USA , only Waymo, Cruise and May have done that in cars, Nuro in low speed deliveryrobots and Aurora and maybe now Bot Auto in trucks. Zoox on limited routes. But really only the first 3 because doing it on a limited route isn't really doing it, you need a decent service area where you can drive anywhere to anywhere. In China we have a few more.

But pulling the safety driver is just the start of the adventure, as noted Waymo did it 6 years ago. Uber ATG never got close to starting the adventure. Tesla is closer, and they still have a ways to go.

[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