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PODCAST

Autonomy Insiders

Daniel Abreu Marques

Autonomy Insiders is the weekly podcast for people who need a clear view of autonomous driving, not recycled takes.Each episode features interviews with leaders across the autonomy ecosystem: robotaxi operators, OEMs, platform players, regulators, and investors. We go deep on Europe and China, markets that are often under-covered, and we always connect back to the US so you can compare playbooks.We talk about what changes outcomes: deployment constraints, unit economics, partnership strategy, safety

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All Episodes

00:43:16

Inside Germany's Autonomous Driving Law: The Hurdle...

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/10/07

Germany wrote the world's first legal framework for driverless commercial service in 2021. Five years later, no operator holds a regular Level 4 approval. Why?Till Stegemann is a lawyer at Rödl in Berlin. He advises cities, transport operators and companies on autonomous mobility. He is a co-author of the German Federal Ministry of Transport's handbook "Autonomous Driving in Public Transport", a practical guide for cities and transit operators on bringing driverless vehicles into public transport.In

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00:45:14

Grab's Autonomous Vehicle Playbook for Singapore and...

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/10/01

Southeast Asia should be the last place AV's arrive. Dense, improvised traffic, monsoon rain and some of the cheapest driver labor in any middle-income region. Yet in April 2026, Punggol in northeast Singapore became the first residential neighborhood in Southeast Asia with a public autonomous passenger service.In this episode of Autonomy Insiders, Daniel Abreu Marques talks with Dominic Ong, General Manager Autonomous at Grab, who runs that program with WeRide and Singapore's Land Transport

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00:49:24

The UK's Autonomous Vehicle Permit Process Explained

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/09/23

London's first robotaxi service runs on the Uber app with a safety driver still behind the wheel. Here is every step a company must clear before the UK lets it take the driver out.Tym Syrytczyk co-founded the Institute for Driverless Transport (IFDT), an independent UK research body, and writes Self-Driving Insights. His recent piece on getting permission to run a robotaxi service in London is the plain-English explainer. This episode walks through it in order.The law comes first. Two Acts separate

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00:32:24

beti: The French AV Operator Behind WeRide's First...

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/09/16

Europe's first fully driverless commercial robobus runs in France. beti is a French operator of automated mobility networks, and a spin-off from Bertolami, a family coach business that has moved people around rural France for 75 years. CEO Benjamin Baudet explains the layer of the autonomous driving industry nobody photographs: the people and software that keep a driverless bus service running once the driver is gone.Before beti existed, the family studied its own routes and asked a simple question

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00:34:05

Robot Pit Stops for Robotaxis | George Kalligeros,...

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/09/09

Everyone measures robotaxi progress in miles driven. Almost nobody measures the hours the vehicle spends not driving. George Kalligeros, co-founder and CEO of Aseon Labs, is building a robot that compresses a depot into a single parking space.When a robotaxi drops below its charge threshold, it leaves the zone it is earning in, drives three to five miles to a depot, queues, gets serviced, and drives back. In San Francisco, a compact city with unusually good infrastructure, that is roughly two hours

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00:36:49

France's Driverless Transport Rules, Explained by the...

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/08/26

France already has a working legal framework for approving driverless public transport. Most of the industry has never heard of it. Aryldo Russo of GESTE Engineering takes it apart piece by piece.Getting a vehicle type approved in Europe is one problem. Getting a driverless service running on a specific street, with a control room behind it and a city that has to agree, is a completely different one. France solved the second problem by writing its rules into the transport code rather than vehicle

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00:45:19

How WeRide Built a Global Robotaxi Business in 9...

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/08/19

WeRide CEO Tony Han on where robotaxis actually break even, how the Uber partnership works in Abu Dhabi, and why Europe could be profitable from day one.Most robotaxi conversations cover one city, maybe one country. Tony Han runs a company that has tested or operated in more than 60 cities across 13 countries and holds autonomous driving permits in eight of them. Daniel Abreu Marques sits down with the co-founder and CEO of WeRide — the Nasdaq and Hong Kong dual-listed operator behind robotaxis,

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00:38:41

The Hidden Human Layer Making Autonomous Vehicles...

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/08/13

This video is sponsored by TaskUS.Autonomous fleets do not scale on software alone. The hidden advantage is the human layer and Nick Allen reveals how TaskUs powers the remote assistance, safety, validation, and emergency response that keeps robotaxis moving when the real world gets messy.If you think autonomy is just about removing people, this conversation flips that script. Daniel Abreu Marques sits down with Nick Allen, Head of Autonomous Vehicle Mobility and Logistics Solution at TaskUs, to

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00:44:17

The Robotaxi Industry's Real Bottleneck Is Not AI....

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/08/05

Everyone in autonomous driving argues about sensors, foundation models and remote assistance ratios. Almost nobody argues about the last ten meters. Bern Grush, CEO of Pudocity, on why the robotaxi industry's real constraint is not the AI. It is deciding where the vehicle stops.Safety is an engineering problem, and engineering problems eventually get solved. Pickup and drop-off is not. It is a spatial management problem, and every robotaxi competes for a fixed resource at the curb against every

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00:36:38

Public Trust in Autonomous Vehicles: What Europeans...

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/07/29

Europe's autonomous vehicle problem is not the technology. It is that almost nobody outside the industry knows what is coming. Guido Di Pasquale, Managing Director of PAVE Europe, on trust, education, and what actually decides whether Europe becomes a player or a market.Most AV coverage tracks the technology, the funding rounds and the deployment maps. This conversation covers the layer underneath all of it: whether the European public and European policymakers are anywhere near ready for what is

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00:50:08

EU Type Approval Explained: How Autonomous Vehicles...

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/07/22

Certification, type approval, homologation. Not the sexiest words in autonomous driving, but arguably the most decisive ones for whether AVs ever reach European roads at scale.The EU's Level 4 regulation (2022/1426) has existed for four years. As of today, not a single vehicle holds EU type approval under it. The common narrative blames slow regulation. My guest tells a different story: the framework is ready, the technical services are ready, and the real bottleneck sits inside the companies

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00:54:41

From AV Pilot to Public Service: What It Really Takes...

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/07/15

Most conversations about autonomous driving stop at the vehicle: the sensors, the AI, the next demo. But once an autonomous service carries real passengers in public transport, the hard part is not the car. It is everything around it.In Episode 19 of Autonomy Insiders, I sit down with Stefanie Berliner, who leads the DACH business at Holo, and Anders Toft, who runs operations. Holo operates autonomous vehicles for Ruter in Oslo and enables operators to run autonomous mobility services across

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00:38:15

Agentic AI for Robotaxis: Inside Autobrains

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/07/08

The autonomous driving industry has mostly converged on one architecture: a single, monolithic end-to-end model trained to handle the entire driving task. Igal Raichelgauz, founder and CEO of Autobrains, argues that approach hits a wall on edge cases and compute cost.His alternative is "agentic AI." Driving is broken into a large but finite set of specialized agents, each an expert in a specific situation, invoked by an orchestrator in real time. Autobrains claims this runs on roughly an order of

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00:45:55

Designing Driverless Cars for Everyone (Not Just...

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/07/01

Driverless cars can pass every safety test and still lose the passenger — because trust, not technology, decides whether robotaxis actually scale.Dr. Clare Mutzenich on the human factors inside the autonomous vehicle almost no one is designing for.Most coverage of autonomous driving is about the driving. This conversation is about everything else — what happens inside the cabin of an empty robotaxi when something goes wrong, and who's in charge when there's no driver to turn to. Dr. Clare Mutzenich

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00:48:09

European Autonomous Driving: Inside Niulinx and the...

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/06/24

Europe has no autonomous driving champion. Luca Foresti wants to change that, without copying the American robotaxi.Daniel sits down with Luca Foresti, CEO and founder of Niulinx, a Politecnico di Milano spin-off that just raised 38 million euros, the largest autonomous driving round in Italy to date. Instead of chasing a full robotaxi, Niulinx is building "Robosharing": you call a car with an app, it drives to you autonomously at up to 30 km/h, you take the wheel and drive yourself, then it returns

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00:37:31

The EU's "Now or Never" Moment on Autonomous...

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/06/17

Almost nobody in Brussels is against autonomous driving. That is not the problem. The problem is that most policymakers treat it as a distant future, not a present priority. So the agenda slips while the US and China move.Pierfrancesco Maran is trying to change that. He is the newly elected chair of the European Parliament's ENVI Committee, and before Brussels he spent thirteen years running mobility, urban planning and housing as a Milan city alderman. In December he hosted a Brussels conference on

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01:05:35

What Waymo's Data Reveals About Who Actually Rides...

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/06/10

Everyone in autonomous driving asks when the technology will work. William "Billy" Riggs asks the harder question: what happens after it does, when you have to fit it into a city that wasn't built for it?Daniel sits down with William, professor at the University of San Francisco and Director of the Autonomous Vehicles and the City Initiative, to challenge ten years of industry narrative. His thesis: AVs behave less like software and more like infrastructure. The hard part was never the driving

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00:33:27

Inside Loxo: Driverless Delivery Vans in Europe

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/06/03

Robotaxis dominate the autonomous driving conversation. Urban goods delivery rarely gets mentioned. Yet Europe has roughly 30 million light commercial vehicles doing last-mile and middle-mile work every day, and almost no one is building Level 4 autonomy for them.In this episode, recorded live at the Automated Mobility Summit in Zurich, Daniel sits down with Amin Amini, co-founder and CEO of Loxo, a Swiss company building a full Level 4 software stack for logistics and commercial vehicles.They

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00:47:07

Hands-Free Charging for Robotaxi Fleets: The Hidden...

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/05/27

Everyone in autonomous driving argues about software stacks, sensors, and miles driven. Almost nobody talks about what happens when the robotaxi pulls into the depot. And that is where autonomy quietly stops.A self-driving car cannot plug itself in. It cannot clean or inspect itself. Today, a human walks over and does it. At fleet scale, that single manual step breaks the economics.In Episode 12 of Autonomy Insiders, Daniel sits down with Crijn Bouman, CEO and co-founder of Rocsys, the Dutch company

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00:43:35

Is the Uber-Waymo Partnership Coming to an End?

Autonomy Insiders ·

2026/05/21

The Uber-Waymo partnership has shifted from strategic alliance to transactional relationship. And transactional relationships have shorter expiration dates.Waymo on Uber, where riders can only book a Waymo through the Uber app, exists in exactly two cities: Austin and Atlanta. Since those launches, Waymo has announced close to a dozen new markets. None with Uber. Nashville went to Lyft.In this episode, Daniel Abreu Marques sits down with Harry Campbell, founder of The Driverless Digest and The

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31 results

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