Announcement: Ride AI 2026 - It's Time to Market

“Why aren’t we all talking about this all the time every day? This is going to completely change the world and eliminate a giant cause of death.” - Acquired Podcast: Google: The AI Company on Waymo, October 2025.

The AI boom continues to make headlines as evidence emerges that LLM breakthroughs are going to cascade through the industrial world. At the same time, a dark cloud hangs over mobility. Pedestrian deaths are at record levels, vehicles are getting more expensive to make, and global supply chain challenges are wreaking havoc on boardrooms. You might think the AI headlines would provide hope, but in walking the corridors of big auto or talking to former DOT heads, you’ll hear a familiar refrain: this wave will crash like the last AV hype cycle.

But what if it doesn’t?

On April 15, 2026, in San Francisco, CA, we’ll focus on the other scenario—the one hiding in plain sight. Autonomous tech has crossed key thresholds. The leaders are out of discovery and into scaling. The safety data is present, and consumers are beginning to feel the future of autonomy in their own cars. Increasingly, the bottleneck is not perception stacks or planning modules; it’s communications, marketing, and ultimately consumer perception that will drive decisions made at the household, municipal, and national levels over the next decade.

Autonomy Has Reached Scale

• Robotaxis have hit mainstream scale in multiple U.S. metros. Waymo is providing more than 250,000 paid rides per week across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin. The company has completed over 10 million trips, surpassed 100 million fully driverless miles, and is expanding its service areas now at an accelerated clip.
• Waymo’s safety data isn’t just a headline, it could be a psychological turning point. For the first time, the burden of proof may shift from the machine to the human. Waymo and Swiss Re’s insurance analysis found ~88% fewer property‑damage claims and ~92% fewer bodily‑injury claims per mile vs. human drivers over 25.3M driverless miles; the studies also show large reductions across pedestrian, cyclist, and intersection crash categories. This is the start of transparency the public has been asking for and that the industry needs to make the leap to mainstream.
• Consumer AV is quietly leveling up. Tesla released FSD v14 with robotaxi‑style (parking garage, curbside, driveway, etc.), emergency‑vehicle yielding, and UI improvements. Crucially, Tesla executives now say overall FSD adoption is in the “teens,” a rare on‑the‑record disclosure from them. Pricing sits at $8k purchase or $99/month in the U.S. These are now marketing levers to pull, not engineering milestones.