Autonomous Vehicles

We recently surveyed 500 US consumers about their intent to purchase and perception of electric vehicles. The results, on the whole, show a lower-than-expected excitement level about EVs and the persistence of common misconceptions about owning EVs. 78% of consumers…

Apple has confirmed an Axios report that they have acquired autonomy startup Drive.ai. Apple has hired “dozens” of Drive.ai hardware and software engineers and will receive some intellectual property and hard assets, including vehicles. Drive.ai, which has been seeking a…

Lost in the breadth of this year’s WWDC announcements was an update to CarPlay. That’s to be expected, given just under 1 minute of the 136-minute keynote and only 1 of 153 developer sessions were related to CarPlay. Despite the…

Tesla hosted its annual shareholder meeting today. Here are our takeaways: Musk was calm, confident, and articulate in a way that we haven’t seen in his last several public appearances. He was less combative and more measured in his remarks…

The Loup Frontier Tech Index tracks the performance of publicly-traded companies that influence the future of technology including AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles, computer perception, and virtual and augmented reality. We will be publishing periodic pieces to highlight specific companies in…

Apple is in talks to acqui-hire the team of a well-known self-driving vehicle startup, Drive.ai, according to The Information. The company has raised $77M and was last valued around $200M. In our view, Apple is not after brand or even…

Lyft reported first-quarter 2019 earnings in their first-ever report as a public company with overall positive results. Our takeaways: Steady growth of user metrics Lyft’s active riders grew 46% y/y to 20.5M, average revenue per rider grew 34% to $38,…

Tesla reported first-quarter 2019 results. Here are the incremental changes: The company gave strong indications that they will raise money in the coming months. We believe raising money (debt or equity) would effectively de-risk the story, given the company’s current…

We left Tesla’s Autonomy Investor Day feeling more optimistic about the company’s long-term prospects. Our takeaways from the event: We are more comfortable with Tesla’s camera-based (non-LiDAR) approach to autonomy. If correct, this approach could actually be preferred (safer, more…

This piece marks the first in a quarterly series to track the progress of frontier tech, as measured by the Loup Frontier Tech Index. The index tracks the performance of publicly-traded companies that influence the future of technology including AI,…

Tesla recently published “An Update to Our Vehicle Lineup” on the company blog, making several tweaks to the Model 3 product line. Tesla is embracing the characteristics of blitzscaling — a net positive for the company. Autopilot will now come…

AT&T recently rolled out a limited 5G Evolution (5GE) network in Minneapolis in combination with its sponsorship of the Final Four. We tested the network and found only modest improvements in network speeds. Given AT&T’s 5GE marketing hype, we’re disappointed…