Recorded on 05/28/26 In this podcast, we sit down with Alex Roy, general partner at New Industry Venture Capital and co-host of Autonocast, to discuss key debates around autonomous vehicles. We explore 1) Waymo &amp; Tesla&#x27;s US leadership, 2) impacts to ride hailing platforms like Uber and Lyft, and 3) the landscape of emerging AV companies. https://go.td.com/PodcastDisclosure Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Autonomous Vehicles In Focus With Alex Roy

TD Cowen Insights

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** TD Cowen Insights

## Participants

- **John Blackledge** (TD Cowen)
- **Itai McKellie** (TD Cowen)
- **Alex Roy** (New Industry Venture Capital)

## Transcript

Welcome to TD Cowen Insights, a space that brings leading thinkers together to share insights and ideas shaping the world around us. Join us as we converse with the top minds who are influencing our global sectors.

We're live from TD Cowen's 54th Annual TMT Conference. Really happy to have Alex Roy, General Partner of New Industry Venture Capital. And I'm with my colleague Itai McKellie, our Autos Analyst. I'm John Blackledge, Internet Analyst here at TD Cowen. This is going to be a great podcast. Maybe I'll kick it off, Alex. Thanks for coming. Just current thoughts on the state of autonomous industry.

Couldn't be more bullish technologically, but the political dimension or maybe the sociocultural dimension is really coming into play recently. I live in Arizona and there's Waymo's all over my neighborhood. I've got a Tesla. It is getting better, despite my criticism in the past. But wow, I'm amazed at how aggressive some political voices have been about AV. It's in prime time.

And how suboptimal, it would be a nice word, for how Silicon Valley and the AV companies are handling the messaging around their quite obvious technical success. Alex, I know you woke up to the program. Great to get to see you. You went coast to coast with Tesla FSD and you've, of course, tracked this system for years. Talk to us about the rate of improvement you've seen in your personal vehicles.

And based on that, what do you think the next couple of years look like for FSD and Tesla RoboTaxi? If you're referring to my zero intervention cannonball drive from a few months ago, yeah, I was surprised that it worked as well as it did. Given that we went at the very end of winter through a snowstorm, it was really good. It was our fourth attempt in a year and there was a lot of progress, obviously. And since I've gone, someone else has already gone and done it seven or eight hours faster. And that's primarily because they went in clear weather.

And so there's obvious progress on the Tesla FSD side. There's no debating it. But it's also very obvious that, you know, the performance is highly ODD dependent. And that's why Waymo is driverless in ODDs where it's optimal. And Tesla is not driverless anywhere except in a very constrained domain in, you know, a couple of places Waymo is currently operating. So Tesla will get there. Waymo is already there.

The only real question is who can afford to scale operations while simultaneously driving down the costs? I'm not referring to the sensors. We'll get to that. The rate of improvement has to correlate to the ratio of people in operations to driverless vehicles. If that doesn't move at the same rate as your costs, as you scale out, you may not be in business in five years. And it's a very dangerous place to be.

On that note, just curious...

Autonomous Vehicles In Focus With Alex Roy

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

Autonomous Vehicles In Focus With Alex Roy

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.