Last week, I was honored to chair the IEEE International Conference on Mobility (IEEE MOST) panel, Driving Force: Towards Large-Scale Autonomous Driving Commercialization.

Top experts from America, Europe, and Asia assembled to tackle pressing questions on AV product success and commercialization challenges: Nikhil Rao (NVIDIA), Ruigang Yang (Shanghai JiaoTong University), Fiona Hua (May Mobility), Matteo Barale (Tecnocad), and Christian John (TIER IV).

Rather than focusing on conventional topics, I designed a list of spicy questions to spark meaningful debate:

  1. Are we facing an "autonomous winter" after recent shutdowns? What do you think about the shift in the investment landscape from autonomous driving to embodied AI/robotics?
  2. With Chinese companies aiming to deploy across 60+ cities with government backing in 2025, is the U.S. losing the autonomous race? How will we stay competent?
  3. Which AV business model can generate sustainable profits: Robotaxi/TaaS (Waymo), Trucking (Kodiak, Bot Auto), Transit & Shuttle Services (May Mobility), AV Stack Provider(Nvidia, Tier IV), or Vertically Integrated Players (Tesla, Rivian)?
  4. Is Tesla's vision-only "deploy and iterate" approach brilliant innovation or dangerous risk-taking? Does the industry's (e.g. Waymo) focus on perfect safety with complex sensors actually slow progress?
  5. Is the industry shifting from modular, supervised approaches to end-to-end, self-supervised systems? Will this paradigm change accelerate autonomous vehicle development or create new challenges?
  6. Are VLMs and foundational models genuine breakthroughs that deliver real-world autonomous driving impact, or are we overestimating their potential for solving the hardest edge cases?
  7. Major accident events in AV deployment can be very detrimental (e.g., Uber's 2018 fatal crash in Arizona, Cruise's 2023 pedestrian accident). What crisis management strategy would you recommend to address such events?

The panelists give honest opinions and suggestions on where the AV industry is heading for commercialization. We discussed AV business models, global market competition with tariffs, VLMs, foundation models, end-to-end systems, and safety protocols during "deploy and iterate".

Apart from the panel, there were also fascinating keynotes from Dr. Xiaodi Hou on Autonomous Trucking CPM (cost per mile), and Vinay Palakkode on cutting-edge world models. These are also insightsful talks. Thanks for the great work and invitation from the organizing committee: Weisong Shi, Xinghui Zhao, Guoquan (Paul) Huang, and Tom St. John.