The intense global fascination with artificial intelligence has sparked a parallel resurgence of interest in autonomous driving—a field that, while long in development, is once again capturing public imagination and investor attention. This renewed excitement has reignited spirited debates within the transportation and technology sectors about how companies can successfully and safely deploy self-driving vehicles at scale. The conversation is no longer confined to whether autonomy is possible, but rather how it can be integrated into daily life, regulated effectively, and made economically sustainable.
To explore these complex issues, I spoke with three leadership figures who stand at the forefront of the driverless revolution—individuals whose companies are either already deploying or are on the verge of deploying fully autonomous technologies on public roads. They include Don Burnette, founder and CEO of Kodiak Robotics; Dave Ferguson, cofounder and co-CEO of Nuro; and Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi. Collectively, these leaders bring nearly fifty years of cumulative expertise in the study, development, and implementation of automated systems. Each has devoted a significant portion of their career to advancing the promise of autonomy from theoretical research into tangible commercial reality.
Burnette’s company, Kodiak, focuses on self-driving trucks and currently operates eight driverless trucking units in the Permian Basin. These vehicles haul industrial loads—specifically sand used in hydraulic fracking operations—demonstrating that autonomy can already function in specialized, high-demand logistical environments. Urtasun’s firm, Waabi, similarly emphasizes driverless freight transport and anticipates deploying fully autonomous trucks on highways before the end of the year, supported by a strategic partnership with Volvo. Ferguson’s Nuro, by contrast, aims to revolutionize urban mobility through autonomous robotaxis and is preparing to launch a collaboration with Uber in 2026 that will place self-driving vehicles in direct competition with industry pioneer Waymo.
In extensive discussions, these executives challenged a number of deeply ingrained assumptions surrounding the field of autonomy. Many of these ideas have calcified into what might be called technological folklore—commonly repeated notions that no longer withstand scrutiny. From their perspectives, three critical insights emerged that redefine the state of the industry and illuminate what still lies ahead.
First, all three CEOs categorically agree that technology itself has ceased to be the primary obstacle. In their view, autonomous driving systems have already proven their core functionality: the essential question no longer revolves around whether the technology works, but how it can be scaled and commercialized sustainably. Burnette summarized this evolution succinctly—pointing out that although industry observers continue to devote disproportionate attention to hardware and algorithms, the truly pressing questions now concern profitability, scalability, and operational resilience. This does not imply that technical advancement is complete: as Ferguson noted, challenges remain in expanding driverless systems to handle varied and adverse conditions, such as snow or heavy rain. Yet even this limitation is seen as temporary rather than existential. Companies, Ferguson explained, have deliberately prioritized more favorable climates to capture immediate opportunities, confident that environmental adaptability will follow in time.
Another persistent misconception, according to Urtasun, relates to how readiness is measured. Within the self-driving sector, companies frequently boast about the cumulative number of autonomous miles driven, presenting this figure as a proxy for competence or technological maturity. Urtasun decisively rejects this metric, arguing that it merely reflects the length of time a company has been active, not the sophistication of its underlying systems. She uses the trucking industry to illustrate her point: given that traditional heavy-truck operations experience roughly 1.3 fatal incidents per 100 million miles—a figure provided by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety—no autonomous company has yet accumulated nearly enough road miles to make meaningful statistical comparisons. The current datasets, she observed, are too limited to determine whether autonomy is measurably safer than human drivers. Most driverless freight firms have only logged in the single-digit millions of miles, a fraction far too small to draw defensible conclusions. In short, the industry must find new ways to demonstrate reliability beyond the raw mileage count.
The third major insight concerns the enormous conceptual and technical leap between partially automated systems—such as advanced driver-assistance features—and the fully autonomous vehicles classified as Level 4 by the Society of Automotive Engineers. Some well-known firms, including Tesla in the United States and Wayve in the United Kingdom, aspire to make this transition. Ferguson, reflecting on his years at Google’s self-driving project (which evolved into Waymo), underscored that even for organizations with extensive resources, traversing the gap between supervised autonomy and complete independence is monumental. He vividly recalled that Google was conducting driverless tests without safety-driver interventions as early as 2011, yet it took another five years before the project achieved true driverless operation on public roads. At Nuro, he added, the company has maintained fully driverless operations for more than half a decade, and even now, scaling those systems to new cities and conditions presents continuous work. The implication is unmistakable: autonomy requires not just incremental improvement but an exponential increase in robustness, redundancy, and public trust.
Finally, the CEOs dismissed one of the industry’s most persistent debates—the ongoing argument over sensor configurations, specifically the use of lidar, radar, and cameras. The source of this controversy largely traces to Elon Musk’s insistence that camera-only systems should suffice, based on his belief that vehicles should navigate as humans do—using visual input alone. Yet among the executives interviewed, none regarded this as a matter of ideology. All their companies employ lidar, not out of adherence to a dogma, but because the practical calculus of cost, reliability, and safety supports it. “It ultimately comes down to return on investment,” Ferguson observed: if a modest additional cost can dramatically increase the system’s ability to prevent accidents, the decision seems obvious. Urtasun, who once favored the cameras-only approach during her years as a researcher, also reconsidered her stance upon founding Waabi. She came to recognize that lidar offered tangible safety advantages that could not be ignored in real-world operations. Burnette went further, labeling the entire sensor debate a distraction from the issues that truly determine the future of autonomy—economic viability, operational efficiency, and customer adoption. In his view, sensor configurations will inevitably evolve alongside technological progress, making today’s arguments largely irrelevant.
Taken together, the insights of Burnette, Ferguson, and Urtasun paint a picture of an industry maturing beyond its experimental phase. The conversation has shifted from proving that self-driving vehicles can function to determining how they can do so safely, profitably, and at scale in complex, unpredictable human environments. As autonomous technology continues to evolve, one thing appears certain: the path ahead will demand as much strategic and economic ingenuity as technical brilliance.
Sourse: https://www.businessinsider.com/ceos-on-autonomy-robotaxis-self-driving-nuro-kodiak-waabi-2025-11
