Autonomous Vehicles

For twenty years, the team at Loup has had a pulse on technology and a point of view on how that tech will change the world. The cutting edge of that change is frontier tech, driven today by AI, fintech,…

Patience is a virtue. We recently gathered data from the nine companies leading the race to build fully autonomous systems for passenger cars. Almost all companies are finding that delivering full self-driving is slow going, more challenging than believed six…

Regional air cargo transportation networks are under pressure from the growing demand for ecommerce delivery. A labor shortage among pilots compounds the challenge facing operators. According to a new report from OliverWyman, 83% of regional cargo operators can’t recruit enough talent. Moreover,…

As investors, we review thousands of company decks every year. Often times, we underweight the total addressable market (TAM) slide, given every company seems to advertise a massive TAM. We’ve lost some faith in said company’s ability to reasonably estimate…

The shift to EVs and autonomy will take longer than most think but will be more transformative in the end than most appreciate. The “take longer than most think” dynamic has played out in the US over the past several…

It’s hard to imagine manufacturing cars will someday have the same margins as a hardware-software tech company today. It’s equally hard to imagine how much cars will change in the next decade, from 97% gas-powered and human-directed today, to eventually…

Tesla shares traded down about 7% following Battery Day. That shouldn’t be a surprise, as the stock’s vertical move over the past year sets the stage for investors to expect immediate results. What they got instead was a 3-year plan.…

Zeno was a 5th century B.C. Greek philosopher known for his riddles and paradoxes. One of his most famous paradoxes imagines a foot race between the speedy Achilles and a tortoise. The tortoise begins the race with a head start.…

We’re updating our expectations on the timing of the initial availability of level 5 autonomy. Previously, we expected full autonomy to see limited availability between 2022 and 2025. We now expect most AV players to have limited availability of level…

Tesla is now the world’s most valuable auto company. With a market cap of $185 billion Tesla edges slightly above Toyota’s $177 billion valuation, based in part on the company’s dominant market share of EVs in the US (about 80%). …

Automation is poised to be the defining theme of the 2020s. The time is now because of the confluence of advancements in deep learning, information collection via powerful sensors, and hardware able to calculate real-time judgments on that information to…

Tesla shares are up 20% today following a 45% move over the previous month.  The most recent share price surge is attributed to a combination of two factors: short-covering and greater investor optimism that Tesla is a tech company that…