The Remount Roundup.
Weekly essays on the operator economics of the autonomous vehicle transition, by Jonas Lamis. What moved this week, what it means for the people who will own the machines, and the unglamorous work of keeping a fleet earning.
8.64 seconds
Beijing's robot games just rewrote the record books, a $12,000 humanoid went on sale in Los Angeles, and the machines learned to earn before they learned to work.
Five Golden Tickets
Tesla is throwing the Cybercab a launch party in Austin and raffling five invitations. What it is not announcing is a way to buy one, and that gap is where the next twelve months get interesting.
8,000 to One
China measured the demand to own robots this week: eight thousand orders for every available share. America spent the same week deciding who gets permission to operate them, and what that permission costs.
The Parking Lots Got Priced
This week a sovereign wealth fund priced the parking lots at $2.1 billion. The capital seat, who actually holds title to the cars, is still open.
My Robo-Delivery Ride-Along
I spent Wednesday in the back seat of a robot delivering dinner by itself in Austin. The same day, regulators told Amazon it may build 2,500 robotaxis. Those two facts belong together.
The March of Nines
I learned product quality at Motorola, where Six Sigma was gospel. Elon just reached for the same ladder and called it the march of nines. Here is where the robotaxi becomes real.
The Unglamorous Half
A robotaxi fleet got towed out of a traffic jam with dead batteries, and our partner's CEO named the missing layer on the record. The interesting part of autonomy isn't the driving anymore. It's the ground underneath it.
From If to Who
The robotaxi stopped being a question of whether it works. This week it became a question of who owns the thing that works.
The Ownership Gap
This week the money world published its map of the robot economy. Billions for the machines' weapons, brains, and fleets. Every layer is getting funded except one. The layer where you own them.
It's a Matter of Timing
This week the government started rewriting a fifty-year-old rulebook to make room for cars that were never built for a driver. Nobody does that for something far away.
The Onramps
The Cybercab fleet is about to start earning real money. The conversation skips the part that matters most: who gets to own it. There's more than one way in.
The boring part nobody's pricing
Everyone argues about whose robot drives better. The economics get decided by who keeps the robot working.
Wall Street just repriced the robot
A thought experiment - JPMorgan just tripled its Tesla target on the promise of machines that earn money on their own. The question nobody's asking: who actually gets to own that income?
Trading the driver's seat for the owner's seat
A thought experiment — what would it actually take for a rideshare driver to own the robotaxis instead of drive them? Just the math.
Why I'm Building Remount
The video is the origin story. Here's what's happened in the two weeks since - plus the week in autonomy.