My Robo-Delivery Ride-Along

I spent Wednesday afternoon in the back seat of a Model Y in Austin, watching it deliver dinner.

The delivery service is being pioneered by Autolane. My son Jack came along. We rode out with the operations team for a couple of runs, and the most surprising thing about it was how boring it was. The car pulled out, drove itself across town, found the address, and then the customer pushed a button on their phone, retrieved the food from the car, and went back inside.

No human in that loop.

Autonomous delivery is not coming. It is running today, on ordinary streets, for people who are just ordering food.

So if that part works, what is actually left?

This week answered that. On Wednesday, the same day I was in that car, federal regulators gave Amazon’s Zoox the first approval in the country to charge passengers for rides in a vehicle built with no steering wheel and no pedals. Genuinely historic. Then read the permission slip. Zoox may deploy up to 2,500 of them in the first year, doubling to 5,000 in the second.

Amazon. One of the most capital-rich logistics companies that has ever existed. Allowed 2,500 cars.

That number is not a knock on Zoox or on the regulators. It is the clearest picture we have of where things actually stand. The bottleneck moved. It is no longer whether the machine can drive. It is how many machines are permitted to exist, who pays for them, where they sleep at night, and who charges and cleans them at two in the morning.

I have been saying for months that the fleet is the part nobody has built. This week I watched both halves of the problem in a single day. The driving half looked routine from the back seat. The permission half arrived with a hard number stapled to it.

Here is what I take from that. The companies building these cars are going to be rationed. By regulators, by production lines, and by their own balance sheets. The demand is not rationed at all, and it’s massive. Somebody has to own the cars that close that gap, and it will not be four companies in Silicon Valley funding every vehicle in America off their own books.

It is going to be people. One at a time, or five friends at a time, or a few hundred of us pooled together.

That is the whole idea behind Remount. Own the bots that do the work. Rideshare, delivery, entertainment.

The unglamorous truth is that the fun part, the driving, is nearly done. What is left is capital and parking lots. That is a far less exciting sentence and a far better business.

More below on what moved this week.

Jonas

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This week’s evidence

The first car in America you can pay to ride with no steering wheel. On Wednesday NHTSA granted Amazon’s Zoox an exemption from the federal rules requiring manual controls, clearing it to commercially deploy purpose-built robotaxis with no steering wheel and no pedals. Zoox will begin charging for rides in Las Vegas. The exemption allows up to 2,500 vehicles in the first year and 5,000 in the second, and carries added reporting requirements for crashes and inappropriate stops.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/30/amazon-zoox-robotaxi-rides-las-vegas.html

The rule that decides how many. Three days earlier, the comment window closed on NHTSA’s proposed amendment to Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard No. 135, which would drop the manual brake control requirement for vehicles designed only for automated driving. Today a company without a brake pedal needs the kind of exemption Zoox just received, and those are capped. Change the standard and the ceiling goes away. Watch this one.

https://www.crowell.com/en/insights/client-alerts/nhtsa-proposes-updates-to-federal-brake-standards-for-autonomous-vehicles-and-withdraws-av-step-program

Delivery gets a six billion dollar checkpoint. Nuro closed a $203 million Series E at a $6 billion valuation, with NVIDIA joining as a new investor alongside existing backers including Uber. Worth noting for anyone who still files autonomous delivery under someday. The money is treating it as a category, not an experiment.

If the driving is nearly solved and the people building the cars are capped at a few thousand a year, then the fleet has to come from somewhere else. It comes from the people who own the machines. That is the whole idea behind Remount. The modeler at remount.co runs one earning machine’s numbers start to finish. Reply anytime, I read every one.

You’re getting this because you signed up at remount.co. This is a thought experiment, not financial advice and not an offer of securities. Reply anytime or write hello@remount.co.