With the AV sector entering another round of turmoil, we are joined by two founders who lost their startups during previous periods of turmoil but have come back to the driving automation space. Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, who previously appeared on The Autonocast following the failure of Starsky Robotics is back to discuss Polymath Robotics, his new "plug and play" off-road autonomy company. He is joined by Josh Hartung, formerly of Polysync and now the founder of Sygnal, which is Polymath's partner on the hardware side. Together they provide unique perspective on the ever-evolving driving automation space.

Safety is one of the words that comes up most often in discussions about autonomous vehicles, but not many people really understand what the word even means in this complex context. Nat Beuse, VP of Safety at Aurora not only has "the s word" in his job title, its a topic he's thought about and worked on for decades. He joins this week's show for a wide-ranging discussion of safety, public trust, and autonomous vehicles.

Sam Anthony made his first appearance on The Autonocast in 2018, when we discussed his pedestrian intent/prediction startup Perceptive Automata in episode #98. He returns to the show for his first interview since the collapse of that company to reflect on his experience as a founder in the space, his concerns about the sector more broadly, and much more.

Bibhrajit Halder has been a part of the autonomous driving technology space since the days of the DARPA Challenges, working on Caterpillar's early automated mining trucks before working at Ford, Apple and elsewhere. Now the founder and CEO of SafeAI, Halder is back in the mining and heavy construction space and he joins the show to share his perspective on the state of autonomous heavy equipment and its similarities and differences with the more widely-followed robotaxi space.

The gang is back together, and finally has the time to discuss NHTSA's release of ADAS and ADS crash data. We discuss the data, what it does and doesn't mean, and explore the challenges and paths forward for automated driving regulation.

Arrival is a fascinating company on the brink of putting its bold vision of "microfactory"-made vans, busses and ridehailing vehicles into production. President Avinash Rugoobur joins the show to explain how its 10,000 unit/year microfactories upend the established rules of automaking, how the products enable these dramatic changes and where the whole thing is headed.

The Autonocast gang were all together at Kirsten's TechCrunch Mobility Sessions event recently, where they finally met Taylor Ogan of Snowbull Capital in person. On this week's episode Taylor joins Alex, Kirsten and Ed to discuss the event, the autonomous vehicle renaissance in San Francisco, Snowbull's unique engagement in the online Tesla discussions and more.

With "growth tech" stocks falling generally, and mobility tech companies like Tesla, Lyft and Rivian specifically down since the start of the year, the gang discusses the changing economic conditions for the sector. Plus, everyone is excited to get back together in person and Ed (and only Ed) is excited about nomenclature standardization.