July 30, 2025 - Motional Still in Motion

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for July 30, 2025 and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry.

There was a period of several years in the late 2010s and early 2020s where Motional appeared to be one of the leaders in the automated driving space. Motional was announced in 2019 and officially became a company in March 2020 as a 50/50 joint venture between Hyundai and automotive supplier Aptiv. Aptiv brought the technology it had been developing since it was known as Delphi through its acquisitions of nutonomy and Ottomatika while Hyundai brought vehicle development and production expertise. In 2018, Aptiv partnered with Lyft to begin offering public robotaxi services in Las Vegas using BMWs still staffed with safety drivers. That service continued until 2023 and provided more than 130,000 paid rides. While Motional had begun fully driverless testing, that was never rolled out to the public program. 

In early 2024, with Motional running low on cash and requiring a significant capital infusion in order to scale and commercialize its technology, Aptiv announced it would reduce it's participation in Motional and sold most of its stake to Hyundai. Hyundai provided additional funding, but the public robotaxi program was paused as Motional sought to develop a viable business model going forward. 

CTO Laura Major was named the new CEO in September 2024 and this week she published a blog post on Linkedin announcing a new technical direction for Motional. The company had begun using what it calls large driving models. Rather than the prior approach of a collection of many smaller machine learning models to handle specific tasks or a single monolithic end to end AI model with no visibility into its inner workings, the large driving model seeks to strike a balance so it can be understood and maintained but provide a more generalizable system that can be scaled. Specific details are still limited, but Motional may finally have a new path forward. 

Thanks for listening.