On the Road to Autonomy: BofA Autonomous Vehicle Field Trip

We hosted >30 executives across 15 companies on our Autonomous Vehicle field trip in Palo Alto and the San Francisco Bay Area, with a series of investor meetings, HQ tours, demo rides and management presentations. The key takeaway: AVs are moving from development to commercial deployment across both passenger and freight markets. We do not view autonomy as winner takes all, with multiple technical approaches, partnerships and business models emerging simultaneously. A newer debate is whether autonomy remains fleet based or extends to personally owned vehicles, potentially blurring the lines between private car ownership and robotaxi networks. Nearly every company highlighted advances in AI, large scale training and foundation models as enablers of recent progress in autonomy. The economic case for autonomy is improving as falling sensor costs and accelerating AI model capabilities meet worsening driver shortages;