{"id":8492,"date":"2026-06-22T13:43:34","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T13:43:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forbes.co.il\/e\/?p=8492"},"modified":"2026-06-24T13:45:14","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T13:45:14","slug":"the-robotaxi-race-has-a-1-5-billion-vehicle-blind-spot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forbes.co.il\/e\/the-robotaxi-race-has-a-1-5-billion-vehicle-blind-spot\/","title":{"rendered":"The Robotaxi Race Has a 1.5 Billion Vehicle Blind Spot"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The robotaxi race has a winner\u2019s podium that everyone can name. Waymo is expanding fast, with TechCrunch reporting that its fleet has now crossed 3,000 vehicles<\/a>, completing over 500,000 trips per week across multiple U.S. cities. Tesla launched its robotaxi service in Austin. Chinese players like Baidu and WeRide are scaling aggressively at home, as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But Igal Raichelgauz, CEO and founder of autonomous driving company Autobrains, thinks the industry is looking at the wrong scoreboard entirely. \u201cThe major market, the biggest opportunity today, is in the Western world for every car,\u201d Raichelgauz told me. \u201cWe have today over 1.5 billion cars on the road. These are not addressed – not by Tesla, not by Waymo, and not by the Chinese players. And that\u2019s where we see the biggest opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Waymo\u2019s overall fleet is impressive and certainly dwarfs Tesla’s. Take the state of Texas, which, as of recent state DMV filings, showed that the Musk-owned company had just 42 autonomous vehicles<\/a> authorized for driverless ride-hailing, compared to Waymo\u2019s 577.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, Chinese players cannot realistically scale into Western markets for geopolitical reasons, leaving the competitive map with a conspicuous gap at its centre. Autobrains is positioning itself directly in that gap, using agentic AI to split the driving task into thousands of specialized agents rather than training a single monolithic model. The Israeli company has raised over $140 million from investors that include BMW, Toyota Ventures, Magna, Continental, Temasek, and others, and claims to hold more than 300 patents related to AI and autonomous driving. It\u2019s where Raichelgauz sees the company getting the best chance to join that winner\u2019s podium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The logic is as follows: Waymo\u2019s approach is built on expensive sensors, LiDAR arrays, and HD maps that require enormous upfront investment before entering any new city. \u201cWhen you need to move to a new city, you need to invest tens, if not hundreds, of millions into this infrastructure work,\u201d he said. Tesla, on the other hand, has made the consumer vehicle its canvas, but still hasn\u2019t delivered on unsupervised autonomy. \u201cYou don\u2019t have a personal car that you can buy from Tesla with FSD (Full Self-Driving) that can run in a way that the person can start working, watch videos, and read emails. You must work in a mode that is \u2018eyes on\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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