Hey —
Big week. Waymo just opened Miami and Orlando to the general public. Aurora is pushing toward 200+ driverless trucks by year-end. And I'm shifting how AVFleetTech covers this space. Here's what you need to know.
Miami and Orlando: no more waitlist
On Wednesday, Waymo announced that its Miami and Orlando markets are now open to all riders — no invite needed, no waitlist. Over 150,000 people had moved through the early access phase. Miami also launched highway service on I-95, the Dolphin Expressway, and the Palmetto Expressway simultaneously — the first time Waymo has included highways at a public launch in a new market.
What this means for the fleet operations workforce: Moove.io has been running Miami fleet ops since January and just proved they can operate at production grade. Fleet readiness was a prerequisite for this launch, not an afterthought. Every city that opens to the public this year will follow the same pattern — the maintenance team, charging infrastructure, and depot operations get built first, then rides get opened second.
If you want to know where AV technician jobs are appearing next, watch the cities where fleet partners are quietly staffing up — not the cities where Waymo is doing PR.
Aurora pushes toward 200+ driverless trucks
Aurora Innovation reaffirmed this month that it expects to exit 2026 with over 200 driverless Class 8 trucks operating across the Sun Belt. They're already past 250,000 incident-free driverless miles on Texas highways. Their second-generation hardware cuts costs by over 50% while doubling LiDAR sensing range. They're also launching a new customer deployment with Detmar Logistics — 30 autonomous trucks hauling frac sand 20+ hours a day on a 60-mile route in the Permian Basin.
The autonomous trucking workforce story is different from robotaxis — different vehicles, different geography, different maintenance cadence. But the underlying demand for skilled technicians is the same. If you're a diesel or heavy truck technician, this is your on-ramp. We covered the full comparison here: Autonomous Trucking vs. Robotaxis: Two Paths Into AV Fleet Maintenance.
Why I'm shifting how AVFleetTech covers this space
When I started this publication three weeks ago, the goal was to map the AV fleet maintenance ecosystem as a career category. After three weeks of research, I'm convinced the bigger story is infrastructure.
Every AV company outsources fleet operations. Every one. That's not a detail — that's a structural market forming in real time. Moove just raised $1.2 billion in debt to own and operate autonomous fleets. Avis is repositioning from rental cars to "fleet management, infrastructure and operations." The AV fleet operations market is projected to grow from $536M in 2024 to $12.8B by 2034.
That's an infrastructure category, not a services contract category. And it's going to reshape how a lot of people — technicians, fleet operators, investors, OEM strategy teams — think about where value is forming in autonomous mobility.
I just published the first article in a new series laying this out: Why Autonomous Mobility Will Be Won on the Ground, Not in the Cloud. The career content continues — every AV Fleet Brief issue will still cover expansion news, hiring updates, and training pipelines. But we're also going deeper on the business architecture behind all of this, because the same forces that are creating thousands of technician jobs are creating entirely new categories of operator companies, investment opportunities, and partnership structures.
Tell me what you think. Reply to this email or hit me at [email protected].
One thing to read this week
If you only have time for one piece, read the infrastructure thesis article. It's the clearest framing I can give you of where this industry is actually headed: Why Autonomous Mobility Will Be Won on the Ground, Not in the Cloud.
Until next week,
AVFleetTech