DEEP DIVE
Deep Dive
By Charles Rubenfeld, Claire Burch, Ran Jiang, Kyle Harrison
Often, analysis on the future of autonomous vehicles focuses on the end state of the market and on which players will establish a dominant market position in a trillion-dollar-plus market that is up for grabs. But the more immediate question and pressing question is which approach will define the future of autonomous vehicles (AVs)? The approach used by Waymo and all the other robotaxi players, which implements the use of lidar, or Tesla’s approach of using cameras alone, aided by compute and data.

Updated
July 8, 2025
1 min
Deep Dive
Authors
Authors
Deep Dive
Updated
July 8, 2025
1 min
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Charles Rubenfeld is a writer and startup operator. He's worked in strategy and analytics roles at Scale AI, Uber and Valon. He began his career in finance, where he did macro investment research at firms including Morgan Stanley. He has a BA in Economics from UPenn, lives in NYC, and writes regularly on his substack, Thoughts on Tech, Finance, and Economics.
See articlesClaire is a Research Associate at Contrary. Claire's academic research has centered primarily on particle physics, and has been published in Nature. Prior to Contrary, Claire worked on the investment team at Bridgewater Associates and studied mathematics and physics.
See articlesRan is a dual-degree MBA and M.Eng graduate from UC Berkeley. He’s working in Product GTM and Management at Latent Knowledge. Previously, Ran worked as a Program Manager MBA Intern at Chime, and as an Applied ML/AI Engineer at AspenTech Subsurface Science & Engineering.
See articlesKyle leads Contrary’s investing efforts for companies from seed to scale. He’s previously worked at firms like Index and Coatue investing in companies like Databricks, Snowflake, Snyk, Plaid, Toast, and Persona.
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