<story><title>Autonomous trucking upstart Embark has gone from $5B+ to basically worthless</title><url>https://news.crunchbase.com/transportation/autonomous-driving-spac-embk/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>supernova87a</author><text>Does anyone have (or has anyone read) any smart summary&amp;#x2F;analysis about the phase we find ourselves in with the autonomous driving industry?&lt;p&gt;Is it like CVML was in a desert for some decade(s) where there were no big advances, but lots of hope and unrealized claims of some impending breakthrough, only for lots of money to be dumped into it, and companies to be led astray?   Are we waiting for some major improvement in algorithms, or hardware, like GPU progress, and things will suddenly take off?&lt;p&gt;Or are there fundamental difficulties that are startups (and their researchers) keep banging their heads against thinking that they&amp;#x27;re the ones to be able to solve it?  Or just that they need to go through the same mistakes over and over but make little progress?&lt;p&gt;It seems to have been a decade and what, $20B poured into this, but we are really not much closer to the goal?   (and I&amp;#x27;m not even sure whether we mean solving the AV problem, much less achieving a viable business model)  Sure Waymo is driving in San Francisco, but that seems like a very handheld single example.</text></comment>
<story><title>Autonomous trucking upstart Embark has gone from $5B+ to basically worthless</title><url>https://news.crunchbase.com/transportation/autonomous-driving-spac-embk/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ignoramous</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;The company joined the Y Combinator accelerator&amp;#x27;s 2016 batch with the  initial intent of building self-driving shuttles for use on college campuses.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;As a change from constantly drumming up YC founders and companies who do make it (&lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; usually off of similarly inflated valuations), it&amp;#x27;d be interesting to see if they do talk about just how and why unicorn startups like Embark (seemingly) lose their way.&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not to say YC is particularly at fault.</text></comment>