Two cheers for looser self-driving regulations

Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power.

Our economic calendar is delayed this week but will be out this evening. A special hello to Ram, a friend of the blog and someone we wanted to wave at publicly. To work! — Alex

• 📈 Trending Up: Tesla on a rumor that self-driving regulations will lighten (BBG) … European tech solidarity … Substack, perhaps? … heat generated by upcoming Nvidia chips … Nilay Patel … hypersonic missiles … Russian inflation … HealthKart, now sporting a $500M valuation … space competition …

• 📉 Trending Down: Spirit(s) … Moderna stock, now down 32% in the last month … EU-China relations … breathability in New Delhi … Russian grid stability …

Via Brice Cooper

• State of the Union: There’s this anon Twitter account called Inevitable West (anti-Labour fanfic, general anti-Muslim agitation, and promotion of the Tories in the U.K.) that’s new to me. Not new, however, to Elon Musk, our nation’s incoming chief unelected bureaucrat.

  • The account recently argued that the heads of the United Kingdom and United States are “war hungry” for allowing Ukraine to defend itself. In the comments, one Twitter user said that the U.S. and U.K. allowing Ukraine to strike more deeply into Russian territory means that “Russia [is] not our enemy.” The Inevitable West account agreed, saying “they never were.”

  • Enter Elon Musk! Whose found the time to respond to Inevitable West, arguing that allowing Ukraine presents the “problem” that “Russia will respond reciprocally.”

  • I think it’s worth considering what Musk reads every day on Twitter. Based on what I can see from his tweets and responses to platform users, he’s the single most ideologically isolated person in the world today.

• Cabinet watch: Section 230 (which allows online platforms to moderate their own digital spaces and doesn’t blame them for user speech) is under new threat with the ascension of Brendan Carr to the head of the FCC in the new year.

Cava is crushing the game

Cava went public in mid-2023. A fast-casual restaurant chain, it wasn’t normal TechCrunch fare, but as the company had ample private-market financial backing, I got to cover it. It went public at $22 per share, after raising its range pre-IPO. Since then? Well, just look:

Why? 39% revenue growth in Q3, 18% same-store sales growth, 36% digital revenue, and improving profitability. Investors, as it turns out, love profitable growth.

How about some good news?

The holiday period is nearly upon us. Here in the United States we are staring down Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and the New Year in rapid succession. Mix in school breaks and the lame-duck Presidential administration, and I suspect that big tech news will slow in the coming weeks. Fewer IPOs, fewer big deals, fewer important funding rounds.

For CO, which publishes around five times each week, this means that we’re going to have plenty of space to dig into the story around technology. Which, for the next few months at least, will hinge on the state of the world once former President Trump kicks off his second term.

I think there is a way for us to stay informed about what’s going on, while not becoming overly politically-pilled. Namely, we’ll continue covering political news as it relates to our core remit — tech, business, and power — with an eye on finding good news where we can.

To wit:

• Food in America leaves much to be desired. Just try to buy pesto in a jar at your local supermarket and realize how long you have to hunt to find an offering that is actually pesto — and not majority unrelated filler oils.

  • While it’s frustrating that the GOP would have treated any attempt by Democrats to better regulate our food supply to be, how to phrase this, more food-like as the nth degree of government overreach, we might get a bit of it from the HHS nominee.

  • Enough of a win to outweigh RFK Jr.’s expected overall tenure? No, but we’re in ‘take what wins we can’ territory.

  • The question, of course, is whether or not the corporate interests in favor of the current setup will roll over and allow the incoming admin to clip their profits. Thus, it’s a business story.

Don’t worry, I have no intention of allowing CO becoming a Trump-focused publication. It will, however, be responsive to the news.

Looser self-driving rules are probably a good thing

Using the above meditation as guidance, let’s talk about self-driving cars. Here’s Bloomberg:

Members of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team have told advisers they plan to make a federal framework for fully self-driving vehicles one of the Transportation Department’s priorities, according to people familiar with the matter. […]

Current federal rules pose significant roadblocks for companies looking to deploy vehicles without steering wheels or foot pedals in large quantities, which Tesla plans to do. The Trump team is looking for policy leaders for the department to develop a framework to regulate self-driving vehicles, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

Gisting that down, the incoming admin appears poised to loosen rules regarding self-driving cars that don’t have steering wheels or pedals. Good.

Human drivers are awful, and we tolerate far, far too many deaths on our roads each year than we should. Robots are already pretty solid drivers — shoutout Waymo — and their accelerated rollout has not yielded a wave of accidents to rival human-driven cars.

Therefore, the hard work to make self-driving cars safer than human drivers in most cases is complete — there’s more work to be done, of course — making it the right time to accelerate the expansion of self-driving. A good way to do that is softer-touch regulation. (Not no regulation, but less.)

Just as I have never had patience for the NIMBY, anti-nuclear, and degrowth elements of the left, the folks who agitate against self-driving make me feel insane. I would not trade, say, Ukraine aid for more intelligent self-driving regulations in the near-term, but the candidate I supported in the election lost.

To close, the fine folks over at Beehiiv have put together a push to attract more media publications to its platform. Given that Beehiiv will become the cheaper option for hosting CO over time, we might move. Would that bother you? Hit respond and let us know.