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Hi everyone,

welcome to Shift, a podcast about mobility. I'm Pete Bigelow, your host and reporter at the automotive news.

This is obviously a precarious time for the self-driving industry overall and probably

robot taxi operators in particular.

Funding opportunities have gotten harder to find amid a broad tech slowdown over the past year.

And more specifically, there's fundamental questions about the business and operational viability of the robot taxi model with the problems at Cruz in particular, which was a leader in the space until the past month now apparent.

So today's conversation with Amnon Joshua,

the founder and CEO of Mobilei, seems particularly timely in a lot of ways.

For one, he's never believed in the robotaxi business model, never wanted to directly own and operate his own fleet.

And perhaps more importantly, he foresaw a long time ago that reaching full level four operations at a meaningful scale would be a heavy financial lift.

Mobilized building a financial bridge to get there through the proliferation of driver assist features.

And what a bridge? The company has a pipeline of orders that's worth more than 17 billion dollars right now.

And given this strategy and its success over years,

heads up that today, Automotive News has named Amnon

to our annual All-Star team.

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