Otto, Levandowski, the Waymo trade-secret lawsuit, the Elaine Herzberg pedestrian fatality, the $4B Aurora sale, and the eventual Waymo partnership. The most-studied corporate AV reset of the past decade.
The AI answer surface is the showroom for EV pure-plays. AV operators run safety-case communications through an answer layer that doesn't forget. Charging networks compete on reliability perception built in PlugShare and Reddit. Everything-PR's automotive AI visibility cluster.
AV operators run safety-case communications, not product marketing — and a citation asymmetry means incident coverage feeds the negative queries faster than product news feeds the positive ones.
