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It’s been a minute, folks! As you might recall, the newsletter took a little holiday break. We’re back and well into 2026. And a lot has happened since the last edition.
I spent the first week of the year at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And while I wrote about this last January, it’s worth repeating: U.S. automakers have left the building.
What has filled the void in the Las Vegas Convention Center? Autonomous vehicle tech companies (Zoox, Tensor Auto, Tier IV, and Waymo, which rebranded its Zeekr RT, to name a few), Chinese automakers like Geely and GWM, software and automotive chip companies, and loads of what Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang calls “physical AI.”
The term, which is sometimes called “embodied AI,” describes the use of AI outside the digital world and into the real, physics-based one. AI models, combined with sensors, cameras, and the motorized controls, allow that physical thing — humanoid robot, drone, autonomous forklift, robotaxi — to detect and understand what’s in this real environment and make decisions to operate within it. And it was all over the place from agriculture and robotics to autonomous vehicles and drones, industrial manufacturing, and wearables.
Hyundai had one of the busiest and largest exhibits with a near-constant line wrapped around the entrance. The Korean automaker wasn’t showing cars. Nope, it was robots of various forms, including the Atlas humanoid robot, courtesy of its subsidiary Boston Dynamics. There were also innovations that have come out of Hyundai Motor Group Robotics LAB, including a robot that charges electric autonomous vehicles, and a four-wheel electric platform called the Mobile Eccentric Droid (MobEd) that is going into production this year. It seems everyone was embracing an …