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I’ve joked here and on the Equity and Autonocast podcasts that the autonomous vehicle industry feels a lot like 2016, at least in terms of the buzziness surrounding the sector.

But a recent conversation with Trucks VC partner Puneeth Meruva has me rethinking that comparison. There’s evidence that 2026 is even hotter — at least by certain measures — than those frothy dealmaking days of 2016 and 2017. 

Trucks VC, which specializes in early-stage investing, has fielded pitches from 81 new autonomous vehicle startups so far in 2026 — two-thirds more than last year and enough to surpass the boom years of a decade ago.  The VC firm argues in a new blog post that we’re in the midst of a second, even bigger AV wave fueled by technological breakthroughs. Yes, I’m talking about AI. 

“For a long time AV companies were trying to go from what was AV 1.0 to AV 2.0, which is kind of this holy grail end-to-end architecture for AVs,” Meruva told me. “And I think the foundation models now provide a technical architecture that makes those end-to-end systems possible.”

These foundational models are particularly good at generalizing across different environments and scenarios, potentially making AVs cheaper and faster to deploy. The arrival of powerful open source models like Nvidia’s Alpamayo and Qwen’s general-purpose vision-language-action models has made it even easier for startups to get off the ground.

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