The autonomous vehicle industry has rapidly shifted from science fiction to commercial deployment, with the robotaxi market alone projected to reach roughly $415 billion globally by 2035.
Most investors seeking AV exposure gravitate toward well-known names like Amazon’s Zoox, Tesla’s Cybercab, or Alphabet’s Waymo, leaving several compelling alternatives underexamined.
Aurora Innovation (NASDAQ: AUR), Mobileye (NASDAQ: MBLY), and Uber Technologies (NYSE: UBER) each represent distinct approaches to capitalizing on the AV revolution.
While robotaxis dominate headlines, long-haul trucking may actually be the first sector to experience sweeping disruption from autonomous technology at commercial scale.
Aurora Innovation leads the U.S. autonomous semitruck market with its proprietary Aurora Driver, combining in-house long-range LiDAR with software and data services for heavy highway freight.
The company began generating revenue in 2025 and currently operates largely on interstate highways across Arizona, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas, where favorable weather conditions support reliable autonomous operations.
Starting in 2027, Aurora plans to shift its business model toward installing hardware and software into fleet-owned trucks, charging operators on a per-mile basis, which could dramatically accelerate revenue growth.
Analysts at Morningstar forecast autonomous trucks will account for 40% of all semitruck miles in the U.S. by 2040, while Goldman Sachs projects the global AV trucking market could reach $560 billion by 2035.
Autonomous trucking is also forecast to become cheaper per mile than human-driven trucks as early as 2028 in the U.S. market, strengthening the economic case for fleet operators to adopt the technology quickly.
Mobileye stands out as perhaps the most deeply embedded player across the broader AV and advanced driver-assistance systems landscape, with its EyeQ technology present in more than 250 million vehicles worldwide.
The company holds roughly a 70% global ADAS market share according to Jefferies, giving it substantial competitive advantages through significant switching costs baked into automaker vehicle architectures.
Mobileye’s 2025 full-year earnings report revealed an eight-year future expected auto revenue pipeline of $24.5 billion, representing a 42% increase over the prior pipeline figure driven by new contract wins with existing auto clients.
Expertise spanning artificial intelligence, computer vision, and integrated hardware and software positions Mobileye to participate in multiple dimensions of the AV market simultaneously.
Uber Technologies takes a fundamentally different approach to the AV opportunity, opting for a capital-light partnership strategy rather than developing its own autonomous vehicles from scratch.
By positioning itself as the primary aggregator of ride-hailing across the broader AV industry, Uber aims to leverage its existing routing, payment processing, and infrastructure advantages at scale.
The central risk to this strategy became clearer when Waymo signaled its intention to eventually dissolve its partnership with Uber, prioritizing the growth of its own ride-hailing system instead.
Whether most AV companies will ultimately prefer to partner with Uber’s established network or go it alone remains genuinely uncertain, and that uncertainty has weighed on the stock price.
That same uncertainty, however, may be creating an opportunity for investors willing to accept the risk, given Uber’s existing strong cash flow and profit growth at what some view as an undervalued price.
For investors with different risk tolerances, Aurora, Mobileye, and Uber each offer distinct and compelling exposure to one of the most transformative technological shifts in modern transportation history.
