L3 driving means that the car can drive itself in many situations, but the driver still needs to pay attention and be ready to take control if something goes wrong.
The Ford Edge is a medium-sized SUV that is great for families because it has a lot of space and modern features. It’s a popular choice because it’s comfortable to drive and has many tech options that make driving easier and more fun.
Cutting edge tech means the newest and most advanced technology in cars, like self-driving features or electric engines that are better than older models.
Hands-free driving means that the car can drive itself without the driver needing to hold the steering wheel or press the pedals, making it easier for the driver to relax or do other things.
'Eyes off' means that the driver doesn't have to look at the road while the car is driving itself, which allows them to do other things like read or text.
RoboTaxi is a type of taxi that can drive itself without a driver. It's part of the new technology that makes cars smarter and helps people get around more easily.
Autonomy means that a car can drive itself without needing a person to control it. Some cars can help you drive, while others can drive all by themselves.
ADAS means special technology in cars that helps drivers stay safe and makes driving easier. It includes things like automatic braking and keeping the car in its lane.
A subscription service means you pay a monthly fee to use a car or a taxi service instead of buying one. It can include things like repairs and insurance, making it easier for people to get around.
Autonomous technology is what allows cars to drive themselves without needing a person to control them. It makes driving safer and easier by using computers and sensors.
Hemi engines are special types of car engines that have a round shape inside, helping them run more efficiently and powerfully. They are often found in fast cars made by Chrysler.
Supercar performance means how fast and well a supercar can drive. Supercars are very expensive and designed to be the fastest and most exciting cars on the road.
An electric vehicle is a car that runs on electricity instead of gasoline. They are better for the environment and can save money on fuel costs.
Car
Afila SUV
The Afila SUV is a new car from Sony Honda Mobility, a company that combines technology and cars. It's designed to be high-tech and connected, which is popular with many buyers today.
The Mercedes-Benz S-Class is a very fancy car that is known for being really comfortable and full of the latest technology. The electric version of this car is important because it shows how car companies are starting to make more electric vehicles, which are better for the environment.
Lucid is a company that makes electric cars, focusing on luxury models. They want to compete with other high-end brands.
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Welcome to this weekend drive edition of Daily Drive for the second week in January 2026. I'm
Kellan Walker in Las Vegas. We're breaking down some of the biggest stories in the auto industry
from the past week at CES and looking forward to what's in store in the days ahead. Joining me
today are Molly Boygon, tech and innovation reporter at Automotive News and co-host of the
Automotive News Shift podcast. Molly has been here with me all week covering CES. Molly,
welcome to weekend drive. Thanks, Kell. And Jerry Hirsch, managing editor of Automotive News,
who was on site most of this week at CES, but now is back home in Long Beach, California. Jerry,
great to have you on the show. Thank you for having me.
So before we get into this week's news, we wrapped up CES 2026. Molly, you've been here all week.
What were your biggest takeaways? What themes or announcements really stood out to you?
There were a few big takeaways for me. Number one was probably that the AI hype of last year has
become reality. And there were some demos that I saw that were AI enabled that really,
really impressed me. All of the AI improvements that we've seen over the last year have created
real deliverable results for things like in-vehicle personalization, voice assistance, and definitely
also physical AI and robotics. So that was probably my biggest takeaway from the show.
Jerry, how did this year's show compare to past CES events you've covered? Was the
auto industry presence what you expected? So auto maker presence was much less. The
interesting thing, and Molly knows a lot about this, is that China was front and center. And
Detroit was virtually absent except for one announcement from Ford about developing L3
driving for 2028. So that's one difference. The other thing is that there was a lot of cutting
edge tech here that was actually happening as opposed to being part of the hype cycle.
Ford made a big splash with its announcement of eyes off hands-free driving coming in 2028
on that $30,000 pickup. Jerry, what's significant about this approach compared to competitors like GM?
Okay, so well, GM's going to match that. Whatever Ford does, GM's going to do. Whatever GM does,
Ford is going to do. The interesting thing is that both of them are behind because by the time
2028 rolls around, they're going to be automakers globally. They're going to have feet off,
hands off, eyes off, and mind off for periods of travel. That means you'll be able to text, read,
do other things. So they're really, I think these automakers are one to two years behind
other portions of the industry. And Molly, we heard from John Kraftchik this week,
pushing back on the idea that RoboTaxi is where we place personal car ownership.
How does Ford's strategy fit into the broader conversation about the future of autonomy?
Well, it does seem like Ford is basically betting that personal vehicles,
ADAS and autonomy capabilities will still be relevant even in the world where RoboTaxi
deployment continues. So I kind of think that there are sort of two separate issues.
And I know people are saying, oh, maybe one day RoboTaxi will replace personal vehicles, but it
seems like Ford and a lot of the other traditional automakers are basically betting that personal
vehicles will remain relevant and that your car's autonomous features will still be a value
ad for personal vehicle ownership. So there's some reasons behind this, though.
They see a lot of revenue, subscription revenue from selling for $50 a month or $100 a month
or $3,000 or $5,000 at the time of purchase. This idea of having a car where you have hands-off,
eyes-off, minds-off for periods of travel. But there's something I think the industry
is missing right now, and that's affordability. And it could be that autonomous technology and
fleets of autonomous vehicles get less expensive than owning a car. So right now a car payment,
$700, $800, $900 a month, the average transaction price of a car is around $50,000. Well, if you
could subscribe to a RoboTaxi service for at least one of your cars for $300 or $400 a month,
you're not paying for maintenance, you're not paying for insurance. I think there's this business
case for RoboTaxi subscription service within metropolitan areas that the automakers are
ignoring for now. So how does that then relate to the traditional automaker investment in ADAS and
autonomy? It'll be paid off, I think, in some ways because they're still going to sell cars.
It wouldn't surprise me if households go to a subscription service in one personal vehicle
where they could store their stuff in and have whenever they want and have control over. But
I think we're going to see ownership trends and practices change over the next 10 to 15 years.
We're still at this infant period, this nascent period. But think of people who live in Boston,
New York, Chicago, San Francisco, who have to pay for parking to park their car, who have higher
insurance rates because they're in dense urban areas, who have higher upkeep rates because
fuel is more expensive there, energy is more expensive there, repair bills are more expensive
there, that there's going to be an attractive case for some sort of subscription service where
the car just picks you up every morning and maybe you even share the right to a central area,
to midtown Manhattan and you walk from there. It's going to be really interesting to see how
this sorts out. And I think the affordability issue is going to be really significant for this
and people are not watching this. They're not connecting the dots.
Good point, Jerry. Now, Hyundai announced plans to deploy Boston Dynamics humanoid robots at its
Georgia plant by 2028 and their building capacity to produce 30,000 robots annually.
This feels like a major shift. What do you guys make of this, Molly? You go first.
The robotics presence and physical AI presence at CES has been dominant. So I do think that this
is a sign of the auto industry's increasing interest in robotics as they're thinking about
reshoring domestic manufacturing because there are so many complexities involved with trying to
staff a factory that's going to be assembling vehicles and parts, especially given the current
immigration environment. So this is like a very forward-looking investment that Hyundai is making
that other automakers are looking into as well. I will say I'm not 100% convinced of the value
of humanoid robots specifically. I understand that the contention is these robots will be working
alongside humans for a long time and therefore there's some ease associated with not retooling
factories to build industrial robots that work on their own. But I know that there are some
engineering challenges involved with deploying humanoid robots, balance, awareness of space,
things like that. I'm curious to see if that ends up being the direction that Hyundai and all these
other companies investing in robotics actually land on. Jerry, do you think this is the beginning
of a real trend or do you really think this is another hype cycle? I don't think it's a hype
cycle. I think these issues are going to be solved. When we first started out, Molly talked about
how AI has jumped by leaps and bounds in just one year and how impressed she was with some of the
demonstrations. Well, we're going to see this another year and another year after that and it's
going to go into the brains, the mechanical brains of these robots. And I think all the issues that
we've talked about are going to be solved over the next five years. And for a lot of certain types
of work, an Amazon warehouse, they can use their robotic eyes and scan QR codes to pick packages
and put them into bins and to move the bins on to the place to load the bins into trucks.
They're all sorts of things. We're working in mines or dangerous situations in hazmat areas. There's
all sorts of applications, industrial and manufacturing applications for these robots.
And they don't have to be C3PO to work. They just have to get closer. The other thing that I think
is important to the automakers is that they have all this experience manufacturing complex machines.
So they see this both as a way to solve labor gaps and as a product that they can sell.
And it might be 20 years from now. We're seeing robots making robots.
Good stuff. Coming up, we'll talk about the software-defined vehicle race and whether the
industry can keep pace with China. That's next on Weekend Drive.
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Welcome back to Weekend Drive. I'm Kellen Walker with Molly Boygon and Jerry Hirsch.
Molly, you spoke with S-Diverse CEO Prashant Gulati this week about accelerating software
development timelines. He made this point that Chinese automakers are launching vehicles in
half the time it takes Western competitors. How realistic is it for legacy automakers to close
that gap? The software offerings at CES 2026 have really revolved around this question.
How can Western companies accelerate development timelines as the Chinese have cut development
timelines in half? I think that Western automakers now have the tools and there clearly is the demand
for these tools to accelerate software development. I wonder about the organizational
challenges. China has a supply chain born out of consumer electronics where all of the raw
materials and componentry are domestic. That's a significant advantage in terms of developing,
planning, and building vehicles. I think that there are some organizational things
that are in the way. Another consideration is Chinese consumers in general are more open to
receiving new vehicles with features that will get improvement over the air. Whereas American
consumers are very impatient with anything that's less than 100% complete. I wonder about the cultural
impact there too and whether the accelerated development timelines and a little bit rougher
around the edges software offerings are actually going to be palatable to the American consumer.
There's another piece to this too is that we're in this retreat from EVs where the United States
is going to be very oriented toward internal combustion engine vehicles over the next product
cycle five to six years at least. Meanwhile, China is all in on EVs. The software defined vehicle
works best in the EV architecture. It's easiest to change things. You can change settings. Once
you have an internal combustion engine and an eight-speed transmission, that's what you have.
There's not much you can do with it. This gap is going to get bigger until we move to an electric
vehicle architecture. Jerry, do you think the industry is being realistic about what consumers
actually want versus what engineers think they could build? I don't know. To be truthful, I don't
know because it depends upon which consumers you're talking about because there's a lot of different
audiences. There's the people who want the Hemi engines, the people who go off-roading,
the people who want supercar performance in an electric vehicle. There's the American consumers
and there are consumers in Europe that go for much smaller cars because of narrow roads and no
parking and denser living. Then there's Molly just talked about the consumers in China. It really
depends which market you're talking about and what products are available there.
Molly, what are your thoughts on that? I think that right now it's really unclear what offerings
are actually going to be valuable. Think back on the early days of the internet. It's hard to imagine
at that time, oh, there's going to be Airbnb. There's going to be now you'll be able to order
deliveries with your cell phone. I think that the industry is just looking at the possibilities
and throwing a lot of stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I think of in-vehicle gaming as an
example of this. I understand that it's very popular with Asian consumers, but I'm not completely
convinced that people will actually pay for that value here in the United States. But I think that
as the industry gets a little bit of a better sense of the potential in new services and other
offerings that are available with all of these different sea changes happening at the same time,
autonomy, software-defined vehicles, increased vehicle connectivity, then I think one business
model will kind of get another and the value of all of these things will become much clearer.
And finally, Sony Honda Mobility debuted its second vehicle, the Afila SUV, and pushed back
deliveries of the sedan to late 2026. They're taking this very cautious approach. Jerry,
is that the right strategy or are they risking being too slow to the market?
I really don't know what their strategy is. I don't think the market wants another hundred
thousand dollar electric sedan or SUV at this point. The whole market is moving in a different
direction and that niche is already satisfied with Lucid, the Mercedes S-Class electric vehicle,
and others. I just don't see where they're going with this. They have a consumer brand name,
but they don't have an automotive brand name. So it's going to be really tough.
Perfect. Jerry, Molly, thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks, Cal.
Thank you.
That's all for this weekend drive edition of Daily Drive. I'm Kellen Walker.
Thanks to Automotive News executive producer Jake Nier for his help on today's podcast.
You can get the latest news on CES, autonomous technology,
software-defined vehicles, and everything happening in the auto industry at AutoNews.com.
We'd love to hear from you. Let us know what you think of the show on the topics we cover today.
Send us an email at dailydrive at autonews.com or leave us a voicemail at 313-444-2774.
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About this episode
The latest Weekend Drive dives into the highlights from CES 2026, focusing on the significant advancements in AI and robotics within the automotive industry. Molly Boygon and Jerry Hirsch discuss the reduced presence of traditional automakers, particularly from Detroit, and Ford's ambitious plans for hands-free driving by 2028. The conversation also explores the future of personal vehicle ownership versus RoboTaxi services, Hyundai's investment in humanoid robots, and the competitive landscape of software-defined vehicles, particularly in relation to Chinese automakers. Insights into consumer preferences and market trends add depth to the discussion.
Automotive News’ Molly Boigon and Jerry Hirsch discuss the biggest takeaways from CES 2026, including Ford’s eyes-off driving announcement, Hyundai’s humanoid robot push and what autonomous technology means for personal car ownership.
