The newest new thing: Nvidia
You gotta love a hype-induced bubble. Having been permanently ensconced in financial markets for more than three decades, I’ve seen a few, and there’s another one forming right now.
It wasn’t that long ago – 2019, if memory serves – that Softbank pumped nearly $1 billion ($940 million to be exact) into driverless delivery-vehicle startup Nuro.ai, which was set up by some ex-Google engineers and was already delivering groceries autonomously in Arizona. It was the same year I was invited to invest (I didn’t) in Zoox, another autonomous driving hopeful.
The proliferation of suppliers was next. Audi, Tesla, Mercedes, Google, and hundreds of others including Samsung, Denso, Uber, Amazon, Honda and Microsoft jumped on the driverless bandwagon, or were vacuumed into it. At an April 2019 Detroit Economic Club event, Ford said it believed its fully driverless cars will be in commercial operation by 2021.
By October 2021, investment in driverless technology had surpassed US$44 billion.
And this was despite the discovery an Autonomous truck company called Nikola, had pushed a truck down a gentle hill, filmed it and claimed it was driving autonomously. Then, in 2022, interest rates started to rise, and just as Nickola’s founder was charged with fraud, the autonomous bubble burst.
Roger Montgomery is the Founder and Chairman of Montgomery Investment Management. Roger has over three decades of experience in funds management and related activities, including equities analysis, equity and derivatives strategy, trading and stockbroking. Prior to establishing Montgomery, Roger held positions at Ord Minnett Jardine Fleming, BT (Australia) Limited and Merrill Lynch.
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