Version 3, August 2026

Autonomous vehicle (AV) companies, their investors, and their lobbying arms move money through several separate channels: venture capital, federal lobbying, political action committee (PAC) contributions, state legislative campaigns, and defense procurement. Each channel is legal on its own terms. Read together, they show a consistent pattern: money flows toward the lawmakers advancing AV deployment and away from the one sponsor of the industry’s most direct legislative opposition.

Every figure in this brief comes from a primary source: Federal Election Commission (FEC) itemized records, Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) quarterly filings held by the Secretary of the Senate, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings, company press releases, or federal contract announcements. Where a figure could not be independently verified, that limitation is stated rather than papered over.

Corporate Funding: Three Different Money Profiles

AV trucking companies do not share a single investor base. Three companies illustrate three distinct funding profiles.

Applied Intuition closed a $600 million Series F in June 2025 at a $15 billion valuation, co-led by BlackRock and Kleiner Perkins. The round’s other named investors include Franklin Templeton, the Qatar Investment Authority, and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, confirmed directly against the company’s own press release. Applied Intuition builds the simulation and autonomy software that Kodiak and other AV companies use commercially, and separately holds hundreds of millions of dollars in Pentagon contracts.

Waabi raised roughly $1.28 billion total, including a $750 million Series C co-led by Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners, plus a $250 million strategic tranche from Uber tied to robotaxi expansion. Nvidia’s venture arm, Volvo Group Venture Capital, and BlackRock also participated.

Kodiak went public in September 2025 through a merger with Ares Acquisition Corporation II, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) affiliated with Ares Management. The deal drew private investment in public equity (PIPE) funding from institutional investors including Soros Fund Management and ARK Investments.

Three companies, three separate investor bases: Gulf sovereign wealth and BlackRock behind Applied Intuition, venture capital and a ride-hailing partner behind Waabi, and a mix of hedge fund and public-market crossover money behind Kodiak. No single investor sits behind the whole industry.

A fourth company shows what happens when that funding path closes. PlusAI announced a merger with Churchill Capital Corp IX in June 2025, cleared SEC review in January 2026, and planned to trade on the Nasdaq exchange under the ticker PLS. The two parties terminated the merger by mutual agreement on April 20, 2026, citing market conditions. PlusAI remains privately held. TRATON Group separately committed up to $25 million in research and development funding to the company in January 2026, part of an expanded partnership announced that month covering PlusAI’s SuperDrive software across Scania, MAN, and International brands.

The Lobbying Apparatus

The Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association (AVIA), founded in 2016 as the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, is the industry’s central lobbying vehicle. A direct query of the FEC committee registry for any committee containing AVIA or Autonomous Vehicle Industry returns nothing. AVIA’s influence runs through lobbying spend and its members’ individual PACs.

AVIA’s disclosed federal lobbying totals at least $3,590,000, verified line by line against every quarterly filing held by the Secretary of the Senate from 2016 through the second quarter of 2026. That spending runs through four separate registrants: Venable LLP ($2,650,000 across 37 quarterly filings, 2016 through Q2 2026), AVIA in-house ($760,000 across four quarters, Q3 2025 through Q2 2026), Navigators Global LLC ($120,000, direct engagement April through December 2025, terminated), and Mehlman Consulting, Inc. ($60,000, Q1 2026, new engagement).

Two shifts in that record are worth stating plainly. AVIA registered in-house lobbying for the first time in September 2025, and within four quarters that in-house spending became its largest single line, running $150,000 to $210,000 per quarter. Over the same stretch Venable’s quarterly billing to AVIA rose from $100,000 to $140,000, a 40 percent increase holding steady through Q2 2026.

Member companies lobby individually on top of AVIA’s collective effort, and their interests do not always match. Alphabet spent $14.86 million on lobbying in 2024 across all its business lines, not AV specifically. Uber spent $2.62 million in 2024, rising to $3.38 million in 2025. Tesla is not an AVIA member and lobbies alone: $1.57 million in 2025.

AVIA’s own regulatory recommendations to the U.S. Department of Transportation, submitted in response to a request for information on which rules to eliminate or modify, echo language published in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 2023 policy playbook, on rolling back the assumption that a commercial motor vehicle must have a human driver. That connection is a matter of public record between two documents, not an inference drawn from one.

A trade association’s scale is worth comparing against AVIA’s. The American Trucking Associations (ATA), which represents the broader trucking industry rather than AV specifically, spent $2.8 million lobbying in 2024 and $2.08 million in 2025 through the third quarter, roughly triple AVIA’s disclosed total. ATA’s own PAC raised $874,525 in the 2023-2024 cycle, giving $539,214 directly to candidates on a bipartisan basis. On record before FMCSA, ATA has supported the position that federal rules should no longer assume a commercial motor vehicle has a human operator, matching AVIA’s core regulatory ask even though the two groups represent different constituencies.

The owner-operator side of the industry runs its own, smaller political operation in the opposite direction. The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association (OOIDA) spent $943,263 lobbying in 2024 and has operated its own PAC since 1989, giving $127,500 to candidates in the 2024 cycle. OOIDA’s own PAC materials describe its purpose as countering, in the organization’s words, “the greatest advantage that large trucking corporations, the American Trucking Associations (ATA) and other political” interests hold in Washington, naming ATA directly as a counterweight.

One coalition adjacent to this fight describes itself differently than a lobbying operation. Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE), whose members include NVIDIA, Toyota, Aurora, and Waymo, states its mission is public education, not advocacy for specific policy. No Lobbying Disclosure Act filing was found under PAVE’s name in any registrant or client search; it is registered only as a nonprofit. That self-description holds up at the coalition level. It does not extend to what individual member companies do separately under their own lobbying registrations, which are accounted for elsewhere in this brief.

Uber and Waymo, both AVIA members and business partners, are lobbying against each other on a specific policy question. Uber has circulated New Jersey legislation requiring human drivers to handle 85 percent of rides on any platform offering robotaxi service for three years, and is pushing an identical hybrid network mandate in Washington, D.C., where a competing bill would also impose a 15 cent per mile tax on robotaxi operators. Waymo opposes the mandate. No dollar figure specific to the New Jersey or D.C. push was found in available disclosures, and that gap is stated here rather than estimated.

The Staff Pipeline: Bill Sponsors to Industry

Money is one channel. People are another. This brief checked whether AV companies are hiring staff who worked directly for the seven lawmakers sponsoring the bills tracked throughout this document, Latta, Dingell, Young, Lummis, Cruz, Mullin, and Fong, rather than generically credentialed former regulators. A staffer moving from a specific bill sponsor’s own office into that bill’s target industry is a sharper signal of a lawmaker-specific relationship than a resume line reading former agency official.

Two confirmed moves fit the pattern.

Kevin Rambosk was Debbie Dingell’s deputy chief of staff and her longest-serving aide, with the office since she took over her late father-in-law’s seat in January 2015. He left in October 2023 to join Tesla’s Washington policy team as a senior adviser on federal policy. Tesla’s own federal lobbying disclosures list autonomous vehicle policy as an active issue area.

Daniel Cheever held four successive roles in Todd Young’s office, intern and staff assistant in the House, then legislative correspondent and legislative aide once Young moved to the Senate. He is now a registered lobbyist at H&M Strategies, working the Aurora Innovation account. His firm’s most recent quarterly filing states the specific lobbying issue as AV technology development and deployment and the SELF DRIVE Act by name.

A third finding sits in a different category. Ariel Wolf came up through a Senate policy advisor role, then the Department of Transportation under Secretary Elaine Chao, where he developed the agency’s early autonomous vehicle policy and launched its Non-traditional and Emerging Transportation Technology Council. He is now the partner chairing Venable’s Autonomous and Connected Mobility practice, the group filing AVIA’s lobbying registrations already detailed above, and simultaneously serves as AVIA’s own General Counsel. He does not tie to one of the seven offices specifically. What he represents is a shorter, more direct pipeline: DOT policymaker to industry’s own house counsel, sitting inside the same firm relationship this brief already tracks by dollar figure.

Every other name checked came back negative. AVIA’s in-house hires, Renee Gibson and Elizabeth Bender, have no congressional staff background tied to any of the seven offices. The four other lobbyists on the same H&M Strategies filing as Cheever, Nicole Mortier, Ralph Hellmann, Sarah Walter, and Kristen Bautz, all worked for members outside the group. The rest of Venable’s AV team, Tara Sugiyama Potashnik, Kathryn Marshall Timmons, Ian Williams, and Arlyn Upshaw, have no congressional staff background at all. Mehlman Consulting’s founder and senior staff show no tie to the seven either, though one recent Mehlman hire spent over a decade in House leadership before joining the firm, worth noting even without a direct match. Penn Avenue Partners, Kodiak’s registered firm, lists only a compliance contact on its filings, not the individual lobbyist actually working the account, and could not be resolved with the sources available here.

Two confirmed hits and one structurally significant pipeline is not proof the industry is systematically raiding these seven offices. It is also not nothing. A full answer requires a systematic pull of staff rosters across all seven offices against every AV company and retained firm named in this brief, which requires LegiStorm’s paid subscription tier. That check was not available for this research and the gap is stated here rather than papered over.

Aurora: The Largest Single-Company Lobbying Operation

Aurora Innovation chairs AVIA’s Board of Directors. It also runs the largest disclosed federal lobbying operation of any AV trucking company examined for this brief, and it has no PAC at all.

Aurora’s disclosed federal lobbying totals $4,137,000 from 2018 through Q2 2026, across three registrants: Aurora Innovation in-house, filed through Politicom Law LLP ($2,827,000, 2019 through Q2 2026), H&M Strategies LLP ($1,110,000, 2020 through Q2 2026), and The Lugar Group, formerly the Lugar Hellmann Group ($200,000, 2018 through 2020, terminated).

The spending curve is steep. Aurora’s in-house lobbying ran $40,000 to $80,000 per quarter through 2022. By the second quarter of 2026 it reported $240,000 for the quarter, its highest on record, with another $50,000 to H&M Strategies in the same period.

On the commercial side, Aurora’s carrier network runs deeper than any competitor examined here. Its named ecosystem partners include AUMOVIO, FedEx, Hirschbach, McLane, NVIDIA, PACCAR, Ryder, Schneider, Toyota, Uber, Uber Freight, Volvo Trucks, Volvo Autonomous Solutions, and Werner, per Aurora’s own investor relations releases through mid-2026. Hirschbach Motor Lines, Aurora’s original launch customer alongside Uber Freight, signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding on April 30, 2026 to purchase 500 Aurora Driver-powered trucks, delivery beginning 2027, the single largest carrier commitment identified anywhere in this research. Value Truck, a cross-border carrier, separately committed to deploying Aurora’s second-generation hardware on the Dallas-Laredo and Fort Worth-Phoenix corridors.

PlusAI: Influence Without a Filing

PlusAI has never registered a federal lobbyist. A direct query of the Secretary of the Senate’s filing database for both PlusAI and Plus Automation, Inc. returns zero reports. No FEC committee exists under either name. The company has no disclosed lobbying spend and no PAC.

Its federal presence runs entirely through people who used to write and enforce the rules. Earl Adams Jr. is PlusAI’s Vice President of Public Policy and Regulatory Affairs. He previously served as Deputy Administrator of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) and, before that, as the agency’s Chief Counsel. He joined PlusAI from Hogan Lovells, where he led the firm’s autonomous vehicle working group.

In September 2025 PlusAI formed a Safety and Policy Advisory Council. Four of its five inaugural members are former regulators or former trade association chairs, including Sue Lawless, former Acting Deputy Administrator of FMCSA, and Andrew Boyle, former Chairman of the ATA Board of Directors.

Unlike Aurora and Kodiak, PlusAI has no named traditional trucking carrier as a commercial partner. Its commercialization strategy runs entirely through original equipment manufacturers (OEMs): TRATON Group’s Scania, MAN, and International brands, plus Iveco and Hyundai. Ryder is the one carrier-side name that does surface, as International’s named fleet-trial partner validating PlusAI’s factory-installed system on the I-35 corridor between Laredo and Dallas, a role Ryder also plays inside the Aurora ecosystem, making it the only carrier confirmed on two separate AV platforms.

Kodiak: A Newer Filing and a Former Administrator

Kodiak filed its first federal lobbying registration in late April 2026, retaining Penn Avenue Partners LLC. The registration was signed May 22, 2026 and reported $30,000 for the period, with a single issue area listed as commercial vehicle transportation issues. No FEC committee exists under the Kodiak name.

Kodiak’s Industry Advisory Council, established in March 2024, carried the highest-ranking former federal official found anywhere in this research. Anne Ferro served as Administrator of FMCSA from 2009 through 2014, then as President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) from 2014 through 2023. Ferro retired from the council in April 2026.

Kodiak’s carrier partnerships are the most extensive and operationally advanced of any company examined in this brief. Named working partners include J.B. Hunt, Werner Enterprises, C.R. England, Martin Brower, Roehl Transport, and Bridgestone, per multiple 2026 trade-press confirmations. J.B. Hunt and Kodiak together have logged more than 50,000 autonomous long-haul miles hauling Bridgestone tires between South Carolina and Dallas, with a reported 100 percent on-time record and zero accidents, the most extensive documented autonomous mileage of any carrier relationship identified in this research. Werner Enterprises holds a seat on Kodiak’s advisory council alongside a separate named partnership with Aurora, making it the only traditional trucking carrier confirmed as an active partner on two competing AV platforms at once. UPS also holds an advisory council seat; James Reed, who chairs the council, is Walmart’s Vice President of Transportation Development, giving Walmart a direct hand in shaping Kodiak’s roadmap as a major shipper rather than a carrier.

Kodiak’s largest live deployment sits outside the traditional carrier category. Atlas Energy Solutions operates 35 fully driverless Kodiak trucks in the Permian Basin as of mid-2026, scaling to a planned 100 by mid-2027, and is the only identified case where the customer owns and operates the autonomous fleet directly rather than Kodiak running it as a service. Atlas is an oilfield logistics operator running largely private routes, not a general-freight carrier under FMCSA’s public-highway authority structure, and is treated separately from the carrier partnerships above for that reason.

Applied Intuition: Three Firms, a Defense Focus, and a PAC That Doesn’t Match the Pattern

Applied Intuition does not lobby under its own registration. It retains three outside firms, each filing separately on its behalf: Holland & Knight LLP (effective July 2024, describing the client as a provider of software for unmanned systems related to national security), GuidepostStrategies, LLC (effective March 2025, autonomous product engineering and development), and ATS Communications, Inc., doing business as Silbey Strategies (effective March 2025, vehicle autonomy).

Its reported lobbying rose from $550,000 in 2024 to $910,000 in 2025. The stated focus of that increase was defense appropriations and support for deploying autonomous systems for the Navy and Air Force, which places Applied Intuition’s federal advocacy on different ground than the trucking regulatory work driving Aurora, PlusAI, AVIA, and Daimler Truck.

Applied Intuition also runs an active PAC, one of only two among the companies examined here. Applied Intuition, Inc. Political Action Committee (FEC ID C00828830) registered November 18, 2022 and reported $244,334 in receipts across the 2025 to 2026 cycle, up from $105,395 across the full 2023-2024 cycle, more than doubling with the current cycle not yet closed.

Seven individual recipients of this PAC’s money have been identified and confirmed by name: Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-PA), House Republican Chief Deputy Whip, $10,000 across five contributions in 2023-2024; Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA), senior House Appropriations Committee member, $8,300 across four contributions; Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), House Armed Services Committee, $1,000; Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR), House Appropriations, former Defense subcommittee chair, $1,000; Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO), House Armed Services, net $0 after a refund offset an earlier contribution; Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), House Appropriations Defense subcommittee and House Intelligence, $4,000; and Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL), House Appropriations, via his leadership PAC, Blue Line PAC.

Every one of these seven recipients sits on Armed Services or Appropriations, most specifically on Defense-related subcommittees or in Defense-adjacent leadership roles. Five are Republicans, two are Democrats. None overlaps with the surface-transportation AV bill sponsors tracked elsewhere in this brief, Latta, Dingell, Young, Lummis, Cruz, Mullin, or Fong. This is a clean, bipartisan, defense-appropriations-specific giving pattern that lines up directly with Applied Intuition’s stated defense lobbying focus rather than the trucking-regulatory circuit the rest of the industry is working.

This finding carries a limitation worth stating plainly. The seven recipients above were identified by following individual committee IDs after initial searches returned blank contributor and recipient names, not through a systematic pull of the PAC’s complete giving history. The defense-Appropriations-only pattern holds for every recipient identified so far; it has not been confirmed as complete.

Daimler Truck: Majority-Owned Autonomy and a Lobbying Figure Worth Reading Carefully

Daimler Truck North America (DTNA) builds the Freightliner, Western Star, and Thomas Built Buses brands, and owns a majority stake in Torc Robotics, its autonomous trucking subsidiary. Daimler acquired that stake in 2019 for an undisclosed sum; subsequent reporting from September 2025 puts Daimler’s ownership at approximately 91 percent, with Torc’s founders holding the residual interest. Torc has retained its name, its Blacksburg, Virginia headquarters, and its existing customer base under the arrangement. As of that same September 2025 reporting, Daimler was said to be in preliminary talks to bring in an outside investment partner for Torc; terms and even whether a deal will happen remain undetermined, and any statement about Torc’s ownership structure should be treated as current only as of this writing.

DTNA selected Innoviz Technologies as LiDAR partner for series production of Level 4 autonomous trucks in December 2025.

DTNA’s disclosed federal lobbying runs about $6,320,000 across six registrants dating to 2011. The four currently or recently active: DTNA in-house ($2,730,000, 2022 through Q2 2026), Capitol Counsel LLC ($1,490,000, 2021 through Q2 2026), Venable LLP ($1,200,000, 2019 through Q2 2026), and Ballard Partners ($440,000, Q1 2025 through Q1 2026, terminated).

Venable’s quarterly billing to DTNA held at $40,000 from 2022 through the third quarter of 2025, then rose to $180,000 per quarter beginning Q4 2025 and held there through Q2 2026, a 4.5 times increase in the same two quarters that AVIA’s Venable rate rose 40 percent and Aurora’s in-house spending hit record levels.

One caution belongs here. Trade-press tracking of DTNA’s most recent quarterly filing, $230,000 for Q2 2026, attributes that spend jointly to autonomous vehicle safety standards, emissions policy, and international trade, without breaking out how much belongs to which issue. The AV-specific total for that quarter cannot be isolated from what is publicly available, and any figure treated as AV-only lobbying spend for DTNA in that period should be read with that caveat attached.

Against that, Daimler’s PAC is close to dormant. The Mercedes-Benz North America Corporation US Employees PAC (FEC ID C00611897) reported $0 in receipts for both the 2023 to 2024 and 2025 to 2026 cycles, spending $4,000 per cycle out of a declining cash reserve that fell from $17,307 to $9,307 over four years. Daimler’s federal political activity is lobbying spend, not candidate contributions.

A separate entity, the Daimler Truck North American Dealer Council, retained Crossroads Strategies in October 2025 and reported $270,000 through Q1 2026. Its stated issue was the 25 percent tariff on imported medium and heavy-duty trucks announced October 7, 2025. That is trade policy rather than AV policy, and its spending is excluded from the totals above.

Daimler’s California record from an earlier legislative fight is worth attaching here. During the 2023 fight over AB 316, California’s driverless-truck safety bill, Daimler Trucks spent $32,000 lobbying against the bill, alongside Waymo’s $80,000, Aurora’s $75,000, and AVIA’s $90,000, a combined $277,000 that Governor Gavin Newsom’s eventual veto rewarded. That fight recurred in 2024 as AB 2286 and AB 3061, both also vetoed, with AVIA again lobbying Newsom’s office directly. This is not a single legislative skirmish; it is a multi-year, repeating pattern in one state, predating and distinct from the federal escalation this brief otherwise tracks.

The Lidar Coalition: A Trade Group That Went Quiet

The Lidar Coalition was founded in April 2021 by AEye, Cepton, Continental, Innoviz, Ouster, Quanergy Systems, and Velodyne. Venable LLP served as counsel and as its sole registered lobbying firm.

Its disclosed lobbying totals $290,000 across 13 quarterly filings, running from its 2021 registration to a termination filed in February 2024. The coalition stopped filing in 2024. At least one founding member scaled up sharply on its own: Ouster, which absorbed Velodyne in a February 2023 merger, now retains multiple firms at once, including Holland & Knight at $150,000 per quarter through 2025, with disclosed lobbying issues on national security and import restrictions on LiDAR sensors from Chinese manufacturers.

The Manufacturers: A Consolidated Market Where Everyone Already Has a Stake

The carrier and supplier landscape in this brief is fragmented; the manufacturer landscape is not. Four truck manufacturers account for 99.9 percent of new Class 8 sales in the United States: Daimler, PACCAR, Volvo Group, and TRATON Group, whose brands include International Motors, MAN, and Scania. Every one of the four already has an autonomous driving partner or subsidiary. Unlike the carrier side of this brief, where most companies are hedging or sitting out entirely, the manufacturer question is not who benefits if autonomous trucking advances. Structurally, all four already do.

Daimler’s position is the deepest and cleanest: majority ownership of Torc Robotics, detailed above, means Daimler captures the technology’s upside directly rather than splitting it with an independent partner. Volvo Group is the most diversified, supplying the VNL Autonomous platform to both Aurora and Waabi at once, hedging across two competing software providers on the same hardware. TRATON Group has made the largest direct capital commitment to an outside partner, $25 million to PlusAI, and its International Motors subsidiary discloses independent federal lobbying, $480,000 for Q4 2024 alone, and maintains its own PAC (FEC ID C00040840), though its disclosed lobbying issues center on emissions and infrastructure funding rather than AV policy specifically. PACCAR’s exposure runs through its Aurora partnership; PACCAR itself shows no independent federal lobbying disclosure in the current cycle, suggesting its political engagement on this issue runs through Aurora’s registrations rather than its own.

Dealer networks occupy a different position than any other actor in this brief: not a passive beneficiary sitting beneath the manufacturers, but an active participant defending a specific interest. The National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA), through its American Truck Dealers division, is on record lobbying directly on H.R. 7390, the SELF DRIVE Act, to preserve state dealer franchise laws regardless of how AV authority gets structured federally. NADA’s own legislative page credits sponsor Rep. Bob Latta and Subcommittee Chairman Gus Bilirakis for including franchise-law protection in what NADA describes as an expected amendment to the bill. The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s own markup record, however, states only that H.R. 7390 was forwarded to the full committee by a 12 to 11 roll call vote, without the “as amended” language used elsewhere in the same document for a companion bill. Whether NADA’s expected protection made it into the bill at that stage is not confirmed by the official record as of this writing, and should not be treated as settled.

NVIDIA supplies compute across nearly every platform examined in this brief, Aurora, Kodiak, PlusAI, and Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz Trucks division, making it structurally present regardless of which AV company or manufacturer wins. Its own $4.97 million in 2025 federal lobbying, however, is disclosed under chip export controls, AI infrastructure, and semiconductor trade policy, not autonomous vehicles specifically. NVIDIA’s exposure to this fight is commercial, not political; its lobbying dollars are working a different, larger fight that AV happens to sit inside.

PAC Money: Who Gets Funded, and Who Does Not

Federal law caps a PAC’s contribution to a single candidate at $5,000 per election, or $10,000 per two-year cycle. That money cannot come from a corporation’s own treasury. Google LLC NetPAC and Uber’s Separate Segregated Fund are both funded by voluntary employee contributions, pooled and disbursed under the company’s name. This brief traced both PACs’ giving to eight federal lawmakers directly involved in AV legislation, verified against the FEC’s own live database, covering 2015 through 2026.

• Bob Latta (R-OH), House AV subcommittee chair, SELF DRIVE Act sponsor: $28,000 from Google, $0 from Uber
• Debbie Dingell (D-MI), SELF DRIVE Act co-sponsor: $19,000 from Google, $1,500 from Uber
• Todd Young (R-IN), Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee: $17,000 from Google, $0 from Uber
• Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), Autonomous Vehicle Acceleration Act sponsor: $6,500 from Google, $0 from Uber
• Ted Cruz (R-TX), Senate Commerce chair, named 2026 AV Champion by AVIA: $6,000 from Google, $0 from Uber, all in 2018
• Kevin Mullin (D-CA), AV Safety Data Act sponsor: $4,000 from Google, $0 from Uber
• Vince Fong (R-CA), AMERICA DRIVES Act sponsor: $2,500 from Google, $1,000 from Uber
• Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Stay in Your Lane Act co-sponsor: $0 from Google, $0 from Uber

Every one of the seven lawmakers advancing AV legislation received money from at least one of the two PACs checked. The one sponsor of the opposition bill received nothing from either, verified against both his principal campaign committee and his joint fundraising committee. A parallel check on Senator Ed Markey, the sponsor most active in AV oversight through his letters to seven AV companies on remote assistance operations, found a single $3,000 Google contribution in 2016 and nothing since.

Google’s presence in this table warrants a scope note. Google LLC NetPAC’s giving reflects Alphabet’s political engagement broadly, not a trucking-specific interest. Alphabet’s AV exposure runs almost entirely through Waymo, and Waymo’s business is overwhelmingly robotaxi and ride-hailing, not freight. Waymo did run a Class 8 trucking effort, Waymo Via, with pilot partnerships including J.B. Hunt and a technology partnership with Daimler Truck, but the company shut down its trucking commercialization push in July 2023 to concentrate engineering resources on ride-hailing, and the J.B. Hunt pilot ended at that point. What survives is a narrower, ongoing collaboration with Daimler on a redundant vehicle platform, not active freight operations. Google’s PAC contributions to AV bill sponsors are real and belong in this table, but they should be read as Alphabet defending its robotaxi and platform interests generally, not as evidence of a trucking-specific stake on par with Aurora’s or Kodiak’s lobbying.

The Todd Young figure carries a specific caveat. His $17,000 from Google NetPAC is a net total across 11 transactions from March 2015 through August 2022, several of which are redesignation pairs that offset to zero. No Google contribution to Young appears after August 2022. The $0 from Uber reads differently than the other entries in this table: Uber’s Separate Segregated Fund registered with the FEC on June 9, 2025 and has barely a year of operating history, so its zero reflects a short window rather than a decade of declining to give.

None of these contributions approach the $24,000 lobbyist bundling disclosure threshold in effect for 2026. Neither PAC’s giving pattern constitutes legal bundling.

Labor money runs the opposite direction. The Teamsters’ D.R.I.V.E. PAC has given Blumenthal $2,500 in three separate cycles, 2016, 2022, and again in December 2025 for the current cycle. The same check against Markey returned nothing. Organized labor is funding a specific relationship with Blumenthal, the same way industry funds specific relationships with the sponsors who advance its interests.

Government Contracts: The Dual-Use Money

Kodiak holds a $49.9 million Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) contract for the Army’s Robotic Combat Vehicle program, awarded October 2022, plus a separate U.S. Marine Corps contract for the ROGUE-Fires program. Applied Intuition, whose software Kodiak also uses commercially, holds three federal contracts: the same $49 million Army award, a $171.1 million production contract with the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) for an enterprise autonomy platform, and a share of a $249 million Army Contracting Command Blanket Purchase Agreement covering artificial intelligence and autonomy testing tools across the federal government.

Aurora and Waabi show no equivalent defense contracts in the federal record. The dual-use path taken by Kodiak and Applied Intuition is the exception among AV trucking companies.

Every one of these figures is a contract ceiling, the maximum possible value, not a confirmed obligated spend. Many Pentagon artificial intelligence and autonomy contracts run as Other Transaction Agreements (OTAs), a contract vehicle exempt from disclosure on USASpending.gov by regulation. An obligated-to-date figure for Applied Intuition’s contracts may not exist in any public database.

The Opposition’s Money

Teamsters California is the only well-resourced organized opposition to AV trucking deployment at the federal and state level, and the current fight is not its first round. In August 2026 it sued the California Department of Motor Vehicles over regulations permitting autonomous heavy trucks. That lawsuit follows a legislative pattern going back three years: California’s AB 316 (2023), a bill requiring a trained human operator behind the wheel of any autonomous truck over 10,000 pounds, passed the legislature with bipartisan support and was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom after AVIA, Waymo, Aurora, and Daimler collectively spent at least $277,000 lobbying against it. The same fight recurred in 2024 as AB 2286 and AB 3061, both also vetoed, with AVIA again lobbying Newsom’s office directly to oppose them. The August 2026 lawsuit is the latest round of a fight organized labor has now lost at the legislature twice.

The lawsuit’s own estimate of the regulation’s economic impact, $288 million in direct costs and $576 million including indirect effects, sits against the state agency’s own estimate of $5.8 million, the figure that let it use an abbreviated rulemaking process reserved for changes under a $50 million threshold. That gap between the two estimates is the substance of the legal dispute.

Teamsters Union spent $2,330,989 on federal lobbying in 2024, comparable in scale to Uber’s federal lobbying the same year, and gave $1,555,700 to federal candidates that cycle, split 86.84 percent to Democrats and 13.16 percent to Republicans.

A second organized opposition voice, less resourced but on the record, comes from the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, covered in the Lobbying Apparatus section above. OOIDA’s public comments to FMCSA in 2023 warned against treating autonomous trucks as a “cure-all,” a materially softer position than Teamsters’ litigation posture, and its $943,263 in 2024 lobbying spend is roughly a third of ATA’s, the trade group representing the mega-carriers OOIDA’s own materials name as a counterweight.

An Investor Stake Worth Naming

Uber has held a large disclosed equity position in Aurora since February 2022, when it filed its original Schedule 13D with the SEC. The position came out of Uber’s 2020 sale of its Advanced Technologies Group self-driving unit to Aurora. It reached 325,973,411 shares, or 27.9 percent of Aurora’s Class A common stock, held through Neben Holdings, LLC, a wholly owned Uber subsidiary.

Uber has been monetizing that stake in stages. In May 2025 it raised roughly $1.13 billion through zero-coupon Exchangeable Senior Notes due 2028, secured by first-priority liens on pledged Aurora shares. On June 2, 2026, Neben Holdings sold 67,500,000 Aurora shares at $7.10 per share in a single block trade, dropping Uber’s stake to 258,473,411 shares, or 15.6 percent.Uber sold again on August 17, 2026: Neben Holdings sold a further 72,000,000 Aurora shares at $6.55 per share in a block sale to a financial institution, dropping the position to 186,473,411 shares, or 10.9 percent, per the resulting Schedule 13D/A and Form 4 filings. Three sales in three months, each at a lower share count than the last, is a stronger pattern than a single data point suggests.

Uber’s position in this brief extends beyond that one stake. Uber Freight, its logistics marketplace arm, is the commercial layer sitting on top of at least three separate AV platforms at once: Aurora (original launch customer, partnership dating to 2021), Waabi (a 10-year strategic partnership announced in 2025 committing Waabi capacity to the Uber Freight network), and Torc Robotics, Daimler’s AV subsidiary, per a partnership announced in late 2025. If any one of those platforms wins, or if carriers simply book capacity through whichever is cheapest at the time, Uber Freight collects a brokerage position regardless. That is a structurally different kind of exposure than any single equity stake, and it sits alongside, not in place of, the Aurora shareholding above.

Uber sits on multiple sides of this brief at once: a large historical shareholder in the leading AV trucking company, an AVIA member, a PAC contributor to AV bill sponsors, a marketplace layer across three competing AV platforms, and the party pushing state legislation that would require human drivers on robotaxi platforms.

Limitations

• Contributions under $200 are never itemized by federal law, regardless of source. Zero found in this brief means zero found above that threshold, not confirmed total absence.
• Applied Intuition’s contract figures are ceilings. No obligated-to-date figure is available, and the underlying contract vehicle may be permanently exempt from that level of public disclosure.
• A further $100,000 in Navigators Global billing on AVIA work, filed between 2024 and Q1 2025 as work performed on behalf of Venable LLP rather than for AVIA directly, is excluded from the AVIA total. LDA filings do not disclose payment flow, so whether that amount is additional to or already inside Venable’s reported figures cannot be determined from the forms.
• PAC-to-candidate figures cover Google LLC NetPAC and Uber’s Separate Segregated Fund only. Other AVIA member companies, and named carrier partners including Hirschbach, Werner, J.B. Hunt, Schneider, Ryder, and UPS, have not been checked for their own federal PACs. This is a known gap, not an assumption of zero activity.
• Applied Intuition PAC’s recipient list is incomplete. Seven recipients have been identified and confirmed by name; the PAC’s complete giving history has not been systematically pulled. The defense-Appropriations-only pattern holds for every recipient found so far and should be read as strong but not exhaustive.
• No systematic check has been made of which named carrier partnerships (Hirschbach’s 500-truck order, Werner’s dual-platform role, and others) are binding contracts versus non-binding memoranda of understanding or pilot agreements. Several, including Hirschbach’s, are explicitly non-binding as announced. Treat commercial partnership claims in this brief as documented intent, not confirmed revenue, unless a source states otherwise.
• No check has been made for equity stakes running between AV technology companies and their named carrier partners, in either direction, beyond the Uber-Aurora position already detailed. If such a stake exists elsewhere, it would change how a given partnership should be read.
• Torc Robotics’ ownership structure is current as of the most recent available reporting (91 percent Daimler-owned) but is actively in flux; Daimler was reported in preliminary talks toward bringing in an outside investor as of September 2025, with no confirmed outcome.
• Daimler Truck’s Q2 2026 lobbying disclosure bundles AV safety standards, emissions policy, and trade issues without a public breakdown. Any figure treated as Daimler’s AV-specific lobbying spend for that quarter should carry this caveat.
• No lobbying registration was identified for Waabi under any name searched. Continental, Quanergy, Ibeo, and Valeo were not individually checked for post-2023 lobbying activity.
• No dollar figure was found for Uber’s specific New Jersey or Washington, D.C. lobbying spend, only documented lobbying activity.
• Two research threads reached a genuine ceiling rather than simply going unpursued. Three UNECE Working Party on Road Traffic Safety session reports, symbols ECE/TRANS/WP.1/163, 164, and 166, could not be located through UNECE’s document folders or the UN Digital Library search, and may not exist under those symbols for the range in question. France’s 2018 treaty amendment proposal, WP.1 Informal Document No. 6, is confirmed only through one secondary French-language source; the primary UNECE text was not recoverable through any channel available for this research.

The Pattern

No single company or investor funds the entire push for autonomous vehicle deployment. The money moves through separate, legal channels that rarely overlap: venture capital and sovereign wealth fund company growth, corporate treasuries fund lobbying, employee-pooled PACs fund specific candidate relationships, and federal contracts fund a small number of companies pursuing dual-use technology.

Two things connect the channels. The first is a consistent choice, repeated across every PAC checked, to fund the lawmakers advancing AV deployment and to withhold funding from the one lawmaker leading the legislative pushback. Organized labor makes the mirror-image choice.

The second shows up in the filing dates. Between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026, AVIA stood up an in-house lobbying operation that immediately became its largest spending line, Venable’s quarterly rate rose 40 percent for AVIA and 350 percent for Daimler Truck, Aurora posted its highest lobbying quarter on record, and Kodiak registered a federal lobbyist for the first time in company history. Those decisions were made separately by companies with different investors, different business models, and in Uber and Waymo’s case, active disagreements with each other. They arrived at the same escalation in the same two quarters, while the SELF DRIVE Act, the AMERICA DRIVES Act, and Surface Transportation Reauthorization were all moving.

A third pattern sits underneath the first two, visible only once the carrier and manufacturer sides are added in. On the manufacturer side, there is no real contest: all four companies that build 99.9 percent of America’s Class 8 trucks already have an AV stake, whether through outright ownership, as with Daimler and Torc, or through partnership, as with Volvo, TRATON, and PACCAR. The open question on that side is not who wins, but how deep each manufacturer’s exposure runs. On the carrier side, the opposite is true: most named carriers are hedging, testing, or sitting out, and the deepest single commitment identified, Hirschbach’s 500-truck order, is explicitly non-binding. Ryder and NVIDIA are the two names that show up as structurally diversified across multiple competing platforms at once, one on the equipment and fleet-services side, one on the compute side, and Uber Freight occupies a similar position as the logistics marketplace sitting on top of three AV platforms simultaneously. None of these three needs to bet on which AV company wins.

The hiring record runs alongside the spending. A former FMCSA Administrator, a former Acting Deputy Administrator, a former Deputy Administrator and Chief Counsel, a former AAMVA Chairman, two former ATA Board Chairs, a former Congressman from the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, a former Department of Transportation Chief of Staff advisor, and a former Senate Commerce Committee policy adviser now work for, advise, or lobby on behalf of the companies seeking federal authority to operate trucks without drivers. Each move is legal and disclosed. The reader can decide what the aggregate means.

Sources

Applied Intuition, Inc. “Applied Intuition Closes Series F at $15 Billion Valuation.” Press release, June 17, 2025. appliedintuition.com

Applied Intuition Defense. “Applied Intuition Defense Selected to Support CDAO’s Autonomy Enterprise Platform.” Press release, January 14, 2025.

Aurora Innovation, Inc. Lobbying Disclosure Act quarterly filings, 2019 to 2026, and investor relations press releases, 2025 to 2026, including partnership announcements naming FedEx, Hirschbach, McLane, PACCAR, Ryder, Schneider, Toyota, Uber Freight, Value Truck, Volvo Trucks, and Werner. ir.aurora.tech, lda.senate.gov

Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association. Lobbying Disclosure Act quarterly filings and public policy filings, 2016 to 2026, including comments submitted to the U.S. Department of Transportation. theavindustry.org, lda.senate.gov

American Trucking Associations. Lobbying and PAC profiles, OpenSecrets, 2024 to 2025 cycles; public comments to FMCSA on automated driving system rulemaking.

Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. Lobbying and PAC profiles, OpenSecrets and FEC committee C00236778, 2024 cycle; OOIDA PAC program materials, ooida.com/pac

Partners for Automated Vehicle Education. Nonprofit filing record, ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, EIN 844685933; Lobbying Disclosure Act registrant and client search, lda.senate.gov, no filing found.

CNBC. “Within Uber-Waymo split, a key labor battle over AVs is being waged in the nation’s capital.” August 1, 2026.

Churchill Capital Corp IX. Form 8-K reporting termination of business combination with Plus Automation, Inc. April 21, 2026.

Daimler Truck North America LLC. Lobbying Disclosure Act quarterly filings, 2011 to 2026, registrants DTNA in-house, Capitol Counsel LLC, Venable LLP, and Ballard Partners. lda.senate.gov

Daimler Truck. “Daimler Trucks Agrees to Acquire Majority Stake in Torc Robotics.” Press release, March 29, 2019; Bloomberg/Yahoo Finance, “Daimler Truck Seeks Investment Partner for Torc Robotics,” September 8, 2025, reporting approximately 91 percent Daimler ownership.

Daimler Truck. “Daimler Truck and Torc Robotics Select Innoviz Technologies as LiDAR Partner for Series Production of Level 4 Autonomous Trucks.” December 2, 2025.

Legis1. “Daimler Trucks Escalates AV Safety Lobbying.” Q2 2026 lobbying disclosure analysis.

DefenseScoop. “War Data Platform integration plans under scrutiny as DOD hustles to weaponize AI.” August 7, 2026.

Federal Election Commission. OpenFEC application programming interface, Schedule A itemized receipts, committee IDs C00428623, C00907683, C00032979, C00459255, C00828830, C00611897. Queried August 2026.

Federal Election Commission. Committee overview records for C00575167, C00477745, C00420745, C00376673, and C00662056, identifying recipients Don Bacon, Steve Womack, Doug Lamborn, Dutch Ruppersberger, and Blue Line PAC (Mike Quigley leadership PAC), queried August 2026. fec.gov

ProPublica FEC Itemizer. PAC contribution records for Applied Intuition, Inc. Political Action Committee to committees C00257337 (Ken Calvert), C00657833 (Guy Reschenthaler), and related committees, queried August 2026.

H&M Strategies LLP. Firm and team biographies. hm-strategies.com

LegiStorm. “Rep. Dingell deputy chief drives off to Tesla.” October 6, 2023. legistorm.com

Kevin J. Rambosk. LinkedIn post announcing move to Tesla federal policy team. October 2023.

Tesla, Inc. Lobbying Disclosure Act quarterly filing, issue areas including autonomous vehicle policy. lda.senate.gov

H&M Strategies LLP. Lobbying Disclosure Act quarterly filing, client Aurora Innovation, Inc., specific issue “development of AV technology and deployment and the SELFDRIVE ACT,” signed January 20, 2026. lda.senate.gov

Venable LLP. Professional biography, Ariel S. Wolf. venable.com

citybizlist. “Ariel Wolf Rejoins Venable’s eCommerce, Privacy, and Cybersecurity Practice.” June 13, 2019, detailing DOT tenure under Secretary Elaine Chao and launch of the NETT Council.

Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association. Team page, Elizabeth Bender and Renee Gibson biographies. theavindustry.org

Legis1. “Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association Builds In-House Lobbying Team to Shape Federal AV Policy.” September 23, 2025.

Mehlman Consulting. Team page, Annie Wolf biography. mehlmanconsulting.com

Heavy Duty Trucking (truckinginfo.com). “Atlas Expands Kodiak Driverless Truck Fleet in Permian Basin,” July 31, 2026; “Hirschbach and Aurora Innovation Ink Non-Binding Deal for 500 Trucks,” April 30, 2026.

FreightWaves. “The real barrier to driverless trucks is no longer software.” March 10, 2026, confirming four OEMs (Daimler, PACCAR, Volvo, TRATON) account for 99.9 percent of new U.S. Class 8 sales and each has an AV technology partner or subsidiary.

FMCSA. “Earl Adams, Jr. Appointed as Deputy Administrator.” 2023. fmcsa.dot.gov

Jacobin / The Lever. “The Robotruck Industry Is Lobbying Against Road Safety” / “Rise of the Robotruck Lobby.” September 25-26, 2023, reporting 2023 California AB 316 lobbying figures: Waymo $80,000, Aurora $75,000, Daimler Trucks $32,000, AVIA $90,000.

Kodiak. “Kodiak Establishes Industry Advisory Council,” March 27, 2024; Kodiak AI Form 424B3 (SEC filing); FleetOwner and Trucking Dive coverage of J.B. Hunt, Werner, C.R. England, Martin Brower, and Roehl Transport partnerships, 2026. kodiak.ai

Kodiak AI, Inc. Lobbying Disclosure Act filing, registrant Penn Avenue Partners, signed July 7, 2026. lda.senate.gov

Lidar Coalition (Informal Coalition). Lobbying Disclosure Act registration and quarterly filings, registrant Venable LLP, 2021 to 2024. lda.senate.gov

NADA. “NADA Legislative Affairs,” nada.org, on H.R. 7390 dealer franchise provisions; U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce, “CMT Subcommittee Forwards Motor Vehicle Safety and Automotive Leadership Bills to Full Committee,” February 10, 2026, official markup record.

International Motors LLC (TRATON Group). OpenSecrets lobbying and PAC profile, committee C00040840; Nasdaq/Quiver Quantitative lobbying disclosure summary, Q4 2024.

PACCAR Inc. OpenSecrets organization and PAC profile, committee C00034355.

NVIDIA Corp. OpenSecrets lobbying profile; The AI Lobby, nvidia lobbying issue summary, 2025 to 2026.

OpenSecrets.org. Lobbying profiles: Alphabet Inc, Uber Technologies, Tesla Inc, Applied Intuition, American Trucking Assns, Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Assn, Teamsters Union. 2024 to 2026 cycles.

Ouster, Inc. Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, and Lobbying Disclosure Act quarterly filings, 2022 to 2026.

PlusAI. Press releases and partnership announcements, January 2025 through April 2026, including TRATON Group $25 million R&D commitment (January 26, 2026) and International/Ryder fleet trial (2025-2026). plus.ai

StockTitan and Ares Acquisition Corporation II. Merger announcement and PIPE financing disclosures, April to September 2025.

Teamsters California; E&E News; Politico. Coverage of Teamsters California v. California Department of Motor Vehicles, August 2026, and of AB 316 (2023) and AB 2286/AB 3061 (2024).

techcrunch.com. “Uber’s autonomous vehicle deal tracker,” August 1, 2026, confirming Uber Freight partnerships with Aurora, Waabi, and Torc Robotics.

TRATON Group. “TRATON GROUP and PlusAI Expand Global Partnership,” press release, January 26, 2026.

Uber Technologies, Inc. Schedule 13D and Amendments 1 through 5, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, February 2022 through June 2026, and Form 8-K, May 2025.

Waabi Innovation Inc. Series C and Uber strategic investment press releases, January 2026; Volvo partnership announcements, February and October 2025.

Wired and TechCrunch. “Uber’s robotaxi lobbying effort has put it on a collision course with Waymo.” July 13, 2026.